The Superstar and the Mirror
Cradled by white walls on two sides, and us on the others, the Superstar is lit by two neon lights stashed in nooks, blurred by the haze of a fog machine. A flatscreen TV, whose screensaver scrolls through stock photo landscapes, shows a fittingly incorrect time (3:30am). A CD player, a mess of black A/V cables, a microphone, two large black speakers. The Superstar, face, ears, and neck painted entirely white, wears a white 3M hazmat suit and black sneakers. The Mirror is stuffed with Styrofoam, lacks hands and feet, and wears an identical suit. Its head is a dull silver balloon. The Superstar poses the Mirror in the corner, and snuggles into its lap. A microphone amplifies the crinkles and crunches of the suits and Styrofoam, the tiny collisions of the two bodies. They fiddle with the CD player, inserting different disks and skipping through tracks until landing on a familiar classical piece.
The Superstar launches and pauses a video on the TV, in which a voice that aesthetically hovers eerily between human and TTS (AI-generated text to speech) reads words that appear in black type on a white screen. They play tracks from the CD player: music, train station announcements, advertisements, indistinguishable speech. They sing. They get up, they sit down. When they sing, they don’t really stand, but crouch, or squat. There’s something intimate and fragile about singing in a squat. The Superstar’s interactions with the Mirror are tender, sometimes frustrated, sometimes patient. They lift the Mirror, giving it too much weight; they set the Mirror on the floor, balloon-head resting on our feet, far too light. They dance for the Mirror. The Mirror is impassive. Or rather, the Mirror is a mirror, as lively and lifeless as mirrors usually are. Toward the end of the work, they don a headlamp and extinguish the neon lights. The headlamp’s beam takes volume and solidity in the haze, the yellow edges of its halo melting like butter. At one point they prop the Mirror against a speaker and sway before it. The shadow swings, a projection of the animate: the dead cast living, the Mirror cutting shadow in light. Your dream, in mine.
Up until the second song, for me the Mirror was a proxy of the Superstar: an extrusion of self. The Superstar’s tenderness and the Mirror’s floppy stoicism generated something of a physical manifestation of attempting to care for oneself, or seeking care from oneself, only to find that “self” rather unresponsive. This was reinforced by the amplification of the tiny sounds of the costumes crinkling, of which I was hyperaware at the beginning (less so as it progressed)—like the amplification of frictions between those selves.
Right before the second song I felt a wave of sadness swelling, which crashed during the song and continued to ebb and flow throughout the rest of the performance. At this point my framework shifted, and the Mirror became a person, thing, or place that the Superstar had lost—“lost” being left (quite graciously) open, encompassing, of course, death, but also simply moving away, growing apart, ending…which somehow worked to stitch all of these possible past and future losses together, generating a kind of soft vicarious mourning.
Somewhere around the 2/3 point, my framework slipped sideways again, and I began to see the Mirror rather as the part of one’s self that is lost when something else is lost—like the part of one that dies when someone else dies, or that sours when a dear friendship sours, or that packs its bags and moves away when one packs their bags and moves away. It was a nice return to the self-proxy, but via the thing-that-is-lost, and made for a satisfying, although unclosed, loop—a spiral.
My own emotions took me by surprise. I appreciate being moved without being told why to be moved—I often have a hard time with violent and painful stories, because it is difficult to avoid inflicting that same violence and pain on the receiver of the story. There’s something quite brilliant in this structure, where the story becomes a scaffold into which the spectator seeps and oozes. Leaving gaps creates pockets of vacuum that pull us in. The sadness isn’t an old sadness, being explained, or the new sadness of the receiver learning of an old sadness portrayed, but a new, specific, shared sadness, created spontaneously and dissipating just as spontaneously, like sparks in the dark—and this transience is deeply appropriate, as the whole thing is about the fleetingly eternal, the eternally fleeting, the unbearably gentle slowness of being that passes all too quickly…that is somehow just evasive enough to not be cliché.
Forde / Geneva / 18.02.23
In my dream you are a superstar, in your dream I am alive
a performance by Gabriel Shields-Hanau