PERFORMANCE
One of the greatest gifts given to me has been a vastly rich cultural education in professional music and performance. It was the family business. Yet, I was never really comfortable on stage, it was always utterly gruelling to me, and still, I knew it was both a privilege and a ticket to the world. I just figured there had to be a better way to harness the momentum of all those 'step-two-three-fours...'
I have so many wonderful memories of the vaudeville divas, great singers and comediennes, beautiful, glamorous ladies, my fairy godmothers, teaching me how to make way across a stage, all about applying grease-paint properly, designing costumes out of old upholstery and paper clips, big hair, spectacular dance-routines, mending a tragically broken heart whilst keeping on knockin' em dead every night, just makin' 'em laugh! I remember those grizzled, philosophical jazzmo's doing their best to educate me about cycles of fifths and engineering techniques to get my fingers to step into the deepest, darkest Africas of the high end of my bass guitar.
I worked in ABC TV as a gopher-girl for a few years, and more recently, began concentrating on writing and producing no-budget plays for independent live theatre, all of which eventually led to some short film screenplays which were well-informed by all that early training. In order to research some of my script concepts, I picked up the panto-pieces of my past, stepped back into the agonising arena and discovered that performance, comedy, dramatic theatre, spoken word, playwriting, screenwriting, directing and producing performed works really only costs the performer their mask of convention.
The mask of convention is the mechanism with which we agree to uphold our place within the social contract of safe, cosy, dependable, congruent, behavioural consistency,... a restraining order which clearly becomes blurred in it's fine print distinctions about creatively expressing any bizarre form of perceived madness or just being endowed with an over-abundance of dangerous artistic flamboyance. (Barry Humphries, Spike Milligan, Woody Allen, Joan Rivers...?)
Gradually, ever so slowly, I recognised a spectacularly beautiful, albeit dangerous vista of activism appearing right there, and I began to grasp the inner nature, the philosophical purpose in generating performing arts. Art is a deeply spiritual calling that safeguards our truths to travel swiftly along the wild and rocky roads of court jesters, bards and troubadours. It took me so long to get it, I was lazy, and I succumbed to the distraction of watching so many other false Idols...
William Blake said 'I must create my own system, or be enslaved by another man's. I must not reason, nor compare, it is my business to create.'
The wondrous experience of appearing in public as disturbingly comical characters pushed me to forget all about my own insecurities, my fractured sense of identity, showing me a freedom to express socially challenging concepts in ridiculous ways.
These days, I am discovering that the greatest amount of pleasure and creative satisfaction exists for me in script-writing, directing, camera operation, audio production and at the editor's bench. My own creative quest lies in seeking the subtle dynamism that flows through the performance art of others,... and to find the right frame to host that light and shade, to highlight that spectrum, draw it forwards and showcase that talent at it's very best.