Before the one hour live event, our group "parasite", had to choose a qualitative focus and a medium as our means of researching, experiencing and documenting the movement and duration of the event. I felt very connected to temperature-touch as my qualitative focus, and skin/body as my medium. As we were walking towards the site of where the event was going to take place, I kept on repeating to myself, "we are parasites; we feed off each other and our environment, use your body, let go."
When the live event started to unfold, I was watching the rhythm, actions, and movements of my group, and started to participate. Keeping my qualitative focus and medium in mind, I took off my coat, sat down, and started to rub my hands on the wooden boards in a repetative rhythmic motion. I felt like I was meditating and feeding off my fellow parasites' energy. Also by doing such a repetative procedure, for a duration of time, I became very aware of my body. For instance, I would start thinking about the position my body was in at the time, and how being in that same position for almost an hour, wasn't good for my body, especially because I was hunching over. My hands were frozen, so that made me think about arthritis.
I enjoyed watching my group co-operate. I would observe how we all offered snow to each other, like gift giving; the experience was very harmonious. Everytime a member of my group would offer me a chunk of snow or ice, I would take the snow and rub it on my arm for a duration of time because i believed that the snow carried evidence of them, their energy. I wanted to take the traces of them that was in the snow, and mix it with traces of my body -- unifying them, our environment, and me, my idea of a "parasite"
Using my body as an archival method, was quite interesting because it's a method that is not permanent as the marks will stay on my skin for a duration of time. I had this idea in mind, and when our live event was over, I thought about ways in which I could keep documentation of my frost-bitten arm. When we were back at NSCAD, I got Melanie to take photographs of my arm, then we brokeup into groups to discuss ways in which we could archive the document. I was paired with Ruby, and we talked about ways that we could re-enact the live event or migrate it. After our discussiion, I came up with the idea of color photocopying my arm, so that we could have an archive of my document right away; Ruby accompanied me to the print shop where I did just that.
It's been almost 2 weeks since our workshop and live event, and my arm has fully healed; there's no longer any traces of my document on my skin, only digital photos, and the color photocopy.
I've been trying to upload the color photocopy of my arm , but i'm having trouble. I'll post it as soon as I can figure out the reason why it's not uploading on my computer.
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4 comments:
Rajee, this is a wonderful recollection!
As for the image issue---You should be able to upload images when you click on the new post tab. (Just click the image icon). However, it will only allow you to upload jpgs and there is a file size restriction. So you may need to convert your images to jpg and compress or rescale the size. If you are still having issues (and this is a constant reality with blogging) you can check out the help icon or Josh has offered to meet with you and anyone else who wants to go over it.
Thanks for your help, Tagny. I was wondering if I wrote enough information for the manual? Please let me know if you'd like me to elaborate on anything that i've written. Thanks.
I loved reading this... it really brought back some of the things i was thinking and feeling about your position in the performance. i think i was really feeling you as this essential quiet anchor, sort of a neucleus of our cell. and the rest of the performance seemed to wrap around you in concentric layers.
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