there are no guarantees with others // one and only
This fall I was able to experience a comedy/theatre/performance art piece called One & Only at the Kitchen by Sophia Cleary (a hilarious and brilliant genre-defying artist). The show took place in a black box theater, and is shaped around a traditional stand-up set up: Sophia, on stage with a microphone telling jokes, but the performance was for an audience of one person. Over the hour or so performance, Sophia incorporates a number of participatory and experimental bits, including movement around the theater, call and response, meditation, broadcasting. All one on one.
The show is about the relationship between a performer and their audience, what they ask of and owe to one another, and what those boundaries look like, how they are maintained and what happens when they are broached. Sophia’s comedy revolves around her own experiences doing The Work: processing the trauma of birth, hurtling towards death, and the tenuous relationships we build in between. She lets you in, but in the context of this performance, also requires that you acknowledge the ways in which vulnerability is constructed and consider how or what of yourself you can give over to her in return. Sophia’s brilliance is that she illustrates the boundaries necessary to maintain healthy connection to others while she jabs at them. She pushes right up to the line.
Imagine you’re alone in a theater and the performer maintains eye contact with you while awaiting your response. Even mimics your discomfort, showing your nakedness right back to you.
The performance asked of me: how much can you trust when you’re not sure what might happen next, when the boundaries of a traditional audience-performer relationship have been bent and shifted. The act of trust was extremely felt, as in: my own trust in Sophia, in theater, in my own willingness, in my own judgement, surprised me.
I really haven’t been able to stop thinking about the experience, its been so generative and fun to share with other people too. The response I get from whoever I’m telling about it reveals something about either my mood or who I’m telling. I’ve gotten anything from “Why would you put yourself through that” to “Well, you had the best day, no contest.”
There was an element of a kind of emotional hangover in the following days: in a moment of role-swapping, I took the spotlight as Sophia climbed in the the seats and prompted me to share whatever I wanted. I have an extreme stage fright - even in this room with just four other people (Sophia, her director Sara Lyons and the light and sound techs) - my body was overcome by tremor and my mind fell blank. All of these synapses that had been firing off while listening - all of these points of connections I had felt to the jokes Sophia made about coming out late, about struggling with oversharing and trauma bonding and creating boundaries that build emotional safety in her relationships - I felt completely unable to synthesize that back to her, let alone do that while being funny, an essential connective tissue in this experience.
This was the moment of the performance in particular that left me reeling over the next few days, my brain on overdrive conjuring the perfect examples, mirroring experiences of mine that with some distance from I could bend into funny anecdotes, the perfect quips I should have offered her while on stage. Like a rush of my most psychically revealing moments, this was haunting and consuming. In therapy that week, my therapist made a connection to patients she had seen after going to a hypnotherapist: traumatized at what had been unearthed, needing follow up to contextualize what they were sifting through.
I don’t feel traumatized but I have been sitting and thinking a lot. Activated is what I kept saying afterwards. I wanted to put that energy into something so I decided to make a piece about it, to use the experience as a prompt.
For the poem, I tried to focus mainly around text relating to Sophia - tweets of hers, message exchanges between us - these already existed in my archive. That was the scaffolding.
For the piece, I wanted to sketch something of a parallel reaching - in tune but not quite touching. An imprecise mirroring.
After a first draft that was very impacted by the stiffness of this particular batch of linen and how I had been storing it (that is, the sun picked up a very distinct pattern of wrinkles), I decided to try a new shape, on a new large piece of ultra soft linen (bed sheets that I wore a hole through). A new shape and maybe my biggest piece to date.
I know I’ve been extolling the virtues of seeking out the sun - my patience has been really pressed while making this piece, waiting out the exact right forecast. I’ve been trying to get the same rich, dark hues I achieved on some banners I made this spring, which means the print has to expose for much longer even on a bright winter day (the sun is just not as strong). Long exposure means the fabric is more vulnerable to being disturbed (please picture me chasing down tiny cut out text as a bluster disrupts how I’ve carefully arranged everything). This was almost a forty minute exposure - but no wind.
I think this piece is about the trials and errors of connection. What that circling around getting to know one another can feel like, how the failures of it fall, where the boundaries lay.
I’ve said way, way too much. And could say so much more! I’ll leave you with the poem, and: go follow Sophia.
I had to be honest
let me practice saying
how I know u
again. I wondered
hyper aware of the ways
she was my friend too
this evolved particular way I’ve become
hyper aware of
a protection layer. a buffer all around me
…… U wouldn’t understand. i will!...never show
All you have
There is no secret
I could jump into
to Make us
embrace me
I really have to be honest
about what I really want. and what I wanted
again. I wanted to be
all of a sudden
inside myself
I longed
to pull toward being
really connected
Essentially, though
the distance at which
I wasn’t travelling backward. I was
someone who has never loved
to subvert their dreams
I said It’s Freud,
He said It refers to the Freudian
Off consciousness
it’s all surface level
It complicates my thoughts -
Either way, stop
spit it out
Dust off Trust
We Want a
something that alters your perception of how
we were Live and what’s left of
the chance
we relate
we welcome
knowing lives
for the first time
exceedingly current friendship
never move away from that
a coming home to
just barely involved
to learn something new with you
do you just start to talk about anything
In a certain way, speak about it,
do you wish that I would
Please be funny…
flaunting
entirely. Fully
SIMPLE I fire off the sound of my gay
healing into the distance
acutely aware intensity
she pulled that string I stared up at
acknowledgement is not speaking a truth
if you are not
and when I leave here?
you will know more
about me?
I have news for you:
there are no guarantees
with others.