Alex Murdoch, Artist

Category: Mulitdisciplinary

  • Dolphins and Otters

    Completely surreally I am in New York in a show on 42nd Street. I am doing what I know, I guess I am being in my element in many ways, it’s kind of dreamlike, like literally a dream you have as a child – and it’s fun as hell and I’m working the stupid long hours, living on sugar and carbs and it’s stressful.  I am so tired and my eyes kind of hurt in their sockets. 

    And I’ve got to say I am pumped up because I’m making hundreds of folk laugh and doing it well.

    I don’t know why I am writing this apart from it’s going to be all joined up.  I don’t know how.  How do I use what I know so far, about play, about clowning, about improv, about acting and about stories.  How does this all fit together?

    What I am doing here is the thing that I know and understand in my bones.  When I started to make independent theatre I didn’t know what the hell I was doing.  I worked from my hungry 25 year old gut instinct – and the things I made were some part made in thrall of the artists I admired and the other part made in punk reaction against the kind of theatre I hated.   How was it then? 

    Some of those admired theatre peers are still doing exactly the same thing,  So sure of their practice they will say things like ‘this is acting / that is not acting’ with such conviction.  I used to admire that and wished I was so certain about what my practice was, to wish I wasn’t so messy and so magpie-like in my tastes.  Perhaps if I was like them I’d be more…legit?

    There is a story about artists that I like that says we are either dolphins or otters, I think it was from Neil Gaiman.  

    If the dolphin does something successful and everyone applauds / throws him a fish etc – the dolphin will repeat the action.  Again and again.  More fish.  More applause.  

    The dolphin will put on the dolphin show.

    The otter will always do something new.  For the fun, for the curiosity.  The otter isn’t interested in repeating the thing to be thrown a fish.  You can’t really train an otter.  The otter wants to play.

    I watch the recording back of our session last week.  About keeping moving, about not knowing being the foundation of critical thinking.  About questions without a finite answer.

    Something also clicks for me when Sofi does her presentation.  Sofi’s work is beautifully raw and serious but also…it’s funny.  She uses humour.  She brings levity to serious ideas – from what I see so far.  

    I feel excited that this will all join up.  

  • You did it wrong.

    I love everything about this picture that I found on stupid social media.  Is the kid wrong?  I think the answer ‘I am dog’ is somehow more right than ‘I am Fifteen’.  Pedagogically the test has created so many crappy misleading clues for the kid – grammatically (’Guess who I am’), visually (a talking dog is actually a number, stoopid) before we even get started on the dated assumption that all kids learn through words alone and that some will be neurodivergent thinkers etc.  But most importantly the teacher is really firm in their opinion that this kid’s answer is a big red-cross WRONG.

    We talked in the last session about failure.  I’ve come to expect my assumptions to be up-ended in this class which is why I’m loving it.  Jonathan presented the idea – ‘do we really learn from failure?’ – and that what happens in the case of being told we’ve failed is more like fight (‘stupid test) or flight (I’m never going there again).  The educational system is designed to have us want to get things ‘right’.

    I notice to myself that all my life I’ve been trying to do things right, to not be as weird as I imagine people think I am, to achieve in other’s people’s eyes.  In the case of my career – to be picked.

    I have more to say on this.  I have a fleeting idea of making a piece of work about it called ‘Well done Alex’ based on an patronising interaction with a ‘more successful’ peer of mine.  I’ll come back to this…

    But actually there are lessons from my theatre training on the subject of working with failure.  We discussed Keith Johnstone (quoted in my first post), improvisation’s UK forefather and saying yes to the unknown.  One of the tenets of improv is to fail gracefully – mistakes are actually a gift.  (My company used to improvise whole stories in one night and on one occasion I had forgotten the name of my character’s husband – a perennial improv problem.  I dropped John in for good measure, accidentally naming Brian’s character’s husband.  Bri said ‘do you mean my John?’ – and thus we had a story of a revealed love affair.).  As Jonathan pointed out – we over-accept the offer from failure and run with it.

    In clowning training the moment of the failure or ‘flop’ is the moment where we discover real fragility and truthfulness.  More another time.

    Jonathan tried an experiment where we reframe failure by distancing ourselves in writing about it in the third person.  I won’t write it all out here but to sum up. In reframing her failure to manage her time in the ceramic studio, Alex discovers that she could be kinder to herself about her excitement to try too many new things, and actually that time is in fact a huge part of the narrative of clay as a medium.  As is slowness, stillness and most definitely unpredictable results and letting go.

    Quoting Jonathan (or somebody else) – 

    the information in failure is a public good, when it is shared society benefits

    Provocation this week – do something in your art practice that might not work.

    Take a risk.  Record it.

    Disrupt something, break it open.