Interdisciplinary: To What Extent?
I don't think any artist is merely just one type of artist. We are constantly exploring new things, whether it's adjacent practices to our base practice or venturing out into new disciplines. My tension has always been in every growing curiosity I have, reaching out, growing, and losing my base practice. What is my base practice and how does it restrict me but also allow me to find the ground from which I can explore?
I write this in an attempt to both map out my 35 years of artistic practice and also to explore what those tensions and moments of release are as I gather and expand different disciplinary practices while returning to the practices that I know best. I will detail the different work I have done over the years and then end with explaining a graphic score that I have recently devised to outline how the different works and disciplines I engage with dance with each other.
My art practice has evolved over time. My mom put me in Portuguese folk dance when I was five years old. Learning the dances of my culture was foundational to my understanding of who I am today as a performer and community-engaged artist. But, at the age of eighteen, I wanted nothing more to do with the 'old school dances.
I thrust myself into the theatre landscape -- going to musical theatre school, writing shows, and acting in shows. At this time I also began exploring mask work, and physical theatre and was testing what public interventions & engagement were as I dawned masks and strange costumes and set out onto busy streets to interact with the public.
At twenty-three I moved to Thailand to teach English (post-theatre school graduation) and expand my understanding of the world. It was there that I found restriction in my practice; I could no longer rely on English text & storytelling. There was also no space for auditioning in English. I did eventually find an outlet with a group of ex-pats who ran the Bangkok Community Theatre out of the English Club. This didn't feel enough. It was limiting. I wanted to create my own work. I was then approached by the curator of Whitespace Art Gallery, Maitree Siriboon, to present a performance at their anniversary party. I took up this challenge and gathered a mix of foreigners and local Thai performers to put together "29.30.31" . The piece was intentionally political and looked at the freedom of speech in Thailand associated with lèse-majesté laws in the country. This work ignited my creativity and from there I started New City Collective, a devised performance company that worked with physical performance, images and collective creation. Integrating video projection and live performance into site-specific work was the essential art ingredient for these works at the time.
During this time, I encountered the dance of Butoh through a workshop led by Terry Hatfield. Butoh Dance was born in
Japan in the late 1950s by Hijikata Tatsumi and Ohno Kazuo. What struck me by this dance form was the difference in structure from the '5,6,7,8' jazz, tap, and ballet forms. Instead, this form, or at least the way I was taught and interpreted it, focused on bringing images of nature into the body as choreography. Imagine: ants on the face; wind through the trees; bird on a rock near the coast. This method of interpreting natural objects in the body gave me a new language to create choreography and text.
Eventually, I was called home, back to Canada. I had reached my capacity for learning and teaching overseas and wanted to finally attain my undergrad Bachelor of Fine Arts. I didn't want just another acting degree. I wanted to create my own work. I was granted entrance into the newly established BFA in Interdiscpianry Performance at The University of British Columbia - Okanagan Campus. This was a major turning point. I began to truly embrace my interdisciplinary nature, which at the time was a mix of physical performance, video, and site-specific work. I ended up exploring beyond that, taking my work into sound installations, internet live stream work, graphic design, sculpture, and painting. Tools that, at the time, I felt I could maintain. However, I was so eager to keep learning more art forms that I was beginning to focus on what was sparkly and new, rather than remembering what my base was. When I graduated I described myself as a projection design expert focused on live art and new media. I did a series of residencies in Portugal in this vein but something wasn't feeling authentic to me. I was reaching for stars and forgetting about the Earth I come from.
I moved to Calgary, Alberta when I graduated. It was here that I was hired at Antyx Community Arts by the Executive Artistic Director, Richard Campbell. In this environment, my work pivoted entirely toward community-based practices. I worked with LGBTQ+ teenagers on video projects aimed at being a campaign to advocate for the importance of Gay-Straight Alliances in Alberta Schools. I worked with homeless teens to develop video projects about the day-in-the-life of someone on the streets. I worked with newcomers to Canada to create video animations on the barriers and challenges they face integrating into Canadian classrooms. All of this work was incredibly rewarding. In attempting to understand the context of the work I was doing, I began researching the field of socially engaged art, eventually learning about artists like Tania Bruguera, Bread and Puppet Theatre, Jeremy Deller, and Suzanne Lacy. I was inspired to make art WITH the public and not just perform FOR the public.
I eventually was hired by the Crescent Heights Community Association to tackle community engagement through placemaking and arts & cultural development strategies. I worked with residents of this inner-city Calgary neighborhood to tackle things like crime, vandalism, and safety. We examined the function of a community association, what its role is in the community, and how we get past this notion of a derelict building that hosts wedding rentals. I worked with low-income residents to examine the income divide that was obvious in the neighborhood -- a community that has both billion-dollar mansions with huge private backyards and low-income/high-density apartments. We did this all through art. And I moved my language from "I make art" to "We make art". This three-year-long project was an incredible success and a number of initiatives are still running beyond my time there such as the Crescent Moon Festival and intersection mural projects.
In 2019 the world was hit by a pandemic. I returned inward to ask myself what I truly wanted out of being an artist. I had spent the past seven years focused on community-based projects and I had forgotten what my base practice was. This is when I turned to the work of Anna Halprin.
Anna's life-work was a mix of the sensing-body in context to natural and urban spaces. Along with her daughter, Daria Halprin, they founded the Tamalpa Institute. Over 40 years, they gifted the Tamalpa Halprin Life/Art Process to the world -- opening up doorways to expressive movement and authentic voice. I enrolled in the one-year-long process which was now being offered via Zoom due to COVID-19. I was taken through body part after body part and offered tools to sense what those parts of me wanted to sing, speak and move. I made countless visual scores and filled out pages of journal entries. The class culminated in the creation of my most daring work and personal work "Way Back Home" . Eventually, I went on to complete the Teacher Training program and was certified by the International Somatic Movement Education & Therapy Association.
I needed to give a long-winded explanation of my journey because I am now curious about where my artistic practice lives after all this. The need to define myself as an artist comes from institutions and colleagues requiring me to define my work in words. This desire to validate my work takes me to places where I often feel like I am continually changing how I define myself based on what is sparkly and new along with who I am speaking to.
This morning, prior to writing this blog post, I danced. I explored tensions/restrictions and expansions/learning. The below visual score came out of this exploration and demonstrates, to me, and possibly to you, the reader, those spaces of going inward and discerning (Who am I? What is my base art practice? What do I take back to my practice after learning and expanding?) and expanding my practice (What am I curious about? What are my adjacent practices? How far away from my practice can get to be inspired interdisciplinarily ?)
We often think of life and our practice as something linear. However, I find there is an ebb-and-flow to my work while also existing in a constant field that expands and contracts. How might I hold the central practice of the body, in relation to others, objects, and nature, while also working with people and sites through video, placemaking, sound art, writing, drawing and graphics? I imagine that I am a male clownfish. I am small in the midst of a vast ocean. I spend my life in relation to my colony of fishes, the food I eat, and the expansive landscape I live in. There comes a time when through the act of creation (in this mating system) the male clownfish may be asked to transform into a female clownfish in order to keep the colony alive. (Look up this process if you are interested in the mating systems of clown fish).
I can be everything all at once -- truly an interdisciplinary artist. But I think it's important that with every expansion I also return inward to discern what is important from my expansion outwards and how it relates to my practice.
We live on this Earth. And we can send Voyager space missions well beyond our galaxy. We can explore the surface of the moon. We can send scientists to Mars (one day). But ultimately, all that research will not mean anything if we don't apply what we know to our existence here on Earth.
As far out as we go, we must go equally, if not deeper, into ourselves.
