Putting on a show

So I'm installed in the 'library' of the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, PICA all this week 28/7 - 1/8 2009, doing nails for secrets 7-9.30pm until Saturday. It's my gig for this year's Putting On An Act, the contemporary performance week that PICA hosts annually.

For it and out of it, will come a short performance of the secrets that my 'clients' and their friends have donated over the course of the week.

If you have followed this blog you may know that this isn't new in the Manic Cures Project, the performance of the gifted secrets. However, it is an evolutionary process.

For this next performance in addition to reporting on the secrets I received in exchange for nail tech services rendered, I would like to find a way for the audience to have the opportunity to divulge secrets 'en masse'.

But how do you get a bunch of theatre punters to 'get it off their chests' to loosen their lips as a group? Who in their right minds would want to divulge personally charged information amongst a group of strangers doing the same thing simultaneously?

Given that I hate the idea and the practice of enforced audience participation this is a tricky proposition. I'm fine with invited participation... But how do you successfully invite a group of strangers in a dark theatre to scream out their most private, most personal and possibly most gut-wrenchingly embarrassing secrets, AND make them feel empowered and protected while doing it????

I have some ideas about that...

Maybe you will just have to come and see................

Putting On An Act

The night before

Think I have all the prep done

Think I will sleep without waking at thought of things not

yet done

It gets easier though it feels like it doesn't

So I'm doing a week of nails for secrets at the illustrious

PICA in Perth WA July 28 to Aug 1 2009

It will be kewl to see what comes of it; to see the PICA

crowd's preparedness to loosen their lips

I would like to blog more but it's late and there are three

jobs I'm doing tomorrow, the last of which is Tawdry

But it's never a chore, it's a dialogue with surprising directions and interjections

And And And this time I get to do more

This time it's evolved a little and that's exciting

And And And

It's the last gig before heading to Burning Man where Tawdry visits the Nevada and nail beds,

hot beds and restless beds of the Burner's secrets as yet un-Manic Cured...

Kewl Kewl

Can't wait

Night night!

meeting the deadline

It's about the lack of sleep
Not because of all the work but all the procrastination
It's not that easy to do, to sit down and commit your honest ideas to a form knowing
you will submit that form to a panel who will rate that form amongst a whole bunch of
other such forms
You give you ideas in that form to a panel which is made up of people you probably know well or at least know of

And they tell you if you have shown good form, are on form, informed, reformed, form fit
Or if it doesn't go so well formless out of form or poor form
All the more problematic coz you used to be on that panel and even chair it
So you better commit those ideas in a way that looks like you know what you are doing
Oh did I leave out the part where I used to run workshops on how to fill out those forms
Hahaha

Still it's no laughing matter
Well, I mean I'm talking about the stuff that means more to me than just about anything else
The communication of the stuff that really keeps me awake at night
The stuff that takes my eyes off the road and takes my focus from a dull conversation and puts the joyful sinful duration into my showers

My ideas
My being a conduit for fresh thoughts
And the sending those thoughts across time and space to who ever is roughly in front of me
When they pick up my ideas my thoughts
When they toss them around their brains for a bit
Mull them over even for a little
Even if they turf them out quickly
Or think about it then decide no
Or hang on to them
Or run with them
Or laugh or wince or be dumbstruck or just cynical because of them

When that happens

I know I'm alive

So despite all the procrastinated sleep deprivation
It's worth it
Coz if this application bares fruit
I get to build some ideas and send them out
And in so doing when I see hear feel those ideas get received
I know I'm alive

And it's a good feeling that...