Saturday, April 29, 2017
a note on liminality of being
This week, a professional mime talked about the nature of performance for the PBS News Hour (link, at the end here, after I enstance my own frame on it).
His is an artistic take on performance, but its implicit value to me includes its dramatizing how all action is performance: We do things, either at a distance of self in the stance toward the action (particular intent); or/and with a frame (or perspective) on the situation that’s relevant to action. We tailor our action (at least implicitly) to be apt in a twofold way: apt to our limited intention (stance) and apt for the situation (relevant frame). We make stances toward enacting by limiting our intent. We make frames toward acting dressed by what’s suitable.
The heart of his monologue was about the presence between performer and witness. I would expand on that in terms of a liminality between stance and frame (relative to oneself, the enactor); and liminality between present-for-me and present-for-”you”: a presence that expresses “our” withness in terms of what’s “present.” The presence of what is present is primarily (albeit implicitly, probably) ours.
Think of being wholly with each other in conversation—thinking together so well that it’s as if “we” are thinking as one.
Look at the point (moment) of reading, as if we’re so wholly with the text that we (reader and absent author) are writing together.
The mime said, in part: “...A story came on the news that Marcel Marceau was embarking on his 80th birthday world tour. And I thought, I have got to study with Marcel Marceau. I sought him out.... He talked about himself in the third person a lot. He said: ‘People say Marceau is genius. I say, no, Marceau is not the genius. Genius is where Marceau and the people meet.’...It’s actually not about you as the performer. It’s about the connection you make with an audience. And the space between you is where this thing can happen....”
Genius there is a phenomenal potential between an authorship (designed for performance by authoriality or, in this case, dramatist—referenced in third person by him, by me writing as if “we” witness the same authorship)—between an authorship and one’s partner (in actual, living interaction).
The temporality between “us” is where something gains potential. We are making time together, and where that goes—where we go together—is open, futural,
an individuation of us as singular relationship.
Yet, the mime said “...the space between you...,” as if that/this is about presence of inter-facialness within one self, presence of oneself in reflection as text, intertextuality of self reflection.
Anyway, here: a darling man.
