To be read after watching video nr.1- “Shadey art tips by Shade” (2021)
TO BE, BECOME AND BEHAVE
Or my relationship with theory, creative process and taking
refuge
Majula Drammeh Master in performing Arts Stockholm University of Arts 2021 Supervisors: Áron Birtalan & Sofia Jonsson
Instructions: Before you start reading, I want you to write down 3-5 words or sentences on your immediate response to the video you have just seen. What thoughts, emotions, colours or actions came to mind? We will get back to them later.
Introduction
These pages include parts of the process diary, notes on process, reading, as well as photos from my research process.
These are abstracts of my research and therefore curated in their own right to show not only my somewhat sprawling process but also my honest attempt to share how I document and research in my process. These “written expositions” mirrors how I gather material when I work as a performer and performance maker. This document is as much about me finding out what I did in the project as you are attempting to understand the project´s content, methods and results. It is me looking at the produced material from the outside, curating it
to try out words on the method, content and material. I have written about the work reflectively at the same time as I invite you into this action. It´s speculative and intimate.
During my master studies in Performing Arts, I have reflected on what it means to be a performer beyond the symbolic meaning of it- such, as being material or representation for someone else work. I have investigated what the performer spends time doing and
reflecting on beyond what is seen “on stage”, and present that, whatever it is and looks like. I have then, in my final degree project, looked at how I can use my gained knowledge as a mainly interactive performer in relation to performance arts and black feminism theory to create my own artistic practice.
My aim has been to do this by being, meaning to exist with, breathing with, becoming part of, attending to and situating myself in relation to performance arts and black feminism theory in a mindful manner. To embody what I read with the help of somatic practice inspired from Mind Body Centring and Mindfulness practice and allow myself to create as a response to the embodiment with methods I use in my practice as performer and dancer. With these expositions, I want to invite you to spend time with my material and I encourage you to acknowledge with what kind of knowledge you are reading it with.
Exposition format
If you have not, please see the video before you continue reading.
The first part of the exposition is mainly focused on my work in relation to black feminism theory at the beginning of the project. It contains poems, photography and extracts of what I spent time being with and writing about. I often find myself thinking back on what I have been part of. I tend to use poetic language when I do this and some of that poetry is presented here. The exposition then goes into a process of a video work I did in
collaboration with dancer and choreographer Robin Dingemans. Dingemans has for the past two years worked on an umbrella project named “Deleting whiteness”. Dingemans makes work and research together with other artists and academics. He is looking on whiteness and the traces it has made on the world, his ancestry as a white male with roots from Holland growing up in a Maori context in Aotearoa (New Zealand). Looking and working on how whiteness is being presented in the arts field amongst other fields relating. Robin in his own
words; “Deleting whiteness means: attempting to become human, embracing shame as an essential positive to feed imperatives of justice and liberty for all. Shut up and listen, and make that a somatic, soul practice (thank you to Hui protocols of Māori). There is no work for BIPOC people to do on racism, it is exclusively the non-BIPOC people that need work on = restore the ills of racism. BIPOC people are not working on racism, they are working on surviving oppression and trauma of genocide, persecution, subjugation and
more”. (Dingemans 2021).
We met briefly in September 2020 by December onwards we started making the work together as part of Welds ongoing project Weld Sided Story. Weld is an independent platform for experimental processes and production knowledge in Stockholm and has a dance company under the artistic director Anna Koch. In the project they invited several choreographers from different dance styles to work on the company to create work to the interlude of West Side Story The work I did with Dingemans resulted in the video Two averaged perfect Swedish citizens (2020). Link below.
The second part of the exposition puts focus on my process and transformation of creating and becoming Shade- a persona I found refuge in to be able to be with and criticise the theories I had spent time with. This part includes process diary, photos, and an interview between me and Shade. And as you will see, at this point, I am very much involved with being in the state of transformation and I lose contact with writing and reflecting. This section is somewhat sprawling and even I sometimes find it difficult to understand what it is I have written about. The exposition then ends with a reflection on my project and my research methods and speculating on where I am and where I am going.
Along with the video you already saw you will find video footage of my physical
transformation and reflection filmed by filmmaker Lina Vain Ilalla. I also provide a link to Two averaged perfect Swedish citizens (2021).
