Nikolina Page

Without Prejudice To The Form

Labels are the progenitors of dualism

• Labels help us linear language speakers identify that something particular exists from the soup of all that is.
• However, unlike a soup in which you can measure where a chunk of celery begins and ends, conceptual labels are more like a puree of flavors.
• To say with any certainty that this spoonful of a well-mixed soup is devoid of any influence of garlic or spice but this other part absolutely has it is absurd.

And so I feel about the labels of what is and isn’t performance art.

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They are absurd

For example, I have a great respect for horror films.

• They allow audiences to scream, when there are many truly scary things they cannot scream about in real life.
• Sad scenes allow audiences to cry and shed tears when they might not be able cry in their real lives.
• Romance and comedy provide feelings of love and laughter they may not get in real life through the neurons mirroring the romance and comedic experiences on the screen.

Neuroscience shows us that the brain does not know the difference between real and imaginary experience. This release affects the viewers’s nervous system in a very real way, regardless of the form.

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Can art produced by professionals labeled as “actors” also be performance art?

I bring up this example because even some of my performance artists idols would say that acting is not performance art because the performer is safe in manufactured circumstances and not actually feeling the pain of or bleeding out from a real knife. But I think to make it about the performer misses the point, as well as dismisses the neuroscience.

If the performer is genuinely emotionally vulnerable and freely transmitting their experience, through whatever means most activates them individually, the audience will feel that truth of that human experience; their neurons will recognize and match it within their own organism and that person will have a private, personal, internal experience initiated by the consciously awakened “performance” of the artist.

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Emotional Exhibitionism

In fact, I think the issue is really in the word “performance” of the label “performance artist.” Performance implies something put on from outside of themselves to imply an experience. All emotionally compelling artists, where their human experience is the art that is shared and affects the audience most directly, is activated from within, with the walls and limits imposed by daily society dropped, so their pure emotion can be seen and felt by all.

Rather, I’d feel much more comfortable calling myself an “emotional exhibitionist” in these moments of being witnessed in a constructed setup because I’m inviting the audience to voyeur my naked emotional truth. The form of the this exhibitionism whether it’s film, stage, art exhibit, etc… are just parameters to inform the audience and my psyche of my designed boundaries in which we are going to play, so that all parties let go and feel safe to have the rawest emotional experience they are ready for.

In film, this is when action is called and the actors can trust to expose a truly vulnerable state without fear of exploitation by their director, crew, or other actors. When cut is called, the invented world is dropped and everyone returns to their personal human agency – ideally. On stage, it is the physical separation between stage and audience that forms this protective boundary. In performance art, it is open to the creativity of the artist to design the rules of the world in which they want to play with their surrounding onlookers, which is as individual to each artist and whatever their seeking to explore – like a human experiment.

Collaborative Vessel

While I label everything I do as performance art, since in no matter the form I am attempting to drop the cloak of personality and channel my purest emotional unfiltered energies, other performance artists may see it differently and that’s fine. Thus the issue of a conceptual label, which I seem to enjoy exploring in my designed works on themes of other gender and sexuality concepts. So I guess I would sort my art between pieces that I’ve personally designed the experience to explore and those in which I am a collaborative vessel to offer the gifts of my energies to enhance another’s vision.

In both scenarios, I value the work equally. In my personal pieces, I get to test my theories of human connection and consciousness is constructed artistic experiments. In other people’s projects, I get to push myself into circumstances that I may not have concocted for myself and face unexpected challenges, either within the demands of the work or the dynamics of the collaboration, both of which I get to channel into the piece as uncharted emotional translation.

Performance Art As Tantric Ritual

In all these pieces, for myself and others, I see the performance more as a tantric ritual. There is an initiated beginning and end. These create the boundaries for an emotionally liberated middle, which in being fully present and vulnerable to whatever level is available to emerge. I qualify the level because, while an actor may not be able to get to their desired degree of emotional openness on day or on a past project and speak of it critically, as a performance artist I embrace the disappointed of facing an emotional block as the art. Like an experiment, the result may not, and often does not, match the intention, but it was a valid, real, and true human experience all the same. As an object of human art, just to enter that mindset and flow with whatever will happen to happen to the truth of one’s state at that time until the ritual is over is authentic art.

In many ways, my experiences in tantra and South American shamanism parallel my process as an artist and I will share more on this and how even my childhood artist performances were in congruence with these modes more in the future. For now, I will just confirm that I see my art a spiritual process exploring the human consciousness, both on my own and in connective interchange with others, that hopefully provides a transformative experiences where both myself as the artist and the observers-participants feel different from before and after they experienced the artistic ritual (performance, show, film, exhibit, etc…).

The Human Art Object

Before I end this not so brief but also not exhaustive introduction to my ever-evolving artistic philosophy, I want to share my thoughts on objectification as a human artist, where my presence, my body and the emotions it transmits, is the subject and source of the art that is shared or on display.

