There are two aspects of ‘The Artist’s Way” that I have stuck to religiously since recommitting to my creative practice. The first is the morning pages, and the second is the ‘artist date’. I make sure to do daily or weekly mini-dates to keep myself engaged and inspired - these can be as simple as flicking through an art magazine in the shop - but I also make sure to schedule monthly/quarterly epic dates. These are the artist dates where you basically love-bomb yourself with creativity, and their effects last for weeks and months afterwards.
This would be the second time I got to see PJ Harvey live. I have been listening to her since I was around eleven years old. She was the reason I bought my first electric Fender Telecaster when I was fourteen. She was the reason I started exploring the screaming, caterwauling aspect of my own voice. Excited does not capture the feeling.
What I love about PJ Harvey (other than ‘everything!’) is that her evolution as an artist is so clear, so bold and so unique. She blurs the line of theatre, music and dance. She has transformed so much over her career, but not in a dramatic way. In a slow, natural, evolutionary way. As I watched her on stage, invoking ancestral wisps; communing with trees and unseen circles of elders; drawing invisible threads, pulling and weaving on the stage part-queen, part-Crone - this theatrical ritual ceremony made total sense to me. It was a reckoning. Her still presence commanded all attentions, transfixing and unsettling in equal measure. She knew something we didn’t know. She could see inside and through me. That was the feeling she created for me.
The medieval feel of the concert was very different from your usual outdoor festival and I was impressed that they managed to create the intimacy of a faerie banquet in the woods at the Gunnersbury Park. The drummer Jean-Marc Butty, was also a revelation, and has brought me down a rabbit hole of Haitian drumming that I am sure I will circle back to very soon.
There is something for me to learn about performance from her grounded presence. Her almost “insistent unafraid”. There was a quiet fury to her performance, but also a playfulness, and a mystery. It was remarkable. As someone who is trying to challenge my performance anxiety head-on, it has given me a lot to think about. The job of performance is to hold the attention and space. She told us she was mysterious and commanding by using her body language, her all-knowing stare. We believed her. I looked around and the entire park were staring back at her.
Big Thief also took to the stage earlier that day, and I was incredibly excited to see them live. I had Buck Meek to thank for my forthcoming song, as I wrote it on his incredible workshop. Adrienne Lenker appeared to me to be on the edge of tears at the start of the gig. I felt her holding back a well ready to spill, I felt irritation and anger emanating, but I didn’t hear it when she spoke to the audience, telling us she loves us all. I know that there have been changes in their band, and I imagine the pressures of travelling and touring take their toll. The performance was electric. It did make me consider the other side of the coin of creativity: the struggle and the toil that seem to be an inevitable part of ‘making it’.
My takeaways from this day out - play with movement in performance. See what it’s like to sing standing still, to sing moving around. Play with this, and take the next step - perform. It’s now or never.