Background
I tend to keep a close and curious relationship with performance -related theory, and I find it relevant as a tool in understanding the context and reading of a work I have seen or
performed in and to place myself in the performing arts scene. Theory, thus, functions as a way for me to understand the work I do in a broader sense. The director/choreographer gives me insight into their reason or calling. But theory allows me to place the work in a broader context and gives me an understanding and possibility to go further into the field the work lands in as well as getting in contact with other artists work. It can give insight into where my representation as performer is placed within the field.
However, this relationship is also conflicting and sometimes I feel trapped because I am neither an outsider looking in but mainly an insider trying to understand what I am doing. And at the same time, as a brown woman in the field, I often hold the position of being a minority in my work and I find myself often shedding light for director/choreographer on how my body could be translated in the work depending on what I perform. Which then, in relation to theory tends to create a somewhat ambivalent relationship. Many times, I feel that rather than gathering knowledge from theory I also find myself reminded of the starting point of it stemming from a white gaze and western philosophy. Meaning that, looking at theory in relation to the reality I perform from makes almost any traditional performance art and performing arts theory out of date, simplified or somewhat written from a colonial perspective. However, I see potential in theory to create updated and complex performance material. So, this expositionthen, is an attempt to present you with material from my
position as performer, vulnerable in finding herself out in relation to documenting her process and share what she is exposed to in this process.
Placing myself in relation to the Performing Arts context
Performers tend to talk about their work in crelation to a specific performance,
director/choreographer or happening. And this way I feel sheltered by my professionalism and the agency the performance comes with when I talk about my work. I identify myself as a performer who works in relation to the performing arts and performance art field and its structures. As performer I mainly perform in other performance arts artist´s work. Rather than it was when the genre was born, and the artist performed in their own work at the vernissage. Artists now more often create work that has similar length of running time has theatre plays and have several performers working from them in a variety of places, such as
theatres, galleries, warehouses or outdoors just to name a few. However, there is currently an ongoing debate in the performing arts field regarding if “performance” is an accurate term to use for this kind of work, but this is not a discussion which my project is placed within.
I always was interested in the reasons and understanding of the codes and conduct within visual arts more than in the performing arts. Finding my middle ground and place in the performance arts field. And that the field itself has not been able to define what
performance is, rather it holds space for any (thing) to happen. Here I understood not only the theorizing of the art but most of all the doing aspect that holds the field together. In the doing, we become art. Not only in the objective matter, no, we the subject, become art. This is something I always come back to, the moment I become art, the other, or the unknown. I think this is what made me a performer. In the doing I don’t have to be concerned with what the work is being read as or if I am being understood. The work as has already been done. Instead, I find myself present in what happens in my experience and my body, my
transformation and my understanding of what it is I am doing. What the very moment makes me become. And it is the becoming which is then transmitted to the audience´s or participant´s experience and understanding of a work. But to be able to arrive to that state of doing, I must create the space for it to happen.
Private: In 2008 I bought the book Perform (James Hoffman & Joan Jonas 2005) where the authors attempt is to “..challenge ordinary ways of looking at art and common forms of categorizing it. By taking the word “perform” as a contemporary alteration of what we have come to know historically as “performance”..2005:11). The book changed my life. The book contains discussions and texts on work from the performance arts field from the 1990s onward. It has international artists as well as some of the biggest western names in the performance art field today and they all twist and turn on what performance is and how, that to perform is the actual presence of the performing. The book also raises questions about who the performer is.
Circumstances-covid 19
My artistic research has during the circumstances the covid- 19 pandemic then inevitably been affected. Due to restrictions throughout the society the possibility to involve others physically has been near impossible and this in turn has made the possibility to physically try my process out hard. It has made my research process lonelier, but that in turn gave me the possibility to spend time with my physical practice, reading and reflecting on my own in a studio space, which is very uncommon in my work otherwise. It also made the physical realisations of my persona happen towards the end of my timeline due to lighter restrictions.
On documentation
As person, I get bored fast and need to change angle on what I do often. But still, I feel a sense of wholeness when I do work in this way, as if I am standing in the middle of a dessert and anywhere I go is right. I have not been trained in how a process should look like, but I have created my own ways in my nearly 20 years of experience. In my independent degree project,t I wanted look closer at my process and document it without limitations or
expectations as I went on. We often value and have interest in artist´s processes, mainly in visual art and I am interested in what value and knowledge is there in a performers process. What insights in the work do they (I) have and what does the performers go through in a process? What does their gathered material look like? And where does it go?
