The process I went through in planning my third Soundscapes project was very circuitous. My second project had to do with project-making and presentation-giving anxiety. I started with a voice recording expressing my anxiety, then built it into a sound project by altering the recording. But the distortion I added to the piece, while it created a tense feeling that evoked anxiety in my classmates, also seemed like a sort of veil between the feelings I expressed on the recording and my audience—a defence mechanism, a distancing ploy. I started off thinking about ways of exploring this subject matter in a more immediate way.
At the same time, I was reading a book called Andy Kaufman Revealed! by Bob Zmuda, Kaufman’s close friend and writing partner. As I read Zmuda’s description of Kaufman’s performances, many of which involved intentionally bombing onstage, often using plants in the audience to up the ante of hostility, I immediately made a connection to my class anxiety. This was the first stage of the project. I worked on a few scenarios in which I would present a ridiculous project, something overly personal and irritatingly pretentious, then use plants (to be recruited from my classmates) to interrupt my presentation and act out the very rejection I feared from my audience. The thing that troubled me most was thinking of an ending. I could either escalate things to the point where I would feign some kind of breakdown, or I could alleviate the pressure somehow. For the latter possibility, I thought of Kaufman again, and the “Foreign Man” routine in which he would begin by doing terrible impressions but then slay the audience at the end with a spot-on Elvis imitation. I contemplated a number of versions of the end-of-the-piece performance, even considering my own Elvis act. But I had grave doubts about being able to pull off anything of the sort, which gave me even more fodder for the anxiety angle.
I started to doubt scripting criticism for audience plants. Why make it seem as though it came from them when the source was my own insecurity? It seemed like a bizarre way to enact my worst fears, and I started to wonder if what I really wanted was to somehow prove myself right about everybody hating me. It seemed cruel to involve my classmates in such an endeavor. Maybe I could do that to random people in a public place, but not my classmates.
I was ready for another shift. I thought about a performer called Dynasty Handbag that I saw at the Gay Bi Gay Gay music festival, who among other things has a recorded “voice-over” of her own stage fright that played while, live, she made awkward chitchat from the stage. I started recording a background track of my own fearful presentation thoughts to play over the P.A. while I made a fake presentation and performed myself trying to cover up my fear. Eventually this became a piece in which I would pretend to have invented a mind-reading mechanism but as I tried to present it, it would sabotage me by showing how nervous I was.
In the last days before my presentation was scheduled, my idea changed again. The “fake presentation” seemed pointless. I tried to improve my recording of my insecure “inner thoughts” by editing, but whatever I did, it sounded too canned. I kept working, but it just seemed wrong. Then the day before presentation day arrived and something dawned on me: what if I stripped away all of the antagonistic stuff, the canned “inner voice,” and the fake project? What would be left? Just an honest expression of how much presenting this project freaked me out. Actually saying the thoughts out loud instead of trying to anticipate them and then perform in synchronicity with them and somehow approximate reality. It felt right. But it sounded insane. At any other time I would have abandoned the thought, but the Actlab seemed like a good place to try something that felt insane.
So I threw out my recordings and my ill-conceived props and I came to class with a wireless microphone hooked up via a digital interface to a laptop computer that would record my performance. I was ready to really open up. When I explained what I was doing, I told people that they were welcome to come up and talk about their own project insecurities with me. But I was on the spot. I thought I’d have to fill up a lot of time delving into my own issues--but nothing could be further from what happened. As soon as I mentioned the possibility, people started walking up. It helped that I had turned out all of the lights in the room and no one could see our faces. I didn’t say much before it was time to turn the microphone over to a classmate, then another, then my T.A., then the girlfriend of another Actlab instructor who described his anxiety about project day in her own words, then more classmates, and so on. The buzzer that showed that my time was over went off before we ran out of people who wanted to talk. Instead of being about me, the project ended up being about something that all of us (or at least almost all of us) were feeling. I felt really good about that. But I’m still not sure if my project was really a project. Still, as someone pointed out on the recording, the Actlab is a good place for projects that might not be projects.