by Christopher Agostino
Hey, I’ve got a barn, let’s put on a show! I was in the 4th or 5th grade the first time I got the neighborhood kids to put on a show in my backyard. For me, there’s really nothing else like the excitement of being on a stage creating and feeling an audience move with you. Sharing that adventure with colleagues makes it more fun. And when the performance itself is like kids playing in a backyard, that has to make it the most fun thing I’ve done yet as a bodypainting performer.
From Bodies Alive! at FABAIC 2008, UV Action Painting with Emma Cammack, Carolyn Roper and me:
A convention audience at the grand finale party is really ready to have a good time, and our audience was very responsive throughout the whole Bodies Alive! show, which made it a pleasure to be on stage.
Even more fun than the UV Action performance was the rehearsal, which was true playtime, like kids having a paint fight. I’d never done a backlight show before, though I’d seen them and knew we weren’t inventing anything here — in fact the idea for making the models appear as we painted them came from Raphaelle Fieldhouse (another world class bodypainter) who had previously described to me a performance she’d seen at the World Bodypainting Festival. So I was confident it would work. In the rehearsal we just had to learn how. Putting a full show together over three days around everyone’s schedule at a convention is a tough task (and I’m really grateful it was my wife Lorraine in charge of the whole production, and not me) so we only had one shot at trying the scene on stage under backlight the day before the show.
Emma, Carolyn and I got ready to rehearse in our all black “ninja ant” outfits, so we wouldn’t be seen under the backlight. We got the models (Jacki, Nick and Emily) onstage with us, talked through a rough choreography, turned on the backlights and started painting — and we had just so much fun using this glowing paint to make the bodies take form: we streaked them with brushes, splattered them, painted with our hands on the models (and each other), sprayed them with Dayglo hairspray — and it all looked so cool. Watching this might be fun, but doing this is really, really fun.
It was also a relief, and very satisfying, to discover we could do it. Lorraine was working so hard to pull the show together I was glad to be able to tell her that I was sure this scene would succeed, and she didn’t have to trouble herself about it. We also learned some stuff in the rehearsal, like just how much of a mess three painters can make fooling around, and that we’d have to take some time to pull the plastic drop cloth carefully off the stage before the next scene. Thus was born Carolyn’s ninja ant dance to entertain the audience as the models withdrew and we cleared the drop cloth.
A big part of the success was the makeup. Kryolan’s UV Makeups are so bright under blacklight, and so easy to apply, that we didn’t have to think much about technique at all. We could just paint. Kryolan, and my friend Joe Korts, have been very supportive of my bodyart career, and in this case Joe really came through by supplying all the UV makeup we could possibly need for the show. He sent it to me in NY before the convention, so I was able to try some application ideas, figure out which brushes we’d use and work the makeup into the right consistency so it could go on quickly and have the maximum glow — I wound up working it into a much thicker liquid than I usually would for regular painting, almost like a thin paste.
A word about what it meant for me to do this with Emma and Carolyn — and that word is “confirmation”. When I came to the agreement with Marcela Murad (the producer of the FABAIC convention) for Lorraine and me to stage a show for their banquet using the talents of the instructors and other artists at the convention, I was concerned about whether the other artists would like the idea and, given that I am not an award-winning artist or working at that level, whether the big name artists would want to commit their time to a show I was in charge of. As soon as we made the agreement, the first two artists I contacted were Emma and Carolyn. I had met them both but didn’t know them well, and I was absolutely thrilled to get enthusiastic replies from both of them. At that point I felt confident that if these two talented and top-notch professionals were willing to join in that others would follow and the show was sure to succeed — it confirmed for me that I wasn’t out of line to ask my colleagues to collaborate with me on this project. In the end many of the convention instructors joined in, contributing original designs as well as their painting time. On the day of the performance, there was so much painting and preparation to be done we had a cast and crew totaling about 70 people, and it was wonderful to see a number of additional artist and volunteers coming on to lend a hand with the painting.
Body painting affords these opportunities for collaboration because it stands in the confluence of visual and performing arts — so this is one of my personal answers to “why body painting?” An even stronger answer is that I keep body painting because I am still waiting for a chance to do another UV Action Painting with the ninja ants.
Three great artists:
Emma Cammack http://www.emmacammack.com/
Carolyn Roper http://www.getmadeup.com/
Raphaelle Fieldhouse http://www.bodycanvas.co.uk/
And a great makeup:
Kryolan UV Aquacolors http://www.kryolan.com/en/index.php
For some insight on how to use them, see my instructors notes from FABAIC 2011:
Learn more at my Body Painting Page https://thestorybehindthefaces.com/body-painting/
Related articles
- Why Body Painting? – 1A: Collaboration – Meeting Colleagues like Carolyn Roper (thestorybehindthefaces.com)
- Why Body Paint? – 1: Collaboration – Painting the Mangbetu Queen (thestorybehindthefaces.com)
- Body Painting Dance Company: Art Color Ballet (thestorybehindthefaces.com)
- Why Body Painting? – 2: Ultimate Collaboration – MODELS, Pt.2: Just how much a model can help, Amber and Kuniyoshi at FABAIC 2011 (thestorybehindthefaces.com)