I'm hoping this will be the first in a series of regular blog posts, outside of (what I hope will become) my normal output.
See, one thing I've never really struggled with in my incredibly short time as an artist is having ideas. They seem to come to me out of nowhere, and I've recently been really good at creating a smooth pipeline from an impulse to a more fully-formed idea. And that's where the issue starts. I often sit on half-formed ideas for a long time, unable or unwilling to develop them further. So, in an effort to jostle some of those ideas loose, I'm putting them here. I'm hoping that the act of publishing these ideas will push me towards taking them more seriously, and I'm also hoping that any comments on these ideas will help me to develop them further/find collaborators who are interested in pushing the idea towards reality. I am going to do my best to post ideas here bi-weekly, but bear with me if I'm not totally punctual.
So, without further ado, here's this week's batch of ideas:
The first idea is (probably) for a play (or maybe a screenplay?) inspired by a lot of the protests and counter-protests happening around police brutality and racism sparked by the death of Michael Brown in August. Something that specifically compels me about these events is the constant presence of counter-protesters, people who take to the streets in support of Darren Wilson or police in general. It confuses me that there are people who could look at the way this country, and especially our police departments, are structured and NOT see the incredibly injustices happening. I find it really hard to see the humanity in those types of people. And, of course, as soon as I see something hard to do, I want to do it. The central character of this narrative would be one of those protesters. But instead of focusing only on this person as a political entity, it would show this character as a regular person. A person who is a husband, a father, a friend, and not necessarily a bad one of any of those things. I have some ideas for confrontations with a child and a coworker, but those are still getting fleshed out. What I do know is that the goal for this project would be to go beyond just exposing the hypocrisy that I believe is present in someone who is a loving father/husband/friend but then actively supports and peddles in hate towards other people, but to explore how this hypocrisy is maintainable. How does this person ignore cognitive dissonance?
The second idea is a performance art piece. The impulse here is the idea of self-righteousness. I'm someone who believes very strongly in what I believe in, and will generally speak up for those beliefs. But I also do believe that how you stand up for what you believe matters a lot, and I do believe that self-righteousness is not just distasteful, but also harmful, or at least indicative of a harmful attitude. Self-righteousness to me indicates that the person talking is more interested in being morally superior than making a difference. And the sort of messed up thing is that you can self-righteous about anything. So, the idea here is to create probably 4-5 different monologues that are supposed to sound self-righteous. They would each be structurally identical and (hopefully) come across the same emotionally, but would each be about a different topic. These monologues would then be performed. I'm currently trying to decide how I want them to be performed. I think the idea of them being interwoven into each other by one performer is really cool, but I worry that it could be really hard to follow. Having them performed all at once, on top of each other, would be incredibly visceral, but would lack some of the more intellectual engagement that I want to happen. Having them performed one-by-one would allow for that intellectual engagement, but feels very un-engaging. As of right now, I'm feeling a mix of those three, but I'm not really sure how.
The final idea doesn't fit quite as easily into a single medium. It's inspired by the way music makes me feel, and especially by the way that a great album makes me feel. I'm really inspired by the way that each track on a great album feeds the whole and adds to the emotional resonance of the tracks around it. So, the idea I had was to take a really good concept album (I'm currently thinking The Suburbs by Arcade Fire, but I am very open to other ideas), get as many writers as there are tracks on the album, and have each writer write a scene for a single track. Each scene would be (about) as long as the track, and would (ideally) be heavily inspired not just by the emotional content of the track, but by the lyrical content, the feel of the whole album, and the place that track has in the narrative of the album. These pieces would then be workshopped together to help them fit together like the album does, and then performed, possibly with the album playing underneath. This idea seems like the most likely to become a reality within the relatively near future, but who knows.
So. Those are them. If you have any comments, ideas, thoughts, concerns, questions, etc. please comment/email me/tweet at me/tag me in an Instagram post, do whatever feels most comfortable to you. If you want to email me but don't have my email, I can give it to you through some private means of communication.
Thanks!
