A Piece of Performance

Trying to parse this out, you know?

Yes, this is performance, but this is also what my body likes to do.

It starts as an inkling and stays this way for months.

The idea had probably been germinating for years before it broke through to vague consciousness. Eventually, an epiphany brightens my mind—usually while I’m doing mundane tasks like brushing my teeth or unloading the dishwasher. I’m grateful for the seemingly sudden understanding. It comes as a relief. But then suffering follows because what I’ve learned usually calls for change and everything in my mind and body rejects this until I am begging to die—metaphorically.

I become possessed by these concepts, and I can’t speak because everything comes to me at once. I don’t know anything at all when there’s a block occupying my brain. I must read, research, think, and finally, wait for the mass to break apart and hope that I can salvage a piece of it.

Right now, performance won’t leave me alone. I am near the beginning of what it asks of me and so, frozen, but I’m starting to thaw.

Let’s take this one step at a time. It doesn’t have to be in a straight line.

I’ve become acutely aware of how much of a performer I am. I’ve been desperate to escape it because I just want to be, but this, let’s call it archetype, composes me.

I wrote this a few days ago to as a brief exploration:

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The Performer 

I am a dancer. 

I don’t want to be a professional. 

It’s what is natural.

My body desires to pose like Jean Erdman in the kitchen, to pointe my toes as I step over a fallen tree.

It’s how I’ve been molded. 

The fawning maiden of many ballets is the way I approach and subject myself to you. 

You will never touch me. Characters are not born. 

It is the most shameful part of me. 

The worst of us are those who know nothing but masks.

I am a dancer, moving along the spectrum of what it is to perform.

A video/reading of The Performer

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The above is a summary of the work I have ahead of me.

For today, I’d like to share a journal entry focusing on one aspect of performance—trying to see what could be viewed as artifice as an effort towards authenticity, a natural flow of self.

9/21

I’m sitting at my computer, headphones on, an image of a squire in a grand library as a background to the dungeon synth I’m listening to while I write down what I’ve highlighted in Eros the Bittersweet for Mother Me research.

It’s a fine setting. It tastes nice in the mouth of my mind. But I’m distracted and unwilling to do my task with focus. Being high probably doesn’t help, though I pretend it does.

Each time Berwyn lifts his head or the dogs bark, I think it’s Fred coming through the front door.

I remove my fur-covered sweatshirt and tell myself that I’m too warm. A deeper voice questions if I give him the chance to see me prettied at home—the aesthetic that makes me feel and act the way I want to be seen.

I consider rewinding the video so Fred can see the imagery I enjoy as ambience—this is a piece of me, too.

My instinct has been to set the scene for much of my life. I prepare for performance when anticipation of interaction or of being observed rises from my subconscious.

I can’t get it off of my mind what a performer I am. The knowledge of this isn’t new, but lately, it gleams in the heap of my imagination, asking me to sit with it, to consider it. And I am.

It is surely human nature to perform for each other, even if the behavior isn’t recognized as performance or artifice. The expression changes through history and culture, but I imagine that it has become more distilled since films, televisions, and especially now that we can be creators, stars, whenever we share ourselves online.

Does the size of the audience matter? It must. Every element does. With social media, the knowledge of the whole world, or what seems like it, is present. When the audience grows and responds, well, that is when the performer becomes crafted by audience expectations.

Even if the viewers are small in number or detached in attention on social media, a greater audience occupies space in our mind than ever before. This audience, however, doesn’t make me a better artist or performer. It makes me nothing.

For me, performance is not dependent on an audience thought there is always an imagined person present in my imagination, watching.

The one I perform for in my mind has become unbearable and must be transmuted into me.

A live audience, one who is in the same room as me, hidden behind bright lights, is fine, welcomed.

I was never as true as when I was on stage letting my body take over and allowing my mind to clear to presence.

There is something here. This is what I’m trying to get to.

When I take off my sweatshirt as Fred comes home, put on a certain song when someone is about to get in my car, or place my book on the couch face up, it is not deception. I’m trying to help the other see me because I do not know how to do it directly, not yet. And I want to share a world with someone else for a little while.

I’m so often unfaithful to myself. I lost myself—not in the desired way. I efface myself with scrolling, books I don’t care about, clothes that feel wrong on my body—I do and speak and present as a person that is not honest when I meet a person fresh from that mindset.

Performance is practice for the setting of self. It is a desire for connection. I present the lipstick, this song, this incense burning because I feel it deeply—that I am alive.

It is agonizing to be so aware of living, and I want to share what passion I can glean from it.

Isn’t this the impulse of the artist?