By JUDD MORRISSEY et al. [Goat Island Performance Group] –

killing!!!

Continued at The Last Performance

Observing the incidence of the color yellow.

By CJ MITCHELL et al. [Goat Island Performance Group] – Goat Island’s performance work is developed collaboratively, a model also adopted when teaching their workshops. Divisions between individuals, and ideas of authorship are blurred – through this we see that the creative material connects to others, and is completed by them. The emphasis is on process, systems, structure, research tools for creation. Use what is around you, approach it with fresh eyes and ears: use the other workshop participants, Goat Island, the room you’re in, the building, the city – other bodies. Use your memory as a resource – mental recall, body recall – not as route to nostalgia or therapy, not necessarily to tell your story, but to tell a wider narrative which reveals the extent to which your body already contains a wider narrative. Critical evaluation is transformed into the need to respond creatively. The work exists in the moment, vital, perhaps not yet even assimilated or understood by the artists who made it. Give up what seems important to you; it’s not yours. Think formally and then thematically. Not analyzing material to find its meaning, but accumulating material, finding unexpected connections.

We are already participating in a Goat Island workshop. Collaborating through words, sounds, touch, texture, viewing, thinking. The material is there to be received, processed, transformed. Keep a journal observing the incidence of the color yellow. Memorize the street names between Monroe and Belmont: how many streets is that? – the geography traversed almost daily, let’s look at this a different way.

And in ten years you will find yourself living in San Francisco, writing a letter, which says: “CJ refuses to believe in the existence of the absolute. I have found it.” And you will mail this letter to the person who, ten years earlier, wore your left black leather glove at the same time you wore your right black leather glove.

This is not everything I have to say, but this is all the time / for all we’ve experienced together. I would like to review a few thoughts now; lessons if you will. There are seven of them that I thought of specifically as it pertains to collaboration.

Continued in “Letter to a Young Practioner” | More Chronicle & Notices.