endurance piece.

MATERIALS:

you.

a skill that you haven't learned.

materials required to learn that skill.

instruct your audience to watch you learning a new skill. do not stop until the skill is completed to your satisfaction or you physically cannot continue.

my performance:

i gave the audience a choice between 5 simple longboard tricks that i either never learned or had forgotten.

the audience chose the trick whose name they found most appealing as they had no context as to what each trick name entailed.

i informed the audience that this was my world that i'm letting them into and that this is something that i do regularly. this was to create a certain mood of casual voyeurism or romanticism giving some context into what activities make me happy. skateboarding and longboarding can be relatively foreign to the average viewer. and showing my proscess was meant to make me seem more human doing seemingly superhuman things.

i regularly encourage those around me to learn how to board and regularly get responses such as "i would die" "i'd bust my ass" "i'm too clumsy" but generally: "i could never do that" letting an audience into my world serves to make it seem more easy than people think. people sometimes say "you make it look so easy" and that is true because it absolutely is easy i think it could be easy for anyone. i think this is true for a lot of skills all they need is to find their motivation behind it.


that motivation was a key piece to my work because there are a couple  things that encourage me to risk life and limb for this sport.
1: connection
      -longbaroding and skateboarding is a community that encourages and spends time with each other
2: endorphins?
      -learning new skills as a longboarder often requires a lot exertion. all of the effort put into a new trick is released in a split second and the feeling associated with it is indescribable.
      - also the exercise associated with skateboarding is mildly rewarding to me.

here is a poem that i wrote back in high school separate from class or anything about why i board.

There is no better feeling in this world that landing a trick for the first time. Even if it is the sloppiest shittiest landing.. its still a landing, and it still makes me jump for joy. That is why I brave the scraped knees, broken bones, and (god forbid) the occasional concussion. One can only try to describe this feeling to other people, but the fact that only a select few know how i feel makes it all the more special.

this peice was trying to let people into that feeling along with me. everyone had the same 'WOAHHHH' reaction to when i sort of half landed my trick and i did too. if i was out there longer or had some breaks to catch my breath maybe i would've landed it for real 

(also a video featuring analogous sounds will be featured soon)