Dostoevsky and the Cross Course Crit

Despite initial fears of a critical mauling, my cross course crit on Friday proved to be simultaneously enjoyable and beneficial. I decided to create a piece of performance to demonstrate the current position of my ideas rather than a ramble about them. I was concerned that this risk would not pay off and just confuse the Crit (ers) even more. I wrote a short play entitled Once More, with Feeling, which centred on a quote from Dostoevsky’s The Double. I sat with a mannequin and a tape machine having a conversation with myself with my trousers down. I will leave the description there but my intention was to play out some of the ideas that currently concern my practice.

The performance received a positive response. I think this was partly because there seems to rarely be performance in the fine art saturated MA studios, (something I hope myself and the other VLP students will change) but overall it seemed to offer something tangible for the group.

The crux of the feedback was that my work seemed to have moved beyond the doppelganger and posed more pertinent questions concerning the fundamental nature of humanism: what it is to be human. This theoretically extends my ideas into a philosophical field that I have been aware of yet cautious to visit, but I shall begin grappling with more challenging texts in preparation for my critical studies tutorial in a few weeks. At this stage I do not want to abandon my work and reading into the myth surrounding the double but look to incorporate it into the body of reading (and eventually writing) that will form my thesis.