I was thinking of the comments from an actor who came to the show last night. He also does some stage clown work. He’s youngish white male from a traditional background. He was blown away by the female energy he felt coming from the stage. The thing that is surprising to me is that it is a surprise to anyone. It’s a small stage, a small audience a dozen performers and a lot of different images. Except for the point at which I was completely filled with anxiety over the higher stakes of promoting this production and trying to take the troupe to the next level, it is not a particularly ambitious production. This is not the first time we have filled the stage with women in red noses riffing off cultural images. Yet, the actor was surprised that he fell “a little bit in love” with all of the clowns even though they were all very different. None of them presented herself as a proper ingenue or leading lady. Hmmm.
This morning I googled a bit looking for artist moms and I found some websites and some blogs by and about women who are combining visual art with parenting. One essay about a documentary film about artist moms described how their art was just as good as the work of male artists in Soho galleries or at the MoMa where less than 5% of the permanent collection is art made by women. Apparently these women-artist-moms could combine making art and having children, but the aggressive self-promotion of the male art world was the aspect of a prominent art career that these women may have let slide (or they promoted themselves and nobody cared so they stopped wasting their limited energy, or they made compromises by being choosing to raise a family far away from the centers of art and criticism. Hmmm.
During this Clown Axioms rehearsal process, it was the marketing aspects of the production that threatened to put me over the edge. Hmmm.
And so I make peace with being unknown because self-promotion is not always worth the stress.
Is that why so many of the successful artists are men while the majority of practitioners are women?
Hmmmm…