In my process I have used similar documentation methods that I tend to use when I work for other artists such as notes, reflections and writing in a poetic language. Besides movement I was encouraged to write poetry after we had a workshop in school when I was 12. I always thought I was bad at explaining myself and maybe movement and poetry was my way of expressing myself. And for some reason I never shared my poetic writing before. The other main method I use is photography. I often photograph space I worked in, this way my body can remember and keep in touch with my relationship to the space I performed or
rehearsed in. I also tend to photograph things that makes me remember the working process such as costume, props or texts. Similarly, I have worked with photography in this exposition.
“When I work, it’s always a performance that I choose to undertake. It’s not a subject or an object; it’s one more human being. I link my body to this figure, because I want to translate its history. I consider my body as a human being, but always belonging to other subjects, to
the person who I am in the process of reproducing”
Shade
I have, in my work, mainly practiced being in relation to Tracey Warr & Amelia Jones (ed) Artists body (2012) and Sarah Ahmed´s text Going strange, going native (2000) in A
Phenomenology of Whiteness (2011) along with other texts that I mention in my exposition. These two books are interesting for me for mainly two reasons. Firstly, they are published around the same time meaning the writers exist and live at the same time. And secondly, they are written by women, women who are very invested in what they write about and on the forefront of what they research on. And so, I feel as if Shade is the cross-fertilization of my insights from these two books.
Shade is a persona I created in my artistic research as a way for me to be and behave with theory. Shade is born out of my urge to take refuge in someone else to be able to be, not just think about performance art and black feminism theory but rather become it.
She came from the need to be able to be with what I read without being hurt by the understanding some theories gave me.
In my work I draw on black feminism theory as well as performance arts theory and art history to look at my understanding of behaviour social structure and language
of the field I work in. Shade came from my need to comment on the field and its codes and conduct, its exclusion and erratic need for interpretations. She has come to be the object that I placed my finding out in. I used methods I have a close relationship to, and I made a decision not work with a specific narrative or aesthetics to start with but rather these came as a response to what I was experiencing and reflecting on. As you will see, this created a somewhat backwords process from what I am used to. Shade is not a finished work, rather she will continue to be the persona I find myself out through in relation to the ones she meets and communicates with. In the process I used somatic exercises from Mind Body Centering taught by Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, a method used in my dance training. This together with physical mindfulness methods I learnt from Buddhist meditation practice where the main methods I used to digest the theory I read. The process then became the output of the understanding which I put back into my work on Shade.
Shade made it possible for me to hold my complex relationship to my work and at the same time make space for me to be with the social manners performed in arts field. Hence, Shade became something I didn’t make artistic decisions on until I felt she had to be physicalised.
She is about finding out behaviour, reason and response rather than being a performance object created for her audience pleasure. How she became is me answering questions on what I understand and what I see when I look at the society in relation to performance art theory. And the questions related to what she is supposed to “mean” or be interpretated as by her audiences or participant is at this point in my process a non-question. Shade is about me finding out, not as it tends to be others finding out about the performance. This is only possible due to the time and possibility artistic research allows art to be focused on.
1. On being in process
I know now
I did quiet I know now I did only listen I know now I did as I was told I know now being is doing I know now I was silent I know now I meant consequences I know now I need to think I know now I need to breathe I know now the reflection in the mirror will never go away I know now there is no turning back I know now and that knowing is turning into a knot, the pressure holds me, keeps me, pushes me, scares me. It tells me, puts me, shows me, pressures me, making me see, making me make, take, hold, uncover, be, be vulnerable, be sacred, be loud, be smart, be tactic, be funny. Don’t be too much, don’t push, don´t tell, don´t demand but pressure, don´t show but hint, don´t believe but hope, don´t assume but ask. Ask to be given, to be shared, to be within not outside, to be held, to be with, to be part of, to be whole, to be lifted, to be as if I belonged.
December 2020, process diary notes
I ´ve been working with Robin for a week now. I barley know him. I did two days of workshop with him. After, he invited me to do something with him for Welds side project Weld sided story. I think they invite different choreographers from different areas of dance to work with them. With the prelude of West side story as a red thread.
