In the second semester of 2010, I travelled to London for a one-year masters course at Chelsea College, an institution that was a part of the University of the Arts.
The course directors advised us to take the opportunity to try things we weren't used to doing. After a few initial painting experiments, I took a performance workshop ministered by Mark McGowan, known in London as "Taxi Driver". From then on, I spent a few months exploring performances. There was something that seemed quite interesting to me about that medium. When we create or take in a painting, time becomes a secondary element. We might have a vestige of time in the chemical reactions that happen in painting, or the order in which we read the visual elements. But painting will seldom take us on an emotional crescendo the way music, theatre or even literature do. With performance, there is a chance for one to be inserted within a given moment. Although the ephemeral nature of performance still bothered me. The absence of a lingering vestige after the fact. Therefore, I chose the format of videoperformance, where the camera, framing and visual aesthetic ended up being valued as well.
The first performance I tried was Animal. McGowan had given us this subject ('Becoming an animal") as a challenge in one of the workshop's exercises and we had a week to come up with something. What follows is an excerpt from my notes on the experience:
I thought it could be relevant to write about my experience for Mark McGowan’s performance workshops about “becoming an animal and the revolution” before the rawness of it drowned away on the day’s many trivial tasks. I had not yet read the text he linked on the Facebook page, about Delueze and Guattari’s notion of becoming-animal. But I suppose in some way, I experienced something of what the text describes. My idea was simple: I had seen foxes in Burgess Park, close to where I’m staying, and I wanted to film them. Simply because I had never seen a real fox before. But I decided I wasn’t just going to stride up to the park, camera in hand, and chase after the animals. I would try to become like them. I chose night-time to do this, because that was when I usually saw them. But also because I felt there was something about being an animal like a fox, a rare and untamed one, that fit well with the night. The dark allowed for stealthier movement and these animals wanted to keep out of sight. The beginning wasn’t easy. Close to my apartment, I still felt somewhat too human. And most of the things I tried just felt silly and awkward. I wanted to hide away from the passing people and cars, but ducking behind the nearest wall felt improper. Like I was about to commit a crime. A human crime. I was afraid of being caught on CCTV and being interpreted as a burglar of sorts. But once I reached the park, I felt more confident there would be no cameras around. On my entrance to the park, I was greeted by a cat. It responded amiably to my body language and came close, despite the fact we were interacting in the very middle of the street, unsheltered. There was something fairly poetic about the encounter, in a narrative way. As if that cat had been some gatekeeper into the realm of animals. Further along the street, I found another cat. But this time, instead of greeting it and beckoning it to come close, I dashed towards it to scare it. I wanted to experience the other feeling, of a real threat. Even if I was the threat. The park at night seemed scary to me, as if I’d probably experience some grade of violence in there, being mugged or running into people doing heavy drugs, for example. And I wanted to get some reference of that feeling before coming in. I wanted the cat to teach me when to run. In the park, there was a noticeable change. I stood on the edge of the light, looking into the silhouettes of the trees in the dark and the city lights beyond the park. Was there a presence there somewhere? A threat? I couldn’t know. People walking their dogs seemed to sprout from the darkness itself and walk past me. But once I actually stepped into the dark and my eyes adjusted, I gained a whole new awareness. One that I could never express in video. It felt like going through a veil into a sort of parallel dimension. I had a notion of the entire park before me, and of people walking in the light as if they were incapable of seeing me. I could see the silhouettes of other people moving in the shadows and understand each of their purposes. I could walk among the trees, out of sight, and observe anything that ventured into the park. And that’s how I found the foxes. One of them trotted past one of the lamp posts in the distance and I knew. More than that, I knew they had a natural way of keeping out of sight: since I could only see other people by noticing their silhouettes against the city lights, the smaller animals were kept out of sight because their figures never reached eye-level to be seen against the lights. They were always camouflaged against the dark grass. But once I crouched to their level, I could spot two of them in the distance. There was some defiance to them. They would lay on the paved walkways, just being there, until they had a glimpse of someone on the horizon. Then they would rush to the bushes on the far end of the park. There was an exhilarating comprehension that, if they were under the lights, they were on the other side of that veil, on the realm of light. Which meant they couldn’t see me. It allowed me to get amazingly close to them, until the sound of me stepping on the grass alerted them. After they had gone, I played with this newfound skill a while longer. Keeping out of sight of people. The hardest thing was to remember to look in every direction. And I believe I blew my cover several times by just dashing from behind the trees before noticing this or that pedestrian on a nearby walkway. Which I’m sure made me look somewhat like a stalker. But I didn’t care. I went back into the darkness and lay low. The rush of adrenaline in this game was so soothing, that after an hour of doing this, I realized I no longer felt the cold night air. I noticed, when I stepped out of the darkness into the light, that I was once again on that side of the veil. Things in the darkness were no longer visible and all the spatial notion I had was restricted to the dimly-lit walkways and the faraway city lights. I was making my way back into being a human.
Unfortunately, the original video was lost due to technical issues with an external drive. The images here are low-resolution images sent to my YouTube account.
Animal
March 2011
Videoperformance
8'07"
Animal (short)
March 2011
Videoperformance
2'27"
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