03.25.10 kulturnatib

friends
je m'exuse. computers have keys that when pressed do weird things. weird in a way that you dont expect. apparently while posting this, i pressed some key that distributed the wrong post and not even halfway through at that. sorry for wasting your time if you took the time to check that. this one should work better.
thanks for you patience.
roy


Play

Home and vacation are words that cluster together often with family and friends. Other words that gravitate towards each other and the just mentioned words are fun, rest, doing nothing.

Those words are foremost in my mind of late because, indeed, we are going on a vacation, heading home to family and friends. Yet, for me especially, it won't be much rest and, in fact, it will be doing quite a number of things. Even then it should be fun.

One of the best definitions of home, I find, is that by the American poet, Robert Frost. He said, in a poem, that home is where when you go there go they have to take you in. Something like that.

This is true, of course, for family and friends. In my case and especially with this immediately imminent vacation it is particularly true of friends who are also colleagues in art.

Birds of the same feather are said to flock together. All the more if these are artistic birds since nowhere in human experience are there more kinds of feathers than in art and they are distinguishable one from the other mostly – though paradoxically since artists are commonly thought of as singularly unique – through their flocks.

The flock of artist friends I share the same feathers with are of the species rara avis performartistscinensis. Otherwise known -- or as of yet mostly unknown -- as performance artists. There are not too many of them in Cebu despite the first sighting in 1978 and almost annually since then in an event called the MindWorks.

These somehow remained sporadic if somewhat scheduled bumps in Cebu's artistic landscape. Though still rooted in the UP Cebu Fine Arts Program, performance art broke through the confines of that program and since 2005-06 has steadily produced works in venues that artistic angels fear to tread.

Having had the honor of being part of that breakthrough, it is performance art and the performance artists of XO? I also consider home.

And so, it is with them that I will be doing a number of things. First, there is a video screening of some of my recent Canadian performances. Immediately after there will be live performances. There will be preparations for these, especially with the latter, involving a bit of construction. Both will happen on April 7 at the Outpost Restaurant, 9pm onwards.

Aside from that there is also this performance piece I have been invited to present in August. This work as it has developed so far has a Philippine (Cebu) component. I will be asking the help of school children (grade six) both from private and public schools.

I am hoping that these children – a hundred of them, if I can manage that number – will be up to the challenge.

I hope that I am up to the challenge with them and before hand, their teachers and even parents.

This is a work that will have what attracts me most to performance art; the capacity for being open-ended, the possibility for other openings or further development.

That might sound like work, but with art, especially performance art, that could as well be play. Serious play.