We are working on identity, ancestry, whiteness…it hurts. He is asking me to take space in the process, come with my own ideas and ways to work in and asks me to demand space for my opinions and not be afraid of topics that are uncomfortable because he is a white male. I am not used to this in the creative process not in the first session and definitely not in relation to these questions. For some reason I´m thinking a lot about the term “passing as white” and how Sara Ahmed writes about it. About how the socially accepted behaviour one can use as a means to pass as if one should be treated as white. Because one behaves in ways that covers up other cultural references, one gains access to the privileged community (Ahmed 2000:53).
And I think I do this …or I think I need to look into if I do this. But I also want to know when I need to do it and when not. I don’t talk to anyone about this, but I think about it a lot in this period of time. I also think a lot about intersectionality and how I, spending time in the studio doing somatic work, am more convinced than before that separatist spaces are needed as a tool to create strong minority identity and communities. But I don’t know how I can use performance as a method to communicate this. How I, just cannot feel convinced that the performing arts fields is open enough to not have these kinds of spaces. And it all circles around my feeling of otherness in looks, class and approach.
So, when questions in our process are like:
“When do you feel you are seen exactly the way you are?”
I cannot think about anything else than, is this in relation to my skin colour or is it in relation to personality?
We are making a video based on questions we asked each other. But these questions are not only from us to one another. They are questions asked to me or him on the otherness we both have. I feel naked being asked these questions. Questions like: How often do speak to you ancestors? My immediate response is to claim it as to private, intimate. And say that as a performer I can do intimate and private but in another reality in an agreed sense of only here and now. But this will be recorded. It stays.
He tells me its ok to be with my agency without me apologizing for having one. He talks about the power positions we are used to and how he is ashamed of his position. I see how his work on whiteness must have built up shame, but I also see that beyond that shame he found a space to give to others to have. But I recognize myself becoming suspicious. Nobody wants you to act solemnly on your needs. But he insists. And I try him. He seems
apperceptive but I can´t trust its genuine. So, I try I and try again. I find myself telling him something along the lines like “You understand I am looking at it from the angle of you being a white male….” And he doesn’t become apologetic. I release this just might be a safe space and do an honest attempt to enter the process and not get hurt by truth when it arrives.
And then something happens. We enter a flow I rarely have had. It´s been a long time I felt that the process is not about speculating on how the outcome could be and how I need to shape and mole myself to get there. But rather, on a common goal and both are open enough to be transparent about not knowing what it will look like. An openness which creates flow. I feel we have many things in common and there is space for the discussions we rarely give time for. I don’t feel I am asked to perform in a work made by his fantasy on identity. Rather, I feel my whole self can be a part of this even my ongoing investigation on black feminism has space here. My inability to explain myself because it’s an underlying feeling I have not yet put words on. My confusion is as much real as it is part of the artwork itself.
May 2021
I asked Robin about these questions:
“The questions and answers, who asks them and how they ask or answer are statements/small performances. The statements will ripple differently through you depending on your own identities, they will also ripple through how you believe other identities will experience those questions and statements being performed or asked to others. The questions come from a series of chain reactions that informed the collaborating artists world view and agency. By putting the questions out there in this way we are
attempting to never give up on the change we know needs to happen.
The choreography and visuals are poems of love, struggle for freedom, and pain.
The density of questions, languages and visuals is designed to take us to a place where some of the work will have to be done subconsciously or on later reflection” (Dingemans 2021)
I need refuge
I need to come back from something like a hangover
I need air
I need to come back from another reality to cope with the present one
I need nervous eyes looking at me
Encountering energy
The smell of Shame
20/1-2021 Process diary notes
I am reading like crazy, novels mainly. Maybe I am trying to find something there I tell myself. It’s not for nothing. It´s also a method (I think) …
Ett jävla Solsken : En biografi om Ester Blenda Nordström by Fatima Bremmer, Charles Bukowskis Kvinnor & Badkarsmusik, Consent by Vansessa Springora, Gift by Tove Ditlevsen, Klubben by Matilda Gustavsson, K by Katarina Forstensson
Poetry by Saul Williams, Nayyirah Waheed, Daniel Boyciglou and Johannes Anyuru.
I read to escape but to what I don’t know yet. I read to understand writing, I never read like this before. Thinking about how my writing could be. My poetry. My translation from doing to writing. What is it´s language?
