Audition

by Katie Kitamura

And I wondered also if that wasn’t the point of a performance, that it preserved our innocence, that it allowed us to live with the hypocrisies of our desire. Because in fact we don’t want to see the thing itself, on a screen or on a stage, we don’t want to see actual pain or suffering or death, but its representation. Our awareness of the performance is what allows us to enjoy the emotion, to creep close to it and breathe in its atmosphere, performance allows this dangerous proximity.

It provoked a fever in me, I entered the play in a state of agitation, exploring the space in a frenetic way, unmeasured and without discipline, like an animal dragging its snout along the dirt, like an animal rubbing its back into the ground, it would only be ten more times, eight more times, five more times.

But it was too late, the room had already transformed, it was just a room in an apartment in a city, it was just a couple and a stranger, a person whose presence they no longer fully understood, the group had already cleaved into us and him, and Xavier, sensing this at once, was not going to wait for Tomas to deliver the fatal blow.

He was transformed by the breadth of his emotion, stepping outside himself and extending the boundaries of his being, and I knew that this was one definition of love.

Here, it is possible to be two things at once. Not a splitting of personality or psyche, but the natural superimposition of one mind on top of another mind. In the space between them, a performance becomes possible. You observe yourself, you watch yourself act, you hear yourself speak, a line that is articulated and then articulated again, and the meaning that is produced is at once entirely real—as it is experienced on stage, as it is experienced by the audience—and also the predictable result of your craft, the choices you have made, the control that cedes freedom.