My time in the Followspot...

Last night I had the privileged to perform for at the theatre of my friend and teacher Kestutis Nakas. He is the organizer of "Followspot Theatre", which is a performance art theatre here in Chicago.

I have wanted to perform for a few months, so I was absolutely thrilled to finally have the chance.

Below is a video of the entire evening. It is taken from a website of another performance artist. So about the video:

It will take a bit to load.

When it loads, you want to find a button that says "on demand". That will bring up a couple of videos. Clock on the one marked "live performance" (it has a picture of me on it, funny enough).

You will probably want to find the button that says "full screen" so it's not tiny.

My performance starts at about the 20 minute mark. Watch the whole video or just skip to mine. Either way, it's a good video to watch.

It will be a bit slow, but that's ok.





I have removed the video so the page will run faster. Let me know if you want the link.





Here is the original text for the piece you are watching.

(Music starts. Lights up. He is in the space. He carries a case. He opens the case delicately. As though it were full of fine glassware. He sets up his “temple of time”, arranging the clocks in a clock formation as he speaks)

I am at the grave of my mother. A place I have never been. The air is thick. The moisture clings to my lungs in this fertile ground. Her grave is well kept. (He scoffs) I kneel before her. I stare her stone effigy in the face. It is as cold as I am. Almost laughing, almost vomiting, I plunge my hands into the soft earth. My fingers digging deep, pushing past the worms and rich, pungent soil, breaking through roots and memories and time, I reach my prize. I wrench it from the earth and it makes fleshy sucking sound and I push back thoughts of horror. I turn the steel box in my hand, the moonlight catching, reflecting back on the flecks of dirt and blood that streak my cheeks. This is what’s left. All that fits inside this box. An eternity of heartache, broken down to its base elements. I pry the box open with my fingernails, not noticing the blood that runs down my arm. I tip the box, letting the ashes, soft like lullabies, flow into the open mouth of the hourglass. I place the cap and sit, watching the sooty seconds fly their course. For a moment, I am joyous. In this moment, the final success is mine. Then, in the next, I realize the agonizing truth. The ashes are hers. The seconds, mine. I gaze in horror as my time flies by, knowing that its end spells mine. (He places the hourglass, completing his temple.)

I have a very particular obsession. One that has followed me through my childhood, and continues to haunt my thoughts and dreams. Sometimes I feel as though I can sit and feel the seconds as they drift past me. Like an early spring breeze across my brow. But that’s not true. Because often, I feel like time is whirring past me, screeching like a dying bird and I can’t stop as my life spins out of control around me. I can do nothing to control time. And for that, I am obsessed with it.

When I was in second grade…no, before that, you have to understand a little something about my childhood. When I was growing up, we were poor. I mean poor. Dirt poor. Like, the only things we exchanged for Christmas were nervous glances. So in the second grade, there comes a day in class where we are going to learn how to tell time. And we’re all sitting on the big area rug, getting ready to learn, and the teacher’s aid pulls me aside, away from everyone else. She asked me what happened, and I don’t understand. She tells me my pants are ripped. I look down…I hadn’t seen it before. I had no idea. But my pants were…tattered. Rags. Eight years old and no one had told me before I left for school that my pants were full of holes. They sent me to the principal’s office, and then they sent me home. I didn’t learn to tell time that day. I didn’t learn for years.

But there’s something very comforting about a clock. In the face of a clock, I am reminded that time is not always our enemy. In the gentle face of a clock, time runs round in circles. Time repeats. Time is unending. In this circular time, I can return to places I have been. Change the mistakes of the past. Live, even for a moment, in the happy meadows of memory.

I have a question for you. A real question, that I want you to answer in your heads. All of you. Everyone. If you could return to a moment in your past, good or bad, to change it or not, if you could go to a moment…what moment would that be?

Do you have your answer?

(At this point, the music will rise and I will take one clock and enter the audience. I will hand the clock to that person and have them sit where the clock was. Repeating this until there are twelve people with twelve clocks seated in the circle. One by one, they will share their moment.)

If I were to go back to a moment…three years ago, sitting at my computer, reading a message from a girl I do not know. Answering that message will begin one of the most terrible points in my life. Change that…and who knows what else changes. I don’t know what I would do.

But this is one of the harsh realities of our time. In our time, we cannot travel back to the past. We must make choices in the moment, living with the consequences for the rest of our lives. In this world, in this universe, time is not a circle. It is a line. A string. Elegant, certainly. But with a beginning and an end. This…this is what worries me so much. What keeps me thinking about it. Because what happens when the string runs out? What happens when all the time has slipped out of our grasp. When there are no more seconds and no more minutes, no more hours…what becomes of us? What happens beyond the cutting of the string? I do not know. And none of us ever will.