I´m thinking and being with the difference between playing and pretending. It has something to do with my refusal to say that performing is play. When I stand in a room giving instructions to someone and I feel the tension and horror-mixed delight I can´t defend my behaviour with play.
Pretending, not playing or fantasizing
Pretending because I am fully aware that I am doing just that. Playing is for me a synonym for having fun. Fantasising is about escaping. Pretending is in the present moment one chooses to be other; I think about passing as white as a sort of deep psychological pretence. One knows that it’s the pretending and behaving that is needed to get the response and treatment one wants…it is embodied as well as a psychological notion of doing and making an effort to gain something.
In the Cambridge dictionary pretending says:
” Behave so as to make it appear that something is the case when in fact it is not” (2020).
2. On becoming Shade
In this second part you find some of the documentation from my work on becoming Shade. It contains mainly process diary notes and photos. Here, I did an attempt at putting the material in a chronological order, but as you will see, it doesn’t mean the transformation in itself happened in a clear narrative. To become means for me to be introvert, to give the work agency and to put the work in relation to others. To do this I worked together with filmmaker Lina Vain Ilalalla for four intense days in Gothenburg, where they would follow me with a camera and discuss the work with me as I went to a nail salon, lash salon and get a make-up tutorial done up by a make -up artists. And to further perform Shade for the camera at Röda Sten Konsthall in Gothenburg.
13/12-2020 Notes from an ongoing course in autumn 2020.
I miss work, I miss moving around, I miss travelling, I miss context and artistic work. I miss daylight. I need refuge. My need for refuge is growing. My need for something new. I am stuck in Stockholm, on zoom. Talking about the potential in zoom and listening to curators talk about their work.
I often think that performers are the last persons being shed light on in discussions. That it is embedded in the culture of performing arts that we take care of ourselves and if, IF there was anything we really wanted said, we would. A bit of rage is growing in me. And the idea to let it out is present.
In my essay I will write as someone else. Someone who is not afraid to criticize the
structures, codes, whiteness, classness and anxiety we have created in the field. I am scared. I don’t know what I have gotten myself into. I have no one to blame.
As Shade I will be brave, I will ask the questions that might seem stupid, pretend I am right, put myself on the same level. Or just be a product.
25/1-21 Notes from walk in city
Things that seem trendy in, seen on streets, Instagram and commercials: Nails
High heels Blue Jeans Lashes
Gold and glitter combined Jewellery
28/1-21 Studio notes and reflection I spend time in the studio this week Reading Amelia Jones “The Artis´s Body Thinking about:
If art sees the body as an object, then one can perform in a way where the body becomes the artefact rather than transformative in the action of doing. This differs from how dance relates to the body.
The body is the tool which finds out and understands? And the form is the result. I am doing somatic exercises everyday- going inwards.
Trying to empty myself.
Trying to empty so I can prepare my body to become Shade and allowing Shade to be and object or a self.
Then afternoons: Walking, laying, sitting and talking in a performative matter so I can open for my impulses when I think about who Shade is becoming.
Warr writes about artists “acting out identity” and body as site (2012:134) and I am thinking about how many people act out the identity they want to be seen as in society and how I see it as a performative act. Or how non-white people as myself feel I am interpreted has having a specific identity because of how I look. And I often times have to act out on preconceptions. Acting out as a way to signal belonging or positioning oneself in society. I´m interested in this performative act. Not only in terms of gender, but I am also interested in the layers of identity we have in the society and how “acting out” is an option in the west. I think Shade acts “in” meaning taking in from what she meets and re-acts on that rather than having a purpose with what she says for the other to act on. She can be taught things.
February-2020 Notes from tutorial
It´s like I have to use what I do to highlight what I know. STEP-BY-STEP That will be my framework.
I have never created a persona without someone else´s idea. I know that I want to:
Not be in one performative frame only, but rather have several frames on each other. If my appearance is norm my performativity can be complex.
I do not want to be a stereotype angry black woman complaining about being invisible in society. Rather I am thinking about the notion of performing “passing as white” or passing as part of norm, the least awaited persona in the arts field.
Not think about the product she needs to be for others but rather use her to access my knowledge on performativity.
Feel ownership in her-feel agency as performer. She is mine only. Even in terms of interpretation.
February -Notes from phone call with filmmaker, trying to find ways to explain my sense of Shade before I go to Gothenburg. Without having decided what she looks like or how he is.
