after weeks of being unable to write a script that i liked or that felt like it could even get at what i wanted to talk about, i decided to go with the thing i really want to do an do my electronic burlesque routine. this happened on FRIDAY, and i feel like i’ve been pretty productive since then given i’ve reworked everything over the past 5 days.

i’m making pasties using an accelerometer and tri-color LEDs based on leah buechley’s  accelerometer shirt project, a bra and skivvies made from EL wire, and depending on how much i can crank out in the next week or so, maybe another layer of simpler electronics (like a bra made from headlights).

i’m envisioning it as a multimedia performance, with video that looks like it could be a live feed going on in the background, with several performers for the first part of the routine, and then switching to a solo electronic dance. i’ve shot some video already– i don’t have it to show you because i started coding instead of pulling the footage off the p2 cards; i’ve got my music pretty much squared away (it’s pop music, please don’t hate me); i have done some basic blocking with my performers (but not with the latest cut of music) and i have the concept down (it’s, how you say, autobiographical?, in content); i’ve designed how i think the bra and electronic components are going to work together, and i’ve been playing with the code– but i’ve hit a little roadblock with that and can only get certain behaviors out of the LED.

so,

by this time next week, i want the bra, pasties, and headdress that houses the microcontroller to be programmed, if not completed. i want the panties to be designed and maybe sewn, so that i can know how feasible a second layer of (removable) electronics will be.

i’ll be capturing and going over the footage from the shoot to see what i can compose and how it will fit in with the storyline.

i will be holding rehearsal with the other performers next week to go over blocking/choreography.

the costumes for the other performers are already squared away. i will just have to figure out what my outer costume is going to look like, and probably invest in a fall or weave.

that’s the update. this is what i’m doing.

after spending all day sunday at the cremaster cycle marathon, i found a new appreciation for matthew barney. i’m not a big fan of cremaster 3, but predictably cremaster 4 and 5 and especially cremaster 1 won me over to the weird visceral freaky deaky dark side. and it tied in well with an idea for a super short (think minute and a half) video i have been toying with for a few weeks.

i need to make some phone calls, but i am hoping to film a scene in the volunteer park conservatory with three or four characters (wiggy of course being the star). it will be short, abstractly narrative, and highly produced in terms of costuming and aesthetic. if more time allows, it can become part of a suite of stardust backstory (the garden of vice) but for now, i will commit only to making one really goregous video, perhaps juxtaposing it with some other footage i’ve taken over the past few quarters should they work as a collage together. and maybe something in there will intimate the need for a press conference, live or filmed, but til then, just this video. and i’m imagining it on a weird 70s tv or monitor on the wall. i don’t want it to be part of the reel because i think it will be better displayed as a loop.

i’ll update this again as soon as i’ve spoken to the people at the conservatory with a more specific shoot schedule, but as it stands:

4.16

i’ve been writing a little, but by this friday i need to have a script/storyline all squared away so i can list it out and figure out what exactly i need

4.17-4.24

props and costumes need to be figured out and made. will be making a birdcage out of hair, i need two or three hazmat suits, glass baubles, rhinestones to vomit, and ideally a ceramic clawfoot bathtub but we’ll see if they let me bring that anywhere near the conservatory. and i need to figure out what wiggy will be wearing, if anything. i’m hoping to get jamie von stratton on board to help with costuming.

4.26-4.30 (with a caveat to not kill myself til the 7th of may)

ideally i will shoot this week, but if not i’m giving myself until the 7th. if i haven’t shot by the 7th, i’m shooting myself in the foot and dropping out of school.

5.5

midterm critiques. i hope to have footage to show you all, but i don’t by today i will by friday, and at the very least you can see all the costumes and shit i’ve been working on. but i think i’ll have some footage.

5.10-5.17

editing and shtuff. depending on how it all goes, maybe i can shoot another, less produced scene the week of the 17th, to be edited together by the 24th.

5.26

final critiques. bowie help us.

5.27

install stuff in SoA basement.

6.1

exhibition opens. invite entire burlesque and club scene. bronwyn will not be there. but wiggy will. probably with glittery track marks.

6.2-6.6

i’m going to miss exotic world. screw you all. vodka shots and glitter coke for three days nonstop.

