REFLECTIONS FROM DAVID VIVIAN

Niagara Shebang

Transcript of Video Interview excerpt

February 2015

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I remember our first performance and (feeling) exhilaration and huge trepidation too, being pushed out of my comfort zone into performative gestures and collaborations with the company on the stage and to have an audience there.

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And I think it regretfully sort of upped the stakes in our sense of participation but what has been brilliant about this time coming together again is the reminder that we really have to take ownership of managing our creative health and a space for each of us to pursue our own disciplines so that Andrea’s work reminds us of, yes, those are the ‘structures’, for example, that are presented to us and that we have to make our choices within them.

Is this ‘re-charging’?  Yes, we were just talking about some of our own anxieties about joining the project again, and can we really make the time out of our schedules to be available and authentically transparent to the learning here but yes, no, I know, if fact I’m thinking that coming away from this, this needs to be part of the weekly regiment, probably not every day but just an hour to more successfully negotiate everything that we do in our lives, including our creative practice.

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(The approaching moving date) I’m going to start teaching downtown, I’m bringing my students ‘off the hill’.  I’m hugely aware in an increasing way about the potential risk of this shift and the ‘ripple’ effect, the need for us to be sending these rings out and to allow them to loosely lock into each other so that we are coming down to a space where we are comfortable to be known and known about and that we will have other practitioners and thinkers, creators, writers, music makers with us here downtown to stimulate us, to feed us and also to listen to us, to hear our ideas and thinking ahead (to) April 2016 that’s going to be that little crunchy moment when this project comes together on the stage on the New PAC but it’s going to be the opportunity to take the Shebang company together to inhabit that stage, to explore it, possibly with some other partners, we were discussing with Chorus Niagara, it would be brilliant to have them on stage with us and to say, “yes, we’ve arrived” this is our landing spot and this is also a place where we are going to take off for another 20 or 30 years in our new facility.  That’s the ripple effect!  It’s maybe waves, a bit of a tidal wave some of the time so it’s going to be about how to ride the boards.