I haven´t thought about how they are going to film me even though they asked me to think about it a few weeks ago. Explain how you see the film material from your mind’s eye!
Doing but just the right amount- it´s not about doing anything big or even specific or radical. It´s probably about being as subtle as one is. It´s rather what she says and where than what she does.
I know who she is, you do too. We see her around. She surprises us when she looks norm but has a great personality.
I know she likes art- it´s her interest because Its my interest and I know things about it I can use in my performativity of her.
She could be commenting on art she does art.
I am NOT looking for L as a director to tell me what to do I need to remind myself of this. Because I don’t know things, doesn’t mean they do.
13/3-21 Notes from course “independent degree project” and preparing to go to Gothenburg and become Shade
Translation of “reality” into my work
Shade, classic and normative, loves art and interprets art with and for you, Instagram live sending?
Influencers-Kenzo Performing “norm”
Asking permission, use for own research, What and how do you share the documentation
When is what explicit and implicit? Doesn’t have to be equally explicit I have to physically change to find who out who she is
As a POC person I reflect on the performative aspect of being just that. Adding the ream of performance on top of it has put me in a mind (fuck) trap. White passing etc…its feel complex.
23/3 Reflective notes from discussing with Lina Vain Ilalla
I´m like, I don’t know until I become….
I talk about blending in. About being still or finding out who I am amongst others. About physicality. Resistance to being loud or angry. And I think she understands. They talk about Marina Abramović, I talk about Black power naps. After a few hours we meet up a colleague who knows me well. They give me the idea to, once I have physically transformed, perhaps try it on a third object. And I understand. It´s all about art. Shade is all about art. The art of transformation, the art of fake nails, fake lashes and make up. My change is then the result of how that art affects me and my becoming.
She does not look like it, but this is where she exists. In the making up …I am excited and scared. I think a lot about transformation and allowing myself to become who ever she will. She hasn’t even spoken yet.
24/3 Evening in Hotel room
We spent half of the day in the shopping mall Nordstan shopping centre. I tried a lot of clothes, L helped me.
Made acrylic nails at a salon since this seems more standard than anything and now, I feel crippled. Will I be able to do stuff? So far even opening a door is difficult. (see video to left) Why do we do things to our bodies that make life more difficult? I really don’t understand. It´s hard enough to blend in. To breath and not be self-conscious. This will change my
physicality in hands and arms. Everything I take looks more elegant suddenly and I am aware of how it wasn’t before. L wants to talk about feminism. I don’t. I tell her “If Shade is about feminism for you then yes, go for it.” I refuse to tell her Shade is partly my response
feminism theory to. But I don’t want it to be a part of the interpretation of her. I don’t want to discuss. I want to be. At the moment she is about blending in. Taking shelter. It´s my time to take refuge in being anyone. At the same time, I´m thinking that the hotel crew must think I came here to like to have a spa week or something…turning up every evening looking different from when I left in the morning.
Make over, make up, make Shade,
I got a makeover tutorial. First, I felt ashamed by the fact that I don’t know these things. Wasn’t refusal of make up a big feminist movement in my teens? Am I making too big of a deal?
But I know I have to learn. It´s crucial for Shade to be able to be my shelter when others look at her and communicate with her.
I filmed the whole session so I can look at it and re-do it over and over until I can do it without the tutorial.
Photo: Lina Vain Illala
9/4-21 Process Diary-Reflecting on my physical transformation
I came home from Gothenburg, and I am so relieved I was Shade in another city. It feels like I am hangover. Because now, I have behaved, and I have been treated according to that behaviour. And left on me are the traces of her. My nails are long and hard to do things with still. I have not learnt to use them properly. And I am so aware of my eyes. These lashes, I see them all the time. I also see more easily now when others have lashes. When in Gothenburg, I didn’t have time to worry about the permeance of my decisions. I thought rather it’s a good experience to prolong the physicality of her. To really, really get to know how it feels to have made nails and
lashes, to walk in high heels nearly every day and put make up on often. I decided I keep this up for at least 3 weeks….
One day at the gym I drop my key on the floor, bend over to pick it up. But I can´t, I can´t pick the key up. I feel like I am making a fool of myself. Like I just gave myself away. Now everyone knows that I am actually not a part of the long nails club. After like 45 sec, I finally get the key up and look across the room. And I see someone has been looking at me. I am embarrassed but pretend not to be.
