Tiny Imaginary Play #6

A crowd of people stand at the top of a hill on a sunny windy day.

Half have their hands jammed into their pockets to fend off the cold.

The other half have their arms stretched out into the air like they could take off at any moment.

The wind sounds like a symphony and the birds seem to cry welcome.

BIRD #1: Craven crawlers, crispy palms
BIRD #2: Sun snuggle noonday down the hard therefoot.
BIRD #1: Ceasing up? Down a long dawn side.
BIRD #2: Richer then fullsong louden alltune time
BIRD #1: Now ringthen?
BIRD #2: Ring to then.

One person with his hands in his pockets pulls out a harmonica and starts to play.

Barely audible over the whistling air, the tinny chords sound strangely noble.

Two of the ones with arms outstretched move closer and reach down to hold hands, their rigid limbs softening as they meet each other. Together, they run down the hill towards where they can hear each other more clearly.

Lover #1: It's warm if you lie right there, on the dark rocks where the sun bakes.
Lover #2: You first.

Lover #1 lies down in the dark rocks. Lover #2 lies down next to her. If they strain, they can still hear the harmonica.


(Written after viewing the video documentation of Solo Training Session #6, 2/23/11)

Tiny Imaginary Play #5

A pock-marked man in uniform looks out over the grey sea.

He can feel the salty wind on his face, its noise almost drowning out the clanging sound of some piece of equipment bouncing against the ship’s hull.

A second man approaches, also in uniform. He’s wearing sunglasses.

SHADES: Don’t do it.
POCKS: Hrm?
SHADES: Don’t look out over the grey sea and ponder the uselessness of it all.
POCKS: M’not.
SHADES: Can see it in your eyes.
POCKS: Just looking.
SHADES: You should look when no-one else is looking. At you looking.
POCKS: Shouldn’t you be somewhere?
SHADES: Got tired of playing World of Warcraft with teenagers in Tennessee.
POCKS: Tired of getting your ass kicked you mean.
SHADES: I don’t play because I’m good, I play because it’s fun.

They look out at the grey sea and ponder the uselessness of it all.

POCKS: I love her I miss her I don’t know if I love her or if I’m just lonely I don’t know how to talk to her I don’t know how to touch her she’s a foreign country without a consulate and I don’t know the local customs and I can’t stomach the food and I know she knows me but she also doesn’t know me and I can’t tell if the me she knows is me or not and if it isn’t do I want to become that me or is it a trap she’s luring me towards so that all the other me’s that may or may not be realer than her version end up vanishing into the ether and what happens to this me the one without limits the quiet one I feel moving in the nighttime and speeding with the sky the one that loves the rush of acceleration and the absent breathing stillness of no one watching I’m afraid that this one will die I’m afraid to lose the most abstract corners of myself I don’t want to map their contours I don’t want to plumb their depths and I’m afraid she won’t let me leave anything vague and sometimes I want more than anything to be left in peace in vagueness.

SHADES takes off his sunglasses and looks at POCKS for a moment.

SHADES: Wanna go play Crysis?
POCKS: Sure.

They exit.


(Written 2/16/11 after Solo Training Session #5)

Play Dangerously with the Body

Yesterday I attended a football game, a highly rare occurrence for me. I still don't understand the rules of the game (and seriously, don't bother trying to explain; what I don't care about just doesn't stick), but I enjoyed the pageant and virtuosity of all the performances: the players, the coaches, the referees, the cheerleaders, the band, the fans.

In honor of the game (and Stanford's crushing victory, ahem, "Go Cards!"), I offer forth some of Richard Schechner's words on the deconstruction and reconstruction of the body through performance training:

"In preparing performers to perform, rigorous exercises reshape their bodies. This is as true of kathakali as it is of football, of ballet as it is of shamanism...Each genre deforms and reforms the body by introducing disequilibrium, a problem to be solved by a new balancing specific to the action: ballet's way of unbalancing-rebalancing is not football's is not a Huichol shaman's is not noh drama's and so forth. But each form needs to play dangerously with the body, to deconstruct and reconstruct it according to its own plan of action. The body is deconstructed--opened, made provisional, uncreated, enters Brahma's night--so that it can be recreated according to plan. The plans are not fixed. They change, sometimes slowly, sometimes suddenly. Ballet's body, and football's, and so on, are each a maya-lila of possibility. And as many genres as exist, untold others could exist: of natural balancing there may be limits, but no such limit hinders the invention of new unbalancing-rebalancing cycles according to not-yet-known codes." (The Future of Ritual, p. 40)

The bodies created by the practice of football training and competition are beautiful and graceful in their own right. But I'm even more excited about the forms of embodiment that await as we continue to invent new ways to unbalance and rebalance ourselves against the weight of the ever-shifting world.