marientina

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During the next year, I am passionately working on two pieces of work that are pushing me over the edge mentally and physically. I anticipate that many crazy things will appear on my blog as I immerse myself in research, inner images and emotions and I encourage you to give me feedback even when some things seem too hard to touch.

Similar to the 'method' acting approach, I tend to produce art by immersing myself fully in my work. My approach is not unusual and I assume most artists follow a similar pattern. An emotion or idea sparks my interest and I immerse myself into an experience that temporarily alters my perception. I want my work to be experienced by me as a first-person experience before anyone else experiences it. It is a selfish approach that works for therapeutic purposes. Third-person experience design is what I do for commissioned projects. (This is why your MFA should be a deeply personal experience or you're wasting a lot of time and money for nothing.)

Although a lot of my work initially falls under the category of 'personal narrative', the end result may become very neutral in emotionality for myself, yet will paradoxically seem more personal to others. Sometimes, I forget completely the 'why' and 'how' and other times I embrace an appropriated experience as my own. In fact, going back to 'To The Loss of Innocence' (a project for a small audience and very intimate screening), I can hardly remember what part of the narrative I wrote and what part I appropriated because I lived it when I did the piece. Every time I look at it, besides noticing my crappy editing job on a linear system (I don't edit cleanly), I experience various emotions that I was oblivious to before. Suddenly what I thought wasn't personal actually is, and it is out there for the world to see.

And I will be damned if I have to apologize for being cold, emotional, or melodramatic at any given time.

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The first piece I am working on now is not clear in my head yet, and will probably be delayed a little more as I try to isolate myself from it emotionally to develop it. This piece is named 'Soulmates' as a dedication to my dear friend John 'Hoi Yee' Lau who passed away last year. This is an interactive dance theatre performance for five dancers/actors using touch sensors on hands, with video/audio depicting flashbacks that are triggered as partners exchange in an abstraction of a waltz. I am collecting these flashbacks to make concrete pictures in my head and I am noting down the specific auditory experiences. In and out comes the sound of a respirator and heart monitor, slowing down to a halt, slowly, patiently and sweetly just as my friend slipped away.

The significance of hand gestures and movement phrases emphasizing the exchange is related to the flashbacks. Besides the fact that I am Greek and we are a touchy feely culture (and yes women hold hands in the streets), I naturally have a strong memory of hand holding during this whole experience of death but it is both interesting and suprising to see who holds whose hand at which occasion.

'Soulmates' will actually strive not to be melodramatic nor hopeful in any false way (to be fair to John). It will not be about closure either because I believe in circular energy flowing through the universe.

Irina C. Poulos of Oxymoros will be choreographing this and the next piece.

'Conversations with my mother' (as some in the immersive lab email list probably saw already) is a solo interactive performance of a woman's struggle with bipolar disorder. This is a strongly personal piece but I am doing the research to do it justice because I have to address the inadequacy of our health system to properly diagnose and treat this mental health disorder. As I immerse myself into this project, I often wonder whether I have lost my mind and question nature vs nurture and behavioral patterns. Obviously, to be an artist one has to be a little insane so I will plead guilty just to that... Sadly my type of anemia will imitate mild cyclothymic disorder at times but experiencing real patients of bipolar disorder helps me understand the suttle differences.

[from the list]:
'Conversations with my Mother' is a non-linear confession about all the things lingering in my mind since my earliest memories of listening to my mother talk for hours on end. Conversations can be short or last for hours but they revolve around the same topics and obsessions, they are random in sequence and they revolve around objects and people. At short doses, my mother is funny and witty, but spending lots of time with her reveals the illness within. As she chooses her actions without logic or reason, one watches her struggle in making decisions that define her future. The cycle never really ends as the decline itself feeds the illusion of progress.

'Conversations with my Mother' replay themselves in my 'virtual' set in three different languages (Greek, English and French) to deter the audience from fully understanding context (and so that I can quote some really cool authors.) The goal is to protect people whose stories are revealed within the conversations and to emulate my mother's paranoid obsession with secrecy and innuendos.

My mother has bipolar disorder with unpredictable recurring episodes of depression and mania that manifest themselves randomly and cannot be predicted. I have spent most of my life denying her illness -- even while medicating her I listened to her patiently,-- but in recent years I had to confront her reality in order to save myself from the same fate.

My mother is obsessed with objects and she clutters her space and hoards memorabilia for as long as she can. Her past tortures her not only mentally but physically in the photographs and objects she chooses to display and cling to. Objects and photographs shift meaning as her thoughts shift in mood and tone.

It is hard to compete with her in conversation as one cannot predict what will set her off and what direction conversation will go because she may switch from being funny to being sarcastic, bitter and offensive at the blink of an eye and soon after she will become melancolic or self-pitying or randomly violent. The most common denominators in all her moods are a heavy dose of denial and fabrication.

'Conversations with my Mother' is conceived as an interactive performance with projections on objects and one performer or interactor. Recorded narratives play back as images on objects change context and mood in an ever-shifting configuration of a state of mind. The recorded narrative includes only one voice mixed with environmental or domestic noises e.g. cooking, television, bus stop, etc, because in all truth it is difficult to hear oneself speak while talking with my mother. Everyone has the right to be moody and it is hard to draw the line where normal ends and bipolar disorder begins so this piece aims to make the viewer doubt even for a few seconds where their draw that line and wonder whether my mother is truly ill or just really true to her inner voice.

This piece is partially influenced by the female character in 'The Yellow Wallpaper' by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and 'flow'-type written narrative in various works by Helene Cixous.

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Phew. Now I can turn off the butter churner and sleep.