Some of us find comfort in Knowing Our Place, having a sense of where we stand in the contribution of our life energies, our creativity, our reflected recognition in a cultural context to higher values of our species.
Live performance played a significant role in my life, despite little active participation as performer, but more often in ballet and acting classes, coffee shop conversations with unique talents, enjoying my access to rehearsals, backstage, movie sets, and a lifetime of loving film and its related processes, and of course, reading. I admit there was a hidden desire to produce and direct film that remains unfulfilled.
My job description was to help sell tickets –but to me it was mastery of craft. Refining the work was my way to serve a Conscious Humanity. Maybe that’s too Ouspensky for you, but there it is.
Three decades of active access, beginning with my first full page photo published in Dance Magazine1971, processed and printed in a bathtub based darkroom, then somewhere near a thousand media kits , books, magazines, newspapers, posters and programs with my copyright photos. For me now,the images that linger are those that evoke a classic Hollywood Gothic Noir sensibility, from Dracula to X Files, and what is being termed an Alternative History movement. The internet makes accessible to those previously disinclined to Occult research and Deep Politics a banquet of lore, speculation, conspiracy and audio readings on a mass scale. More of the uninitiated are learning to doubt their propaganda and sanitized education in history, religion, physics, medicine, and political perspectives.
It has been argued that theatre itself is dead, an outmoded and impractical form in the Digital Age, and “aesthetic issues” are as obsolete as literature from the Romantic Era. That same argument could well defend embracing instead our devolution and disappointment , leading to apocalyptic resignation to the script written and directed by our cast of characters playing leading roles on the stage of world events. Living and breathing theatre is still the great source of ideas and talent for all media.
Quality of performance and authentic energy will always matter. My position is simply that the image of a production, its silent representation, should speak, attract and evoke that living essence, and that the performance of image is properly itself a unique artform If my work is a mere footnote, may it echo to the work of Marshall McLuhan and Susan Sontag, finding its place in the shadows of Lord Snowden, Max Waldeman, and with any luck, maybe the Pyramid of Giza
