This week I am taking a leap, stepping into a new artistic support role that draws on my expertise as an interdisciplinary performance artist to offer support and guidance to performers and performance projects alike. I am calling this new expanded practice Outside Eye.
A concept familiar to those of us who make performance-based work, an Outside Eye is someone who is invited to watch a performance in process and offer their insight. This is often a fairly casual and singular engagement. For example, an Outside Eye might be a friend who is also creative or has a perspective that you value who comes to watch your show before it premieres and offers some constructive feedback.
In my role as Outside Eye I plan to offer and develop an expanded model of this witnessing practice in order to support performers at various stages of their development and rehearsal process.
The eyes are such an active part of the performance process. How the artist witnesses themselves, how internal vision becomes manifest, how the artist is witnessed by another / by an audience, the camera as witness (thinking about performance documentation, photography and film here)…the list goes on. Building our capacities as performers to practice clairvoyance and hold a multivalent awareness (simultaneous inner, outer & greater awareness) is part of what I am interested in exploring with artist's in my role as Outside Eye.
I am particularly interested in performers and performance projects that exist in the cracks between disciplines. Theatre has dramaturgs, Visual Art has curators but who is supporting the pioneers, the boundary jumpers, the path carvers, the multi-disciplinary magicians who are drawing on the full breadth and scope of their creative life force to bring something totally new and uncategorizable to life?
My Outside Eye practice is the answer to my own issues and needs as an interdisciplinary artist. I want to tenderly and compassionately witness the innards of a performance artists’ process and then work with them to build and/or refine their approaches and practices so that the making process becomes more enjoyable, supported, nourishing and liberating.
I am interested in how an artist feels as they are making and performing. Do you feel stressed, anxious, exposed, like you have to prove yourself or do you feel free, easeful, confident, secure? Through my Outside Eye practice I hope to support artists to explore these foundational questions encouraging flexible structures of support to emerge from within the artist’s practice itself so that the artist becomes more secure, agile and resourced.
I am also really excited to practice compassionate witnessing. I have experienced some of this recently through an Authentic Movement lens and am deeply moved by the potential for expansion that opens up when we can be in process, knowing that the witnessing is being taken care of by someone else who is actively practicing compassion and non-judgement. This is the sweet-spot where our true blocks and resistances as well as impulses and instincts can emerge, a shift in awareness can take place, and new choices open up.
My artistic practice is primarily concerned with liberation and through my new role as Outside Eye I hope to assist other artists to consciously implement liberation as a practice within their approach to their own artistry.
For more detailed information about my Outside Eye work check out my website : https://www.maianunes.com/outside-eye-artist-support