Where in the world am I today?: North Vancouver, BC, Canada

While at the Oklahoma City Festival of the Arts a while back I got to hanging out with visual artist Scott E. Hill a fair bit and talking about the ‘Artistic Process.’ Now Scott’s a painter and it’s a bit like comparing apples and oranges to try and compare a juggling show to a painting, but there are similarities in the way I approach each performance as though it was a blank canvas and the way he takes his brushes to a blank canvas to create the works of Art that were on sale in his booth.

The piece above is a part of a larger piece called “Pursuit.” Scott’s work is dark and moody work that often involves Penny Farthing Bicycles and/or Trains.

So… A visual artist starts with a blank canvas of some sort, and a performance artist starts with an open stage of some sort. I was thinking about this more in Oklahoma City because I was doing Street Style shows and it really did feel like I was starting from scratch with nothing and creating a show from the ground up…

The Street is great in that you really are crafting something from virtually nothing, and there’s a different kind of satisfaction in it than in a performance at a trade show, corporate event or theatre. I think perhaps I got addicted to that feeling of crafting something out of nothing and never quite move past it to fully embrace other performance venues as strongly as I might, but that’s just part of my DNA as a performer. Some artists paint with their fingers, some use brushes, I choose to tap into my Street Performance heritage no matter what stage I’m on.

The sheer act of gathering a crowd, of convincing a group of passers by to stop because you can convince them that you’ve got something worth watching also helps layer the experience for both the performer and the audience. All of a sudden, there’s more at stake, you’ve got more to prove and if you don’t prove yourself that audience will simply walk away. So you dance and you weave, you present the tricks and crack funny with the jokes. Typically you build to some sort of finale, audience and performer feel a release and the show comes to an end.

For a live performance artist, the canvas is as much a moments in time as it is the stage he’s working on. Sure you can capture the moments on a video, preserve them for all time, but video only goes so far to capturing the experience. The real beauty and artistry is to create something in that chosen moment which is very specific to the people in that particular audience… Those choices and that audience are a once in a lifetime opportunity and there’s a beauty and poetry in that which though fleeting is magical.

In the end a painter has a finished painting to show for his work, a performer, often just the memory of the show… I sometimes long for more of a record of the shows I’ve done, some sort of tangible, put my finger on it and touch it, object to keep as a record of those moments in time that I’ve got to play in – perhaps this is why I’ve gravitated towards shooting video and still images of other performers… It’s not the same as being there in the moment, but in some small way perhaps it’ll help keep the memory of those moments alive a bit longer…

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