Flying the Coop

Behind every beautiful thing there s been some kind of pain, Bob Dylan

The Devised Yukon Project completed our first week of exploration in the Studio Space at the Yukon Arts Centre. We have been developing a vocabulary through various forms of improvisation and slowly tilling the earth to find our story that we need to tell. In doing so, we have been presenting ideas for experiments and working them without judgment, pushing each other for clarity and chaos.

With the first week compete and as we start to find our collective rhythm I would like to comment on my hope(s) for the next seven weeks of discovery.

Our point of concentration for the project is Outside, which is obviously a very broad theme, there are so many micro themes that can be extracted from the term itself. My hope is that this theme will push the collective to not only examine what it means to be outside, be it yourself, the outdoors, etc, but also to explore the opposite element of inside.

Through our improvisations and experiments I have noticed a collective discovery, the hint of an apex of interpretation of the under current theme of Outside, and that is of breaking free. Some of the physical images that have begun to recur with only four days of studio time under our belt are of escape and the force to which we escape from. Sometimes we are bound to floor and need to fight against the unseen force grasping our movements; sometimes en mass the collective will signal out one and the rest will move as a monstrous menace threatening any variable of safety, be it physical, or mental or emotional. To truly examine this idea of breaking free or escape we must now delve into the ugliness that we must break away from, to find freedom we must know why or what was/is keeping us bound; how vicious is it? Where does it come from? What does this prison look like and who or what is controlling the entrapment that we must free ourselves from? And ultimately what is the call to adventure that inspires the great escape?

I hope that as our explorations continue that we can really mine what in our story is the force of "inside" and how much we can cage our hearts before we find the beauty of losing the pain.

Shaun McComb