Movie: With You Lilly Marleen (2008), Pt. 1
Produced and directed by Baccara Smart
Vocals by Baccara Smart.
Courtesy of Ominim Records.
Movie: With You Lilly Marleen (2008), Pt. 2
Produced and directed by Baccara Smart
Vocals by Baccara Smart.
Courtesy of Ominim Records.
Movie: Be A Clown Make 'Em Laugh (2005)
Produced and directed by Baccara Smart
This is a personal interpretation of my reaction to illness in the life of my family. It is about human behaviour and emotion and how illness affects us all and how we effect each other, primarily led by instinct and emotions. My short film offers an insight into the experience of dealing with the inevitable decline in the health of parents. The experience is timeless and relatively taboo and forces one to re-evaluate relationships and dependencies. My father is part of my art in many ways and I am proud to perform alongside him. I have relived memories with my father when I still could and in his confusion, have found new routes to know him better.
Illness, confusion and grief have leading roles to play in the final performance of my father, Billy Smart, a famous circus impresario starring beside me and my mother who has early onset Alzheimer’s disease. My industry focuses on re-creating the circus, my family and living with illness. I try to show how cancer and confusion has made life for us a surreality with more intensely felt emotions, alongside irrationality, and a sense of detachment from reality, that is part of life living with grief in reaction, to changes in a family.
The ups and downs of this situation forces one to focus on dealing with the denials, frustrations, mood swings and grief. These are superimposed on the personalities and interpersonal tensions in a family. These naturally emerge but are as often irrational as they are rational. I have experienced a roller-coaster of emotions from love to hate, from happiness to sadness and been in the middle of increasing confusion, madness and alienating hospitals, that has changed the familiarity of home, into a new alien environment.
Performance runs in all my family’s blood. It is how we are judged. My film and painting has put the circus of life beside illness and my family. Filming my father, made it easier for me to deal with. The camera act’s as a barrier, both physically and psychologically, this allows you to abstract what you want from the image, it becomes a altered reality. It is part of a process that has been inspirational and cathartic and allows me to be positive of a situation, and also involve my family in my art. My mother is slipping slowly down a similar path with increasing confusion and irrationality and my art is inspired by this in a Neo Dada way, as much as in an emotional way.
This is Process art, Surreal art, and Performance art in the medium of light, colour and sound. I believe we are all performers of art in life. The meaning is the meaning. I hope it brings a sense of happiness and a sense of sadness, as dance allows me to escape into a dream world of happiness and hope, in the midst of the unrelenting weight, that life can sometimes put upon you. Illness in a family can restrain and imprison you and yet it can ultimately free you and empower you.
I am interested and inspired by the performance artists ‘Los Elegantes’, the film artists, Douglas Gordon & Bill Viola.