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Connecting: Relating artistic ideas and work with personal meaning and external context
Connecting: Relating artistic ideas and work with personal meaning and external context
“I always took for granted that the best art was political and was revolutionary. It doesn’t mean that art has an agenda or a politics to argue; it means questions being raised were explorations into kinds of anarchy, kinds of change, identifying errors, flaws, vulnerabilities in systems.” Toni Morrison, American Novelist
Mary Overlie, the late choreographer and discoverer of the Viewpoints, aimed to articulate a system that created the “actor as an original anarchist.” In a workshop I took with Mary, she revealed that the Viewpoints are called the Viewpoints because the system is about being present in time and space and developing a point of view. Similarly, Anne Bogart often talks about the need for performers to be interested in something on stage, as opposed to concerning themselves with being interesting. There is nothing more personal than being present with an audience and sharing what you as an actor are interested in and passionate about. In this section, I describe an autoethnographic, solo performance that I created for Anna Deavere Smith’s course “Performing Personal Narratives.”
COOKING WITH CANDY
COOKING WITH CANDY
A Solo Performance by Daniel Leeman Smith
This example demonstrates my ability to relate and synthesize knowledge and personal experiences to inspire and inform artistic work as articulated by Colletti & Yolen (2017) in section Cn 10. of the New York State Learning Standards for the Arts.
Daniel final performance.MP4Cooking with Candy
Final Performance - December, 2019
Video Clip (Duration is 5:03)
Courtesy of Stephanie Schneider, Anna Deavere Smith, and the Institute on the Arts and Civic Dialogue at NYU.
In the fall of 2019, I studied solo performance with renowned actress and activist Anna Deavere Smith in the course “Performing Personal Narratives” at the NYU Tisch School of the Arts. The final project for the class was the creation of a 5-minute “universe” which was performed for a live audience in December of 2019. These pieces drew from each performer’s personal life, and often traumas, and were intended to be the seeds of solo performance shows to be developed and expanded in the future. Over the course of the semester, we worked to develop our pieces as visual, sonic, and emotional works of art. We studied visual storytelling with Kristi Zea (production designer for The Silence of the Lambs), poetic storytelling with Kathy Engel, and musical storytelling with Samora Abayomi Pinderhughes.
My piece, Cooking with Candy, which is framed as a cooking show, was inspired by the death of my brother, who was a professional chef, as well as my working as an artist, educator, and activist in Oklahoma, a place where folks often feel like they are ignored by the government and coastal elites. The piece explores the experience of grief and anger felt by queer people, and others, who feel neglected and irrelevant because of their geography.
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