Play The Child

It is now 1pm on Friday 5th November, presentation day.

I've spent this morning watching other students presentations on and off, and I've been gathering toys and other materials form around my shed and my kids' rooms and placing them in my testing room 'set' in my shed.

I wanted to take my brand new approach back to it's most basic form. I've come a long way during this process, learning about my own creativity, the processes, and also discovering more about what I'm really interested in, with an interest in teaching being a big surprize to me. This thought process has made me think about what's important, in a sense of the world on a large scale, our country and the whole world at the moment is in a pretty shit place, and maybe creativity can save it. So with that, I'm in this place where I am angry and want to help bring creativity into the mainstream through creative education based on play.

This line of thinking has lead me to wanting to really break myself as an artist and explore these creative experiments for myself, and really start to understand how actions can affect creative thinking, and with that I don't think my performance idea really stands up to that, yes I'm doing something new, but it's really trying to tell a story, in the same realm of thinking as I've always done. Maybe to really break myself I need to break free from narrative thinking and explore more open ended results. I've never really failed in a sense, or if something hasn't worked, I've seen it as wrong in a way. So I think I need to not have an end result here, I need to keep exploring my creativity.

So today I've come up with a new performance for this afternoon. I'm calling it 'Touching Myself in Creative Ways'.

I was going to change my title from play the animal to play the child, and this morning I was going to be playing the child in my performance, but maybe I just need the freedom to play like a child, as an adult.

So I've set out my blank walled space with toys and other materials, I will play 'like' a child at times in my performance, but what the experiment aims to do is to give myself complete creative and improvisation freedom to create and do what ever comes to mind as I respond to my own play.

A YouTube channel called 'the art assignment' created a video essay called 'the case for video art' where it talked about an artist who decided that he was an artist, and so anything he did in his artist studio, was art, this came to mind when thinking about this today.