I come home and I can´t shake it off. 2 more weeks in costume to go.
…” when an individual projects a definition of the situation and thereby makes an implicit or explicit claim to be a person of a particular kind, he automatically exerts a moral demand upon the others, obliging them to value and treat him in the manner that persons of his kind have a right to expect.
He also implicitly forgoes all claims to be things he does not appear to be 2 and hence forgoes the treatment that would be appropriate for such individuals” (1956:2 Goffman).
Interview between myself and Shade after watching:
https://www.universal-music.de/jayz/videos/picasso-baby-a-performance-art-film-326307
S: It´s a Hiphop video, what should I say? M: No, its performance art!
S: What?!
M: Yes, these things have been done before. In the Performance Art context... S: Ok….so what?
M: I mean by performance art artists or mainly its flirts with Marinas "The artist is present".
S: Mhm...what’s that?
M: It’s a work where the performance artist Marina Abramović, sists at a table at MOMA for like 740 hours silent. And people came to sit opposite her as long or short they want and spend time with her. Sitting in silent looking into her eyes. It´s hard to explain the depth of it.
S: Oh cool, ok.. So…what you saying is “Art” done it before, but culture
didn’t? Right, some (probably white) artist did something in a gallery for a long time and people where mind blown?
M: Kind off, but that´s very simplified
S: But still. That´s kind of what you are saying. That art, that is assumed to have more status than hiphop done this before and that´s why it´s not Hiphop…I mean you’re not saying it, but you ARE saying it.
M: Well, that’s a very very simplified and harsh but yes, I guess yes in a kind of weird way. Or no, what I am saying is that, or,rather…forget about it.
Hi!
My name is Shade, and I am interested in cooking, beauty and art. Mainly visual art but I also like to see live performance sometimes with people in them. I like talking about what I see and get inspiration for my own art. Yes, I also do my own art, but I am not educated or anything like that. No please! I´m doing it for me. Although I won´t be shy and not admit that if someone asked me to exhibit my things, I would turn that chance down.
Anyway…for quite some time I have been dragging my friends along on art things, but I get the sense that some om them had enough. So, I got an idea. Why don’t I ask random people if they like to go with me? And we can just look and talk about the exhibition together. There must be others like me out there who just want to go and see some stuff and wants to go with someone new? Right.
Photo: Robin Dingemans
And the best thing with going with someone else is that you learn so much from each other! I always believe that we know more than we think if we just dare to say what we think! So, if you are up for meeting on an exhibition and have a look together and hang out a bit (covid safe of course!) please contact me on:
The Now-reflection
Being with theory
I want to start writing a bit about my attempt to be with theory rather than thinking or writing about it first. I believe there is a difference if one reads and then allows what you read to go into the body, into the nervous system and digest it that way rather than writing or discussing it with other colleagues first. That the being makes you put what you read in relation to whatever you encounter while the body understands it. As in mindfulness practice, you think, see, understand and exist in relation to the theory and this way you create your individual understanding of what it means and can relate it to work that way. You try it in your everyday existence as well as in your artistic work and the theory becomes a part of your whole being. This a way one can put theory into practice, and this was my main research method. Embodiment by mindfulness. Mindfulness meaning integrating your reality into your being. This way I have been able to understand and be with what I read and create a creative response to it with the methods I know from my work from performance related transformation and creation. By being I also include doing, doing Shade with all the content from theory as parts included in the becoming of her. In my research I wanted to use my practice and embodied knowledge to find her out. Rather than looking on a work I already had and understanding it.
During my four intense days in Gothenburg, undertaking my physical transformation to becoming Shade I noticed a slight resistance to documentation, not as in taking photos of her or filming her. Rather filming me and my process into her. I understood that this part of the process is the crucial one and felt in ways private. Because this was the semiotic part of my transformation. Not only did I start to look different and therefore treated differently I also behaved because my clothes, make up and attributes made me move and do things differently. This way I could allow the props to become a part of my transformation. But this in turn also made me feel introvert. Trying to understand the transformation intellectually in front of camera was challenging and intimate. It is this part of the transformation I still find hard to put words on. But I intend to continue having interest in it, and I believe I can get in connection with it by continuing to research on my transformation and being Shade.
