We are all artist. We all create our own lives. As we become adults, we decide to what extent we will comply with society’s demands and how we will balance this with our individual interest. In this, life is an ongoing struggle between conformity and creativity. Conformity securely diminishes. Creativity precariously broadens.
As social beings, we are herd animals. We feel most comfortable and secure with the familiar. However, with only the familiar, we begin to weaken and this becomes more repulsive than our wariness of the unknown and the foreign. Society relies upon artists, just as society relies upon the rebellious period of every emerging generation, to renew and revitalize our collective being.
On Sunday night, an eclectic group of artists presented works they created over an intensive 3 week residence to explore the shape of the most formal social identity – citizenship. 9 resident artists, and numerous other guest artists, worked collaboratively and individually to create a broad range of expressions regarding the concept of citizenship and the nature of humanity.
The production, You May Not Belong, was presented by Forward Flux, a company working from both coasts of the United States with producers located in New York and Seattle. As declared in their mission statement, the company tries to “connect people to art in unexpected ways.” Typically, audiences witness artistic expressions in a finished state and there is a tendency to consider art to be set in stone like ancient statues frozen in form from antiquity. Art, however, is alive and it lives through the artists’ conceptual and creative process just as it is performed in the life of the audiences’ mind.
This production had a particularly interesting twist to the concept of citizenship where the artists composed their own worlds where the audience visited in hopes of admittance. Through this, the audience was reminded that our social arrangements are of our own creation and are sustained as we consent to compose them. Through the numerous performances, Q & A sessions with the artists, videos and installations, the audience selected their paths of citizenship, labeled as “immigrant” or “alien” as designated by the sequence of stages they selected.
Through the night, the audience was encouraged to obtain stamps of approval from the artists on their programs that qualified them for a lottery at the end of the show. But before the concluding drawing, the penultimate performance was titled, “Show Me How to Dance” which eventually erupted into a spontaneous dance party where the artists and audience all moved in their own way to the music they shared together. In this diversity of agreement, a greater dynamics and more robust arrangement was achieved.
From the gyrating hips, bobbing heads and shuffling feet, I considered a statement made in one of the videos, “Nobody Not Really.” In the video, the speaker relates his struggles where he realized that he did not fit into any category that others found desirable. Finally, he accepted that this wasn’t because there was something wrong with him, but rather because he simply is who he is. And although that is not always the most acceptable, it is the most distinguishing.
You May Not Belong was performed at TheaterLab.
Garrett Buhl Robinson is a poet and novelist living in New York City. www.garrettrobinson.us