6.11

gradumacation.

i’m exhausted. my throat has been hurting since sunday. it was starting to get better but then i chain smoked for that little video experiment and now i really feel like shit (i cut that part out of the video: i get into the tub as wiggy unapologetically lights her second or third cigarette. oh the joys of sharing a body with someone too glamorous to give a fuck). and now the conjunctivitis of my brain has manifested itself in the leaking of my right eye. if i hadn’t been expecting it, i would have been scared to wake up unable to open my eyes.

what the fuck?

i’ve gone through everyone’s comments from the beginning of the year again, trying to glean what encouragement and inspiration i can from them.

i don’t know why i feel so stuck. i know i’m on to something. i guess it’s the commitment to one project means i can’t do all the projects i want to. talking to noel earlier this quarter was so exciting and i all of a sudden wanted to make my spectacular props, wham bam thank you ma’am, and then i guess i decided i hated custom electronics too much to actually want to do that (and also, the whole choreographing of a performance utilizing them was a little off-putting). i am still very much into this idea of the press conference. but i want it to be live and choreographed and full of wiggy impersonators and a ruckus. and i want to really do the scandal i’m dreaming of, because it is potentially worthy of a press conference if i do it right. and maybe i can incorporate electronics into that. but really the problem is moving forward on any one of these ideas discards all of the other potential projects and i don’t want to give up any of my babies or have them in an order but rather explode them all out at the same time. and i KNOW that’s not going to work.

so here i am, sitting at watertown with a shriveled eye, too tired to feel sorry for myself.

if you follow my facebook (facebook.com/wiggy.starddust) and/or twitter (twitter.com/wiggystardust) then you already knew that and were receiving live updates probably to your phone via SMS as i did all those things. if you don’t, then you probably just think i’m a bit of a fuck up. you might think that anyway though.

seriously, though. i framed my adventure and mini-vaycay to vancouver as academic research and a performance piece– which it was, i had a reason to want to meet him, i had questions for him (although i got totally flabbergasted when we went to talk to him and mostly made dirty jokes), and i was in character the entire time (facillitated by the lovely va gina velvet, who was mostly in character and made it easier to be wiggy, but was also fantastic as herself –morgan elizabeth– and was a fun filmmaker/director to have on board) and i documented the whole thing, keeping my intellectualism up with the help of the epicly amazing margaret hayes, my personal wig stylist, make up artist, costume consultant, and documentarian. i have a feeling you’ll be seeing margaret in my thesis, playing wiggy’s agent --but it was also fucking fun! it was incredible what i was able to accomplish by following my intuition so to the T (funny how i dreamt i needed to be up there midweek, not knowing an impromptu press conference was being held wednesday…) and by shirking all my other responsibilities (the fact that everything came together told me i HAD to go, and the fact that i had so many to shirk in the first place told me i need to let most of them go til june)

anyway, it was super fab. i bumped into tivon yesterday and he was like, “whats up, how was the impromptu whirlwind thesis adventure?” and i think i said something like “OMG I MET JOHNNY WEIR!! and i don’t know how its relevant but it is….” and then spent the rest of the day going over footage from the trip, trascribing the parts of the press conference that were particularly relevant to what i’m interested in, watching his spot on larry king live, be good johnny weir, and getting giddy.

and i have my thesis idea. i don’t want to blog about it just now. but i will tell you all about it in class.

xo wigs

the dimensions of the vid are all fucked up from being converted, so the light isn’t quite the perfect disc it was when i recorded it, but you get the idea.

anyway, here’s some pictures of what i’ve been thinking about over the past few weeks.

i took a lot more photos than this but these ones seemed to go well together. and a lot of the rest were macro shots of glitter.

so, i don’t have much time now (my experiments are supposed to be due in less than a week now) but i think i need to start making some wearables so that i can see what i can make, how it works, how it looks, and what kind of choreography is well suited to the props.

so, i’m going to hook up an LED to an accelorometer and see how it goes

i’m going to continue to collect images towards building an aesthetic and maybe a storyline can emerge from that too, but it will be tangential to what is going on with the electronics.

and those are my experiments. guess i better get to work.

