we made a party

A collaborative piece, and a first attempt at some sort of happening...a lot of nice things happened. So we made a party that was about a birthday party, and a slip n slide out of clay. and it came with all the normal anxieties that having any party does.

It's interesting that it was a completely forced and fabricated event that was totally self-supporting. We set up this sort of controlled environment, and everyone ran with it and discovered all the things we set up for them/situations/opportunities we gave them. I wondered what our guests expectations were before they arrived. They had several actions to participate in--there was eating, singing, game playing, crafting, sliding, and it all went down like any party would. So back to the idea that it was a forced situation that turned into this group effort to keep the situation going.

Something I hadn't expected was the transition from making mode to participation mode. One minute we were preparing this situation and the next it was taking place. speaking of the making, it was a process that also contained a lot of great information. The efforts we went through to create this environment, like moving a big tent, or cutting up a watermelon were nice moments on their own.

I questioned the idea of why/what we were making, how this stands between an art piece or just a party we threw for the heck of it. We created the event with some specific goals in mind, we imagined the image of mud-covered people in this strange birthday party setting, we achieved many of our desired results but also had a lot of nice surprises, it was so much like a real party, even though it was kind of a fake party.

It was nice to see everyone that participated getting excited about it. Everyone was really into being blindfolded and spun around for pin the tail in the donkey/pinata, which was cool because none of us could probably pinpoint the last time we did those things/is it ever nice to be disoriented in front of a laughing crowd? It was funny though.