Creation as resistance
Alex Robison
In the deepest gratitude for my fellow scholars and those who made this course possible for teaching me my most important lesson thus far.
Twisted door, I think you are home.
Reflect light
But find your hand
Don't let it please beauty.
What Blind Sunset Shows Coz You Are Twisted Wind
“To write is to… resist; to write is to become; to write is to draw a map: ‘I am a cartographer.'”
“it resists death, slavery, infamy, shame.”
Deleuze
A collaborative physical theatre project about the most basic theme of connection. It concerns symbols of voluntary movement (such as animation, puppetry, dance, performance, and exercise) and involuntary (such as shaking hands in the face of shame), a warped mirror, door, and paint on plywood that will not be destroyed, lest it hurt oneself.
It may seem ironic to precede this discussion of a sort of physical theatre project with a quote on writing. As it personally concerns me, it must deal with a tension of how to liberate a sense of movement towards connection that can marry with my inclinations towards stillness and observation through my primary practice of storytelling through visual and graphic narratives. I initially approached it through a scripted, storyboarding process, before accepting that it must rather be about guiding and setting structure to an improvised performance that can freely react to energies at the moment.
A rejected storyboard (of which there are 30…)
In setting on this life path, I also hope that it can contribute to freeing a shared ability to fluidly and directly react to the world’s changing intensities and becomings through art, like the perfection of Charlie Parker’s improvisation.
It aspires towards being a healing deviance from a pervasive ideal that, not just within art, claims all one needs is to reflect the world and its energies at a given time. Yet, if one becomes what one creates, it’s unsustainable to aspire for oneness with the world spiralling towards destruction!
Drafts of destruction
Absorbing an impersonal shame by consequence of following this ideal in my practice, it was not until I stood - and spoke with a friend, that the desolate labyrinth of stillness I was misled into faded into a tiny door adjunct to a warped mirror.
The plain breeze of where the door opens to… it was a zone of pure sight observation, its physical size being restrictive of physical entry.
In sight, the mirror seemed to form more and more reflections from depersonalizing angles, intermingled with instantaneous moments of others’ experiences, forming another visual illusion of labyrinth.
Pulling away from a draw for increasingly closer examination, I asked, “Then, why are you here?”
“... Is it okay for me to be here?”
As a congenitally deaf young man, I’m moving beyond depersonalized observation to listen and react to the beats of our hearts.