Andrea Fraser Podcast

Listen to this if you get the chance:

Andrea Fraser- Bad at Sports Podcast


She brings up some very salient points that resonated specifically with my own work. It's a long podcast with a lot of different ideas brought up so it becomes hard to narrow it down. I will say, that at a point she is speaking about performing her relationships to a group, instead of performing that specific group. In this way she is always present as herself while embodying other characters persona's. I find this extremely interesting because she is allowing herself to explore that in-between space of creating a dialogue within a larger conversation.

I think that these were some of the issues I have been trying to work through in my own performances. For me, it becomes less about the specificity of a character but about the nature of how I would interact with that character and what that interaction would look like. Who is that person to me? I'm speaking in reference to a piece I just did where I attempted to take on the persona of a 1970's feminist performance artists. After listening to Andrea's interview, I realize that there is an importance to scripting and truly investigating that person before allowing them to enter into our world. Then, once entered, I should ask, who are you as an artist in relation to this character?

She also brought up a point about the Woman's Building in LA, and the emphasis that those women placed on collective learning and group process. For the Pacific Standard Time show she attempted to find evidence of this process, but unfortunately she was unable to. I started to wonder what ever happened to that type of learning? I understand many of us do work collectively at times, but what about the beginning stages? I just finished with a collaborative piece for my Installation class and it did not go so well. Is there space for collaboration and collective learning in our individualistic society?

Might be a utopian ideal...
Off to crochet upside down triangles