Notes from Underground Above the River: Performance, Aesthetics, The Works

Several days following the SWAN 'rubedo' performance, one audience member--an ophthalmologist by profession and a  movement therapy client of mine, shared a wonderment and wanted to ask: "How is it that you were able to not blink throughout the entire performance? Normal dryness of the eyes--a part of our autonomic nervous system--instinctually cause our eyes to blink, yet you did not blink, not once! How did you do that?"

I found this to be a perceptive and delightful question, and one that I readily confessed was an aesthetically important and conscious aspect in my performance approach. First I admitted that I have no real knowledge, that is, scientific knowledge about it, but that I imagine that I exercise the same kind of control capacity that suppresses normal bio-neural response mechanisms in the body the same way we read about yogis suppressing pain responses while lying on a bed of nails. The capacity for certain control mechanisms of normal autonomic body functions are, I imagine, the same.

I further offered that, as an artist, I am particularly sensitive to this "blinking" thing when I watch actors for example--film and theater. I find myself responding to and thereafter noting that the aesthetic power of the moment is broken when they unwittingly blink their eyes, catapulting me out of the transportive mode of the work.

It is when one is completely and wholly absorbed by the intent of the poetic gesture and the experience at hand, that the dissolution of borders and boundaries occurs. Here the ethic, desire, and consequence of the aesthetic experience abides. No blinking till it is time to journey back from the cosmos.