the timboucher experience

Something I’ve realized about performance and creative stuff is that it helps a whole hell of a lot to develop for yourself a character, a persona or an identity to adopt. The character becomes both a kind of receptacle and a safe zone for testing out types of personal expression which you’re unaccustomed to, which you’re trying out, or what have you.

In keeping with that base concept, it helps even more to really flesh out your characters. I don’t know if this is what method acting is all about, but maybe. For me, I’ve been developing costuming, speech patterns, characteristic sayings, mannerisms, vocal styles, movement aesthetics and so forth. The costuming I think is one of the things which has helped me the most. Being by nature a very mental person, putting together costuming helps me to get out of my head and apply ideas to physical objects, and to my body itself and how I use it.

So far, I’ve got two base characters which I’ve been working on. One is the whole “Big Elk” thing, which I used as sort of a bridge to transform myself into the whole singer-songwriter wandering minstrel rambler type thing. And I’ve been finding that branching out into a second character, which I’ve been calling “Dog Paw,” as an homage to my time spent working with and learning from dogs these past four months. This is the character I’m working with more as the juggler/street performer thing, and today I was F-ing around with developing a sort of new voice by way of this character. I spent a long time stretching my vocal range and pushing myself through personal boundaries of expression, and sides of myself I let other people see, and just kind of blowing it all up with some really hard-hitting physical performances. Vocal delivery which is a lot less cerebral and restrained. Stuff that’s more guttural and “extra rippin”. The kind of way of singing where you literally HAVE to contort your whole body and face in order to bust out the types of notes - they’re not even notes, they’re sounds, they are complexes of richly chaotic tones…

Anyway, I’m gonna convert and post some of the Dog Paw stuff later, which is basically just alternate voice/character renditions of Big Elk compositions I’ve been working with lately. I’m excited just at my ability to break down walls for myself, though I’m too close to it at the moment to be able to tell which aspects of it are “good” or “bad”. That’s something I’ve noticed a lot: that there is a stage where you have to allow yourself to develop the new expression styles without applying any judgement to it, because judgement at that stage cuts of growth, expression and experimentation. You can always go back later on and separate the wheat from the chaff, but that mostly gets done automatically on its own by virtue of repetition, and becoming familiar and comfortable with the new territories you pioneer into.

• My Beloved Reindeer Has Great Antlers
• The original evil 4-armed Grimace
• Authenticity, Sincerity, Performance, Image
• Nature of Performance
• The O.C.