When I was actively choreographing I thought that I was only as good as my ideas and the dancers I attracted to my company or at least that was one of my rationales. I was lucky to have a group of dancers who stayed with me a very long time. I still imagine myself to be a performing artist first and painter second. My last orchestrated performance art work was 2001 until this year when I involved 44 people, including many who were a part of my original company in my newest piece SPRING FEVER. I had a PLAN A and a PLAN B. Performing arts is a little like parenting, you start off with one idea, then reality sinks in and you accept many many ideas and hope that one of them works. Happily my PLAN A was enough. When my oldest was 5 he asked me to make him a dinosaur costume for Halloween and as a dutiful parent I tried. He played around with it in the house but when the day came for him to wear it to school, he changed the plan. The new plan was that he would carry a baby kangaroo in his pullover’s front pocket, really quite pouch-like. It was his call. He would be a mother kangaroo instead. Since I was not the person going to school in place of him, his plan was beyond perfect. I actually thought it was quite poetic. So in his case, PLAN B worked. So what happens when you are well past PLAN B and maybe onto PLAN G, OR PLAN T? Is that what they call “thinking out of the box”? Kinda like when you have lemons – it is time to make lemonade. Plan X, Plan Y and Plan Z, I guess you do whatever it takes to get the job done. I am struck by the whistle-blowers of our age, Bradley Manning, Ed Snowden, Pussy Riot, Julian Assage, Malala Yousafzai, and now Deric Lostutter. Did they rotate through the alphabet with their plans before committing their controversial acts of honesty. They are paying a serious price and it is as if they are “up on that wall”. I can just hear actor Jack Nickolson’s speech in a FEW GOOD MEN written beautifully first as a play and then as a screenplay by Aaron Sorkin. “You don’t want the truth because deep down in places you don’t talk about at parties, you want me on that wall, you need me on that wall. We use words like honor, code, loyalty. We use these words as the backbone of a life spent defending something. You use them as a punchline.” I for one am grateful for their honesty because we are a better world with less secrets. Historical the USA has been very good about covering up the truth with fantasy. “Manifest Destiny” was another term for wholesale genocide in the 1800s. GONE WITH THE WIND, while being a fantasy level for all toiling writers, it is said that Margaret Mitchell works on the book privately for decades before being goaded into sharing it with someone who could publish it. It provoked a long familiar ring: “Not all slavery was bad for black people”. So while I claim to possess no state secrets or claim to ignite a movement that would bring me to the United Nations or solitary confinement, artists still possess one vital secret. The secret is to indulge your inner process and get busy making that process move from idea stage to something alive and present.
2 Performer from SPRING FEVER.
Micro Museum 