A friend of mine was preparing a live performance at a local venue. It involved projecting some YouTube content. He was afraid something would go wrong in the moment, so he asked if I could be there for tech support to ensure everything went smoothly. I was happy to help.

He said that since I would be there anyway I was welcome to do a performance of my own as part of the program. His thing was experimental dance. I had no experience there, and had absolutely no talent in terms of dance of any kind, but I still wanted to participate.

My strength was video production, and the stage would already be set up to project from a computer, but because this was a live performance I wanted to do something that would include me in the flesh as well. I finally came up with a concept that would merge the two, with me on the screen and me on stage side by side. And since I was also about nudity, I had the idea that video me would be getting dressed while live me was getting undressed, which would leave me stark naked in front of a live audience. It was perfect.

Shooting the piece was a bit of a challenge. First of all composing the shot so that I would have my feet at exactly the bottom of the frame was tricky. The camera needed to point at me straight on, not be angled down. I finally went out back on my property where I could stand on a raised bit of land. That had me framed up just as needed without an odd perspective.

Once I had the camera angle worked out and the shot composed it was a trivial matter to record the footage of me putting my clothes on. I searched my music library for something that had the same running time. I didn't have a lot to choose from because it was so short, but "Tommy Can You Hear Me" was a good enough fit.

The trick was the live performance. I can get undressed much more quickly than I can get dressed, so I had to slow my pace way down so that I was removing the very last article of clothing at the exact same time that video me was donning the last article of clothing. That meant a lot of pausing, taking my time carefully folding my jeans, and otherwise wasting time.

I rehearsed a few times at home to try to get it right, but I had the benefit of being able to look at the video screen the whole time. The idea was when I was on stage I would be looking directly out at the audience the whole time, so I would not know if I was getting ahead or lagging behind. When I was actually up on stage performing it for real I wound up looking to the side a lot more than I would have liked, but at least it did allow me to get pretty close to a synchronized finish.

I brought my video camera and set it up on a tripod so that I could get it recording and capture the performance. Other than me constantly looking to the side to check the progress of video me, I was really happy with the final product. I thought it was a great concept, and the perfect way to merge my video art form with live performance. I also closed the show, so I was able to walk around the crowd naked afterwards. I couldn't have asked for more.