Yesterday I spent the first hours in the studio here in Yokohama. It was both good and hard. The experience of being here in Japan and understanding how everything works is so powerful, it is hard to think about making a piece of work just yet. There is a lot of finding my feet, finding the supermarket, trying to get myself fed, making myself comfortable to live here, to be done. Having said that, entering a studio space is a bit of a leveler. It is (to some extent) like any other studio in any other city, and while I am not always at my most productive in a studio space, in this context it feels like a useful disconnection from the distraction and stimulation and challenge of being somewhere so new. Or rather, not a disconnection but a means of focusing.
We talked as a group about the rule ‘Attack!’ (and its exclamation mark) and that it is in some ways an instruction to just go, make, work, hit the ground running. To not over-think, which is hard for me as a chronic over-thinker. I tried quite hard yesterday to not think. I even tried meditating, which came up in our discussion because my initial response to the rule ‘Find the stage’ had been about finding your ‘right’ to the stage, and presence, and different states of being as a performer. So I sat in the studio with my eyes closed for twenty minutes and tried not to think about anything and thought about everything. It is so fast, my mind, that often I don’t even notice it has gone elsewhere. This was an interesting exercise, one I think I will repeat just to see if I can get better if nothing else.
I wrote a text then, about all the things I had thought about while trying not to. And then I set myself a task to write a text that is so honest I would feel uncomfortable performing it in front of an audience. I spent some time trying to beat myself up, physically (‘the body attacks itself’). I bit my own lip doing so and tasted blood in my mouth. I have cut and injured myself accidentally so much in the last few weeks, I think I am getting more and more accident prone. I thought about blood then, and about a moment where an audience experiences the taste of blood, and now I wonder how I might re-create that taste.
– Ira Brand
