Fuck Yeah, Awkwardness!

So I’m trying to start a movement. I think I’ll call it the awkwardness appreciation movement. In short, I believe that the emotional/affective/psychic experience that we often call awkwardness is beneficial, necessary for personal growth as well as social change, and should be courted rather than avoided.

In critical theory, much attention has been paid to the experience of shame. Shame, theorists say, is a moment of intense awareness of how you are different from other people, often accompanied by the fear that your difference is unacceptable. In this way, shame simultaneously creates the sense of differentiated individuality and the desire to re-aggregate with the whole. In shame’s hot intensity, you see yourself from a new angle. Your perspective on yourself expands to include the shared context of others.

The problem is that shame has a stopping force. It can freeze you like a wild animal sensing the rifle sights. It’s hard to let your perspective on your own significance shift when you’re afraid you’re going to be annihilated. In the face of shame, childhood defense mechanisms (however useless) rush in to protect you: fight, flight, freeze, play dead.

Awkwardness, however, is shame lite. If shame is the terrifying fall into the cavernous gap between self and other, awkwardness is the giggly, heart-racing fear you feel when peering over the edge. There is space to move and breathe inside awkwardness, but it is still a meditation on the sometimes-precarious experience of being a self surrounded by other selves that are constantly affecting you and being affected by you.

In awkward experiences, we sense the precariousness of our ego boundaries as well as the sheer randomness of the social conventions that regulate our interactions with each other. In that heightened sphere of awareness, you wonder how else you could be, other than the way you are right now, and how else we could be together within the grip of this strangely funny, embarrassing, uncomfortable moment.

Awkwardness is vulnerability with its fly unzipped.

Awkwardness is a prologue to transformation and invitation to grace.

Only A God

In On the Marionette Theatre, by German Romantic author and philosopher Heinrich von Kleist, the first dancer of the Opera insists to the narrator that the grace of the marionette is superior to the grace of human beings...

"My reply was that, no matter how cleverly he might present his paradoxes, he would never make me believe a mechanical puppet can be more graceful than a living human body. He countered this by saying that, where grace is concerned, it is impossible for man to come anywhere near a puppet. Only a god can equal inanimate matter in this respect. This is the point where the two ends of the circular world meet." (Kleist, On the Marionnette Theatre)

In this video, an inanimate object (the fans) animate another inanimate object (the fabric). The result is so full of vital grace that it calls my own liveness into question. In the interaction of these two non-sentient phenomena I see and feel emotional depth, symbolic meaning, a dramatic arc, and a clear aesthetic vision. I'm not sure if this is an argument for a god-less universe or one where god-full-ness is everywhere. Perhaps that's the place "where the two ends of the circular world meet."

P.S. Everything in this post is borrowed from the brilliance of my friends: performer Grace Booth, who found the video, video artist Joe Moore, who showed it to me, and playwright Elizabeth Hersh, who connected the beauty of this dancing scarf to Herr Kleist and his automatons. And Daniel Wurtzel (not yet a friend) is the installation artist who made it in the first place.

Akin to Death: Mary Stuart

I recently saw a fantastic production of Friedrich Schiller's Mary Stuart at Shotgun Players in Berkeley. Adapted and directed by Mark Jackson, the language was clear and direct without losing the dense, poetic force of the 19th century original. It was blessed with a slick contemporary design and actors to die for, and so expertly paced that the two hours traffic never lost its urgency.

This play chronicles the last few days in the life of Mary Queen of Scots before she's put to death by her cousin, Queen Elizabeth. The confrontation between two immensely powerful queens in a deeply patriarchal world is fascinating, and the one scene in which they share the stage is the keystone of any production of this play. Lucky to even get an audience with Elizabeth in the first place, the imprisoned Mary's passionate nature gets the better of her. Instead of begging for mercy, she calls her cousin the Queen a bastard and reiterates her claim for the English throne saying, in Jackson's powerful translation: "I am your king!"

Ooops. Not the way to avoid a beheading.

From that moment on, while our sympathies lie with Mary and we hope for her rescue, we know she's doomed. Death, like the presence of the actress who never leaves stage, looms.

Playwright Jean Genet, in his letters to his director Robert Blin, says, "If we maintain that life and the stage are opposites, it is because we strongly suspect that the stage is a site closely akin to death, a place where all liberties are possible."

Schiller's play is about bondage and freedom. The chains that bind us sometimes take the form of politics, sometimes of patriarchal systems, sometimes of the will of the public, and sometimes they're just the outcome of the tangled mess we've made of our life. Death is sometimes a gateway to freedom, to a place where "all liberties are possible."

In Schiller's version, Mary is given her last rites in secret from her Lord Chamberlain, who has been ordained as a priest, before she mounts the scaffold. In Jackson's production however, all of Mary's attendants have been cut, leaving her desperately alone in Elizabeth's world. The last rites scene is done solo: this passionate, beautiful force that is about to be extinguished plays her own father confessor.

The hope for absolution - the dream of utter grace - lies somewhere at the border of death. At this boundary between the freedom offered by the void and the meaning that only exists in the land of life's living interpreters, forgiveness is possible.

I'm not a Catholic, so no personal mystic associations arise for me as I watch the actress playing Mary take the imaginary host into her mouth. But I feel the dream of transubstantiation as I'm held spellbound by her performance. In the mouth of the stage, the host of the actress's body becomes Mary Stuart, becomes Christ, resonates with every person facing the imminent truth of their own death, overcome with longing to return to communion with the dark quiet everything that grows closer and closer with each breath.

Genet called for a theatre that was "so strong and dense that it will, by its implications and ramifications, illuminate the world of the dead." He called on his artistic collaborators to "break down whatever separates us from the dead." I believe he'd be proud of how this beautiful production reaches a quivering hand out across that boundary.