Right after rediscovering my energy reserves and getting back into good habits of work and being social again, something interesting happened.
Now it's been about 5 years since I pleformed regularly and in the past 5 years there have been 3 it 4 performances. Suddenly, after 5 months of being here, three people asked me to perform during the same 12 hour period, two already setting a date.
It's funny how things always seem to happen at once, right? So the next two weeks I'll be busy preparing. The first performance is a proper performance and I'll keep it short, 4-5 songs (though my songs tend to be rather long compared to many songs on acoustic guitar). I'll play rearranged versions of old songs, and it will be my first performance in this country in 6 7 years.
The next performance will be less of a performance and more of an experiment. It's at a kind of performance art show and tell. Each artist has 30-40 minutes to share some interactive material with the 30 or so people who come up. I'm thinking of a kind of music jam that is different from a usual music jam in some ways. This will be a big challenge for me as I've never gone outside of musical performance and never led anything interactive before.
I'm excited!
The two shows will be one day after the other and adding to this, my new favorite pop singer (and the only pop singer I like right now, I almost never listen to pop) will have a free performance the day after my two shows a 3 minute walk from our event.
Hopefully this is the start of something. It would be nice to be able to draw a crowd to a small venue like a cafe or bar once a week as I pull my album together. It will certainly give me lots of motivation to write new songs, which I've started doing.
It would be nice to know more artists and think of new ways to collaborate together. It will be nice to have friends and stuff going on for a change. I'd also like to come up with more ideas for interactive performances, talks and new ways to get more comfortable with each other and with ourselves.
My goal as an artist is twofold now. The first is creating work that I'm in love with. The second is less about spreading that work directly and more about learning to be more free.
I want to be able to roll around on the floor speaking gibberish like some performance artists might, but not for the sake of being pretentious. More for the sake of freeing myself from mental chains. I want to rediscover the joy we feel as children and love every moment more readily, and also be able to share that with others.
Of course I want people to listen to my songs and to read my stories (you can find them at I+Everything) but this is something I think will happen as a side effect from holding fun and interesting (and casual) events.
