From The Payoff, a series of essays about performance
Rent from DeepDyve- From The Payoff, a series of essays about performance
This story is about magic. Up front, no apologies; this is a story about heroes, about G-d. This is a joke. This is a story about something impossible, about doing the impossible, about people who do the impossible, about becoming one of the people who do the impossible, about getting up in the morning. It's a story about the body, the circadian rhythms that wake us in the hour before dawn, the secret orientations of canaries locked in darkness, still turning to face the North Star. It's about pigeons driven across country in unmarked vans and released in the middle of nowhere still finding their way home. Did you know that when Tenzig Norgay and Edmund Hillary struggled up Mount Everest, when they stopped to increase the flow of oxygen from their pressurized tanks, they heard wild geese flying over the mountaintop, calling? A wild goose flying right over the top of Mount Everest sounds like this: ha-ha ha-ha ha-ha ha-ha! Can you imagine that sound so clearly you can actually hear it? Can you imagine it so clearly that somebody else, watching you, can hear it? Can you imagine it so clearly that it happens? That's what it means to be in the spotlight. On stage, you can't see the light that shines on you; you have to feel your way. You know you've found your light when you can feel that the heat's on you.
All of what I'm telling you is real; those birds have extra lungs tucked away inside their bones that you and I and Ed and Tenzig don't, but if you listen very closely right now you might hear your own bones growing. They are growing stronger in response to the exact forces being applied to them, so if you're sitting cross-legged right now your leg bones are busy laying down new layers, so they'll be slightly better adjusted to that habit tomorrow than if you are sitting with your feet on the floor, or lying on your back with your knees up, or standing, or running, or dancing, and if your weight right now is being supported by one leg while that hip cants out and the other leg relaxes it's probably a habitual posture, which means ten thousand years from now somebody can dig up your skeleton, and if they know the secret I've just told you then they'll be able to see the growth pattern in the ball joint of your femur and reconstruct exactly the way you liked to stand, the [End Page 38] particular silhouette by which somebody who loves you would know you anywhere. Clowns like to do this job while we're alive. This is a story about what survives.
Aaron Raz Link is a writer and teacher. By training, he is a historian and philosopher of science; he is also a graduate of the Dell' Arte School of Physical Theatre. He is the author, with Hilda Raz, of What Becomes You, a 2008 Lambda Literary Award finalist. Currently, he is working on a book about performance with the theatre artist and teacher Daniel Stein.