“Put in personal terms, restored behaviour is ‘me behaving as if I am someone else’. But this someone else may also be ‘me in another state of feeling/being’. Performing my dream, re-experiencing my childhood trauma, showing you what I did yesterday. Also social actios: the enactment of events whose origins can’t be located in individuals, if they can be located at all. Sometimes these events are attributed to collective individuals like the Books of Moses, the Iliad of Homer, the Mahabharata of Vyas; sometimes they belong anonymously to folklore, legend, myth. Restored behaviour offers to both individuals and groups the chance to become someone else ‘for the time being’, or the chance to become what they one were. Or even, and most often, to rebecome what they never were.”

“Ceremonies… exist between fact and fiction: they are a new class of facts. Simulations, models, and theatricalizations are part of this new class.”

“From the perspective of Euro-American conventions, ‘acting’ means make-believe, illusion, lying. Even Goffman, who has studied acting in ordinary life, identifies it most directly with con men and others who must maintain a ‘front’ separate fro their ‘true’ selves. This understanding of acting derives from our Platonic view of a hierarchy of realities in which the most real is the most distant from experience and from our Aristotelian view of art, which is an imitation of a reflection. But from the perspective of Indian conventions– and the system of maya/lila underlying them– acting is playful illusion, but so is the world itself, so that in India acting is both false and true. In fact, in Asia the mask is often credited with being closer to the way things are in the world that the face behind the mask can be: acting becomes not a species of lying but a means to the truth.”

from Winnicott : “I am here staking a claim for an intermediate state between a baby’s inability and his growing ability to recognize and accept reality. I am therefore studying the substance of illusion, that which is allowed to the infant, and which in adult life is inherent in art and religion.”

“This constant movement in the liminal space ‘not me… not not me’ is the matrix of performance… Hierarchies of all kinds– ontological, social, aesthetic– are dissolved, set aside for the ‘time being’ so that people can ‘make believe’. Thus in theatre we get a very powerful kind of subversion/deconstruction followed by a reconstruction of realities according to new, playful possibilities.”

dance classes– beginning ballet? zumba? capoiera? etc? look up, find a way make into a weekly schedule

reading– finish hero w/ 1000 faces, start reading more campbell, 2010?, abundance

watching– 2001, a clockwork orange, thx 1138, the man who fell to earth, ziggy stardust and the spiders from mars

looking– all those names of artists i’ve been writing down and not really researching other than pulling up their page on a new tab– never closing that tab but never really spending time with it either.

writing– a performance narrative, kind of in the style of dr. lucky’s persona class. also to start thinking about a performance in terms of how i would be making a purely burlesque performance. which means making a dance score and music mapping (8 counts). the reason why i don’t want to do this is because i don’t have a musical score in mind yet or conceived or collaborated with. so i need to maybe talk to some dx ppl (post-dx? grad-dx? still in dx?) about sound design– i don’t think pop music will work. silence could potentially. classical would have to be for a reason (how kubrick would it be to have a weird harpsichord beethoven or bach piece? ha, ha). how would i do this if it were a film i were making instead? how is this process different? does it have to be????

i was really sick for one. yesterday was the first day in four that i spent more time vertical than horizontal.

for two, i just wanted to quit so badly after class last week. i had a series of meetings and coffees and consultations etcs that served as encouragement and attempts to reinspire but some ended up backfiring. wednesday after class was awful, all of a sudden there was nothing i could do to make my situation better, i didn’t want to go to ballet or audition for any shows or anything (i did go to ballet, even if just to take a class from ricki before embodied movement next week, and i am so glad i did– bowie makes ballet totally fun) thursday was good– i met with tivon and talked about the burlesque/dx overlap and genre breaking and building a character and aesthetic; i rushed home to meet noel to give him costumes for his shoot that night, and he had some positive words–  he is always a great person for me to talk to since he’s all about breaking the rules (“it’s cool to be in trouble”). friday i ran around trying to be productive and not really getting it probably; saturday i auditioned for the bombshells space show and performed at west hall for a benefit; somewhere between saturday night and sunday morning i got really sick and didn’t get out of bed again until wednesday (yesterday).

so that’s where i’m at. i’ll be posting about my thoughts and reconceptualized experiments later today.