I wanted to challenge myself to make my own video-art since I had been watching so much of it for the research I was doing for my first project Non-Lived Nostalgia. I had watched very little video-art before working at VIVO and realized that it just might be a form of media that suits my needs as an artist and performer.

I conceived the idea behind this piece in the shower one day before school, I might have also been crying a bit too much that week. As an actor crying on stage or on film is a subject of debate as it is said it takes the viewer out of the experience. I then realized this is because crying is almost always attributed to emotion which makes people feel uncomfortable because they start to think about the well-being of the actor and instead of the character’s situation. I wanted to test whether the action of crying and its emotional attributions could be separated. Isn’t crying just another bodily function? Why does emotion make people cry?

To test this I asked 8 performers to cry on camera. The prompt was to make themselves cry anyway possible, I wanted them to induce tears. Some performers opted for emotional recognition as their stimulus, other’s used external media such as a video or song, one performer used Suzuki technique as an emotional warm-up, and one performer chose the only non-emotion related stimuli: a fan.

I had hoped the performers would have been more creative with their stimuli, like bringing in an onion and knife, taking a shot of absinthe, or getting punched in the face, however the results are only an affirmation of my hypothesis, crying is emotional.

The clip presented is an excerpt from the full video. I hope you enjoy.