New Year? New…
So the triple bill I’m featured in promises to be an interesting one. The group piece will be quite emotional, if I understood well, while the other solo will be quirky and fun in some places. As for mine? The way I described the piece seems like it might be a heavy affair. Deep even – as one of the other artists mentioned. Philosophical maybe, I’d say.
The quirky solo will (in-)directly deal with integrity, chronicling highs and lows of making work for free. A recurrent theme of discussions which doesn’t often find a happy medium. ‘What to do with the money you’ll earn?’ The group’s choreographer asked. Surely, they should keep the money as reward for the sweat, hurdles and anticipated emotional turmoil they’ll be facing throughout the process…That was my suggestion. The choreographer’s observation raised a good point: do we realistically think about earning money as soon as we agree to make work for free? Or is it some wishful thinking that we keep in the back of our mind, knowing we probably won’t see any penny in our purses from the performance we’ve produced?
In this platform’s context though, the pressure is tripled! Not only each featured artist has to earn money from their performance to cover the costs making the piece will require but also to avoid owing the venue the hiring fees they will charge if we haven’t reached the box office target to break even. On the top of it, each of us needs to guarantee bums on seat to make the night pleasurable (at the very least), which, if we think about it, is just a given.
What becomes of artistic integrity then? For the quirky solo, an easy, obvious selling point. For any other first-timers, it’s a “rude’ welcome to the independent performing artist’s reality. And for the established one who’s used to self-produce his work? A different approach to the same game. In my case, it’ll raise the question of what I’m selling, through my piece and to whom. Dance is the medium of communication I’ll be using to explore a sensitive subject, quite personal to me but is it really how the audience will perceive it?
I have thought about the question of integrity since the moment I submitted the proposal about a month ago but it didn’t really concern me until tonight, being surrounded by dancers who know pretty much they’re making a dance piece as we know it to a large sense. All I know, at this stage, is that the body – my body – is the centre point of ideas and reflection on social paranoia and persecution. Can the performance remain true to the subject if the body becomes dancing? Or does the idea have to be altered to fit the exercise?
Questions I shall carry with me when I’ll start the process for this piece…
