Your standard performance methodologies will do you no good here. 

 

As we hope for a world where we will be able to gather together, in person, I am left considering what must be present for a piece of writing to act as a “playscript,” a document that instructs and scores performance.  In hand with that consideration, I also wonder where a play (the body that the playscript actualizes) exists.

 

I am, of course, tempted to say that a play exists in its audience, as they are the ones who are changed by a play’s happening – they are the ones that the conjured, manifested body act upon.  But then, what standards need to be met in order for a play to have a body?  Is it called forth even without the presence of an audience?  I have not travelled far and I realize that I am back again at the start.  I do think I value the undeniable comfort from dodging such slippery questions.  Auden reminds us that in this circular logic, there is a sort of lesson in humility: “Yet satisfies a moral need / By turning behavior into deed, / For I have boxed the compass when / I enter my front door again.”

 

But this moral contentment that comes as a result of inhabiting a circ-logical shape – by traveling from the question and then arriving back at a synonymous question – feels like it might simply be a reward for my ignorance.  In her book Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), Gloria Anzaldua offers a better way forward: “At some point, on our way to a new consciousness, we will have to leave the opposite bank, the split between the two mortal combatants somehow healed so that we are on both shores at once…” (100).  It seems that movement, which inevitably – by way of repetition – collapses time, might be more vital than the dyadic assumption that a question will necessitate an answer.

 

Can the body of a play – the thing that makes it whole, that makes it total, that makes it itself – be present without an audience?  More specifically: without a gathered, collective audience, maybe?  What then does the conjured body from the playscript – real or imagined – act upon?  Does the meaning of a play exist a priori?  Or, more exactly, does the playscript signal the essence of its meaning?  Does it still sing, even if no one is present to hear it? 

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And so, I have the impulse here to write towards a problem, a question, that might not ever have an answer. 

 

What if the sound were always conjured, ready to be heard?  What if the play were to always be its result?  That it draws its power not in how it changed (for) you (or you or you), but in how it was always its change, with or without your (or your or your) presence.  

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In other words, where does the memory of Princess Diana go after you click away from her Wikipedia page?

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