At the beginning of this year, I read an article in Wallpaper magazine about artists/artisans and craftspeople making work before the eyes of their customers. Designers making furniture and housewares there on site in their design studios, visual artists and graphic designers drawing and painting moments before someone purchased and walked away with a picture. I found it fascinating as a visual artist, but even more so, I was intrigued from the standpoint of whether this could be done with theatre. Not sketch comedy improvisational theatre - that has been done before - but from the perspective of more experimental theatre with serious subject matter. I was in the midst of creating performance pieces every month for 7 months as part of the LAB10 monthly theatre lab here in London - and I wanted to try to find more ways to make the art in front of the eyes of my audience. It was a lovely and liberating experiment and it worked well in the context of the intimate space downstairs at the Leicester Square Theatre. Each month my performance was prepared less and less in advance, with the final LAB10 appearance being based on an outline - with all text being written right before I went on stage. As an additional aspect, during the performance, as I read the text I ripped the pages into strips - discarding them at the end of the evening. Therefore the performance was a one-time piece of art, never to be repeated and created only for the very people in the audience on that specific night. As a natural hoarder and saver of everything, this was a big step for me!
But now LAB10 is finished and the question still remains - can art be created in an instant? The freedom of improvisation is a beautiful thing and can apply to all things. I love the planning of art, but I love the spontaneity as well. In terms of living a life of art every day: if we see something ordinary and capture it in the moment in such a way that it makes something extraordinary, is that not just as wonderful as the photo that you set up meticulously, knowing that it would make a great photograph and one that could be framed and put up on the wall?
Life is full of wondrous creative questions.
