a touch lingers longer than a word
a sigh of warm breath longer than the turning away.
I went to see Robert Moses' Cinderella Theory a few nights ago
at the Nitery at Stanford.
it was a project that I let fall by the way side
when RENT took over my life
but the entire cast of characters upon that stage were
one and the same with me.
A collection of what Daniel Graver calls the "personnage" body
for I could see little more than Katharine's expansive wing span
and Little Linda's staccato head movements.
Mostly I was disarmed by the type casting of bodies
the full figured pair that fought over the children's clothing
the frail ones offered up like a hybrid of an aborted fetus
and the deposition of Christ.
How utterly oxymoronic and unpoetic.
the bodies merely feigned frailty between virtuosic
batmas and pirouettes en attitude.
The dissonance between the dancer's body and the character's body
was rearticulated in the disjunct between the textual accompaniment
and the choreography.
After a while, I found myself purposely ignoring the text
in order to attend to the movement.
The text was literal
the movement contrived.
Conviction in movement parsed the performer bodies
from the familiar bodies of friends.
The written labels on flesh acted more like costumes
rather than insights into identity.
And though there was a ritualistic cleansing at the end
as if the baptismal commencement of a renaissance
there remained a cacophony that could not be cleansed.
The lack of relations between bodies on stage--
the lack of relationship--
revealed no history or memory.
There was a dearth of corporeal souvenirs
an absence of embodied affect
the result of time spent with
in, around,
another.
Hangers made up the bodies of lost children
like ghastly wind chimes echoing the absence
of life.
I wondered why the portrait of the modern family
was so desolate and bleak.
Why life seemed so anemic in these circumstances
even when the shoe seemed to fit at first.
but then we grew.
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