Shade + theory = transformation
Reading performance art theory and how the body is written about in contemporary art books I often find the theory creating a further objectification of the works written about. What I see is that there is a viewing of the body as being an object once chooses to place, act out from or talk about. What I miss in performance theory is the complexity of it being both that the work it is both visual and many times objectifying the body but at the same time as the performer or artist is in a mode of some sort. This in turn radiates out to the audience or participants and this is often not written about. I also lack the artists subjective and mostly the performers, understanding, calling or experience of the performance. In Artist´s Body (2012), Warr & Jones write about the change of the understanding and discourse of identity that came with the developments in the fields of psychology (Warr 2012: 11). But when we read texts about how the work was interpretated from the audience point of view and what the artists performed it is often written as an “attempt” of something
(Warr 2012:50,76,146). This missing part I have come to understand is important for me as performer and maker. And so, when I created Shade, I think I wanted to free myself from the notion of interpretation and rather become and perform some of the tools of interpretation myself. This is why theoretical interpretation of my work with Shade is secondary for me and my work. In difference to the performance arts theory, black feminism is written from Ahmed understandings of being a person of colour as well as her presenting notions on whiteness in relation to objectification. She brings forth a phycological narrative in the text Phenomenology if whiteness (2007) to why others are seen as such and desiccates the social structural structures we live under in here in the west in Going strange, going native (2000). By placing understating outside of ourselves we create distance to our individual
experiences and understand the arts mainly intellectually rather than feelingly meaning somatic. And I find myself hurt by the insight that work I have been performing in becomes objectified in similar ways. In my research I wanted to allow myself to be in contact with my knowledge of theory as a means of inspiration without being hurt by the notion of it being excluding, intellectual and colonial. To be able to do that I got a huge urge for refuge. To create someone who could do just that, a shield for me and a free zone for Shade to behave according to my reaction on theory.
I thought If she hides behind the looks of normativity (I know its relative what norm is) I can hold on to my doing without disturbance or questions from outsiders. I wanted to highlight the values and codes of conduct in the field by not using them but rather to some extend by ridicule them for my own freedom of them. Shade is me performing my undoing of black feminism and performance theory in relation to the participant. By verbalizing what we see and experience together my motivation is that Shade makes both me and the other aware of the knowledge as well as behaviour, the need to interpret and the expected topics of
conversations we have been trained to have whilst in an art space. I am at the moment looking to continue my research further into Shade performing interpretation. Together with verbalising and documenting what performers do and how I work.
So now, please go back to the words or sentences I asked you to write down after watching the video. And give yourself a few minutes to reflect on what you wrote and your thoughts on what you thought then and what you think about the work now. Thank you.
Link to video documentation
https://vimeo.com/552305556
I asked myself
Do I need a witness? Yes
Does it have to be real, what I do? Yes
Does it have to happen in the now? Yes
Does it matter if it is understood? No
Do you want a specific reaction? No
Do you know why you do this? No
Do you know how you do this? Yes/No
References:
Ahmed, S. (2011) Vithetens Hegonomi. Hägersten:Tankekraft förlag
Fosso S. (2017) The Lives of Samuel Fosso. Interview by Yves Chatap for Aperture, June. Available at https://aperture.org/blog/lives-samuel-fosso/ (Accessed March 2021.). Goffman E. (1956) The presentation of Self in Everyday life. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Social science Research Centre
Hoffman J. & Jonas J. (2005). Perform. London: Thames & Hudson.
Njami S. & Petersen M. (2002). Portaits of Pride-West African portrait photography. Laholm: Trydells Tryckeri AB
O´Rielly S. (2009). The body in Contemporary Art. London: Thames & Hudson.
Sontag S. (1966). Against interpretation and other essays. New York: Farrar, Strauss &Giroux Schehcner R. (1985). Between Theatre and Anthropology. Pennsylvania: University of
Pennsylvania Press.
Tarr & Jones (ed). The Artist´s Body (2012). New York: Phaidon Inc. Waheed N. (2003). Salt. Great Britain: Amazon.
Young A-L (2018) Ann Liv Young Discusses The Challenges And Rewards Of Being A Full-Time Performance Artist. Interview by Jillian Billard for Ravelin Magazine, April. Available at https://www.ravelinmagazine.com/posts/ann-liv-young-discusses-challenges-rewards-full-time-performance-artist/ (Accessed February 2021).
