Risque & Me
Sometimes when I watch Risque, I have to detach myself from her. She is powerful, so powerful that she controls and scares the living daylights out of my eyes. I had lost control over her in past instances when I wasn’t fully aware of who I was. As it is with powerful performers, they sometimes may lose sense of themselves in the performance and resume the identity of their characters in their daily lives. I tried to dance her off, by socialising and hanging out with friends to shake her off my mind when I just started performing. But she stayed with me and enacted her sadistic streaks in flashes of memories I don’t even remember doing, but waking up to see that she had written her name in red ink all over my body.
When I first started my YouTube Channel, my dance teacher actually noticed my personality shifts. He said, “You look off today.” I explained to him I filmed some episodes. He said, “Take a shower, change your clothes when you go in and out of performances. Find out what you really like in life.” I did what he said and it worked. After every performance now, no matter how small or trivia it is, I will change out of my existing clothes. On some days I have to change out of my clothes four times when I am in different social settings and doing different tasks. Another thing I do is to not watch my videos the day after. I would review it only when I upload it and learn from my videos to make corrections for the next, but I detach from it as an art work that I had created and it now belongs to the world.
Over time, through trial and error, I resumed control over my identity and my performance in a way that was inaccessible to me previously. The fluidity I had adopted now is my connecting to my core and reanacting a past memory to the performance by bringing my emotions forth. Once the performance ends, like how a song ends, I snap out of character and I am back to my jovial cheerful self. Now I had to adopted some new rules, which is not to socialise with people when I am inbetween my “acts”. I only socialise once my “act” is over. This is so that I won’t resume being in character past after the performance is over. I am proud to say that at this point, I had mastered the art of going in and out of character without staying in character past the performance. I am fully myself. I had found my happiness and joys in life.
My writings have tense shifts in them as I am using my past based memory to write the scenes, and it becomes “present tense”. Once I had regained awareness that it is in the past, I shift the tenses to past tense. In the edits, I usually have to spot my tense shifts and recorrect them to rewrite my scenes as they had happened in the past. I employ the same method of writing as it is with my acting and dance. They are regressive memories that are still in my body, and through my performance I release these pent up emotions and set them free.
One of the funniest and most humourous thing my dance teacher told me to do is to go to a different dance school to learn pole dance. He said that social dancing is not my thing, but I am more suited for sensual dancing. I chided him and said, “Come on I am attending your school to learn social dancing, and you are referring me to another studio to learn exotic dances.” He shrugged his shoulders, “Well, you will do well and you will get more channel views if you attend another school.” His comments left me in a conflicted mess. Till today, I had received numerous request to perform a pole or chair dance.
The real problem about being a solo performer is that our lives are spent mostly in solitude. The lonliness that comes with creating artworks could be soul crushing if the artist loses touch with himself. Yes, I received thousands of views per day and hundreds of comments and likes. But dancing is not about dancing, it is about connecting with people. I might eventually succumb to performing exotic dances on the pole or chair if my fans on patreon demand so, but they are still solitary acts.
Spending hours looking at the mirror everyday is a super narcassitic activity, and I am no Dorian Gray. What I would prefer to do for recreation is to dance with others and be part of a community. Hence I had started dancing in public events for fun. It really is my kind of thing to be a performer. As myself or Risque or Cheryl, they are expressions of who I am.
Risque is an unexpected breakout character from my initial pilot run of 30 episodes by filming myself everyday, once a day for one month. From that pilot run, I resumed the channel and made the storyline complete in my latest release of The Scarlet Hotel series (estimated 50 episodes). My next goal is to film a 20 minute short film about The Scarlet Queen and send it for independent film competitions to gain momentum towards making it into a feature length film.
I know that my artistry will not bring much monetary returns, but it brings me great fulfillment to communicate my artistic statement by filling the world with love & beauty. I am willing to dedicate my life to this. In this pursuit, my body is numb and aching, I can’t walk straight but I can dance. I am elevating my performance to the next level by attending dance classes and going to acting school to film the short film. I am watching Penny Dreadful during my downtime and studying it’s dialogue and set up scene by scene.
Eva Green remains my greatest inspiration of being a top tier actress. When she is on screen, she stirs such emotion within my body, she is holding so much secrets in her eyes and her sadistic streak. I am very much like her. I am taboo and transgressive. My childhood was filled with transgressions that would be labelled sick to write on this blog. But I had accepted that I am born this way and I will not hide or change it and that’s why, Risque remains my greatest outlet of expression of my unfulfilled wants and needs that may never be met.
The post Risque & Me appeared first on AVERRAL.