When I begin my artistic ritual in whatever form, I self-transform into an object of art. This is how I see myself and desired to be seen. When I am an art object, I don’t want anyone to interact with me as the personality they think they know as Nikolina; who they just had a personal conversation with or checked out at the grocery store. I wanted all previous identity erased, so I can channel the highest intensity of pure emotion that I can in the present moment within the parameters of the form’s design. I am no longer the identity of “Nikolina”. I am a living, breathing, experiencing human art object. This protects me and sets me free.

Once the ritual is over, I reclaim my human agency. I have boundaries. I have idiosyncrasies. My personality has shades that not everyone likes because I am in fact not a blank canvas. However, becoming an art object is a cleanse for myself to experience human connection in ways I haven’t felt always capable of in regular life.

By constructing or participating in unusual designed circumstances under the pretense of art, the people I am connecting with suspend their expectations and meet me for the adventure of unpredictable human interaction. From this design, I feel free to give all of me and be received in the most natural form to me. Most of my life, I felt very lonely.

The Unintended Societal Object

Only in my mid-thirties, I found out I am on the autism spectrum. Growing up in the 90s there wasn’t much understanding, awareness, or discussion of autism, but now I understand why I struggled so hard to express myself in ways that could be understood or interpret the intentions of others without being ridiculed or rejected for being “too much.” I siloed myself in the arts and academics where my big imaginative energy had an outlet on the stage and I could logically match the outputs of what I needed for exams and technology with clear inputs of what I needed to research to execute my goals. I was also drawn to other languages very early on and loved deconstructing and reconstructing their grammars, perhaps in an attempt to find another land where I could interpret communication norms more clearly.

As I discovered the value I provided on the stage as a vessel channeling emotion that could fill a hall as teen, I preferred the state of being identity-less. I felt so uncomfortable in daily life except when I could become what they wanted me to become. I didn’t feel like who I was was acceptable. This made me susceptible to physically abusive relationships and rape, attracting those who took advantage of dominating my lack of boundaries and providing me with emotional obsession in return. Coping with this damage in my early 20s, I looked to other “roles” society wanted me to play like a successful businesswoman, happy housewife, or other form of female trophy. I just wanted to be accepted and loved because I still didn’t believe I was worthy of love as I was.

This pain also initiated my path to explore other spiritual explorations of inherent worthiness in the human experience and when it came time to have children in my second marriage I saw that I could not pass on my repressed dreams to freely express myself as an artist to them before experimenting with the actual life of my soul’s calling myself. So I divorced and started over in Ecuador in 2019 and have been on my spiritual artistic mission of performative expression every since.

Thus it is with pride that I chose to transform into a human art object and back to a more private complex experience instead of submitting to constant unconscious societal objectification. Within art, I adore being projected upon, even as a muse for other’s creations, but now, when the artistic moment is complete, I return to my equally valuable human agency even if it occasionally upsets those who I previously allowed complete creative direction and inspiration over my form.

What You Will Find On This Site

On these pages, I share the artistic projects I have artifacts of and what they have meant to me, including what I intended to explore in them as well as what they unexpectedly taught me to appreciate in the breadth of human experience. There are also traditional resumes for film and television, which is still a medium in which I love to express as an artist yet unfortunately is a world in which I have little agency as a whole human. Thus, my main present focus is concentrated in performance art pieces I can exhibit, tour, and distribute. However, I do not exclude the possibilities for any opportunity to collaborate in any field, including technology where I always found mutual acceptance and comfort among often socially-ostracized engineers.

I also have programs and materials I’ve taught on in yoga and the application of linguistics through dialects. While these might seem out of place in a performance art website, they are still artifacts of my search for meaning and understanding in my existential struggle to make sense of the world around me. Many things I have learned or experienced have helped others and before I gave myself permission to be a performance artist fully, this is the teachable art that I created that I hope will still provide enrichment to the right audiences.

Finally, my current frontier in trying to understand other humans is through comedy and what might be termed “European Clowning” of the Marcel Marceau-style schools in Paris. A while back, I briefly explored a career in international relations, regarding post-soviet states specifically, until I lost my security clearance while still in college at Brown University, graduating in the aftermath of the 2008/9 global recession. However, I always found comedy to be a more effective tool than politics to open up hearts and minds, mixed the pleasure of an unexpected dopamine release.

So on this website are also comedic works-in-progress as I continue to bash my head against the wall between what I desire to communicate and how masses will actually receive it. It is a struggle and I enjoy the exhibitionism in showing how the sausage is made, at least for me. The human connection and vulnerability of this style of clowning is already present in all of my performance works as I first found resonance with it in South American as the heyoke shamanic clowning part of my spiritual training.