I must admit when I first heard about the Shua Group’s Public Moves project on Federal Hill I was one of the biggest skeptics. Being from Baltimore, I knew where Federal Hill was and what many of the area locals used the space for but I had difficulty drawing a picture of what it would look like in the concept that was to be the Public Moves Project. I’m not a performance art connoisseur yet the opportunity to take part in such a project made me anxious to see what it was all about. I learned much about the art form through Professor Steve Bradley, an art professor at UMBC, and much more at the rehearsals given throughout the month prior to the final performance. Being a student of film, the study of space and how people move throughout it is an important step in understanding relationships not only among the people and the place, but also relationships amongst the people.
The movements and interactions with colleagues, and at other times with complete strangers who’ve found the project interesting, really pushed the interactive level that the project aimed to do. Again, feeling a little uneasy about the process of the assignment, I became involved not just from a participatory perspective or class requirement, but soon began to feel what the movement was about. The idea of what public and performance art was stressed here; the random interactions between people being a public art from and the choreography of the group movements being more on the performance facet. Performance art deals more immediately with the audience, involving them since what they are observing exists then and now. Public art has much to do with how the general public can create art out of basic movements or sounds following some type of order.
All in all, the experience was surely an opportunity to learn much from. I’ve learned to be more open to Public and Performance art forms as opposed to perceiving them as too abstracted to ever be considered any form of art. Its very surprising to discover what can emerge from simple interactions between two complete strangers. I guess my overall scope of the art world has been zoomed out a bit to be able to view more universal art forms that are very popular in today’s conventional mediums as opposed to the classical fine arts. The Federal Hill Public Moves Project may have been a glimpse of something emerging within the art world, the popularity and acceptance of Performance art into an otherwise classist art world.
Let me know how your experience was,
Steve
