Dancing with the Gods by Kent Nerburn

Author:Kent Nerburn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Canongate Books

13

The Hummingbird’s Heartbeat

The gossamer line between discovery and mastery

‘It is idle, having planted an acorn in the morning, to expect that afternoon to sit in the shade of the oak.’

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

LAST NIGHT I attended the staged reading of a play by a wonderful playwright. A staged reading lives on the margin between a full production and a script read-through. The actors are performing, but the blocking and the sets are minimal. In this case, the performance was strong. The script was good; the actors were excellent. But something was wrong. The production never caught fire.

As I left, I pondered over where that flatness, that lack of life, had come from. Was it from me? Had I failed to be fully present to the work unfolding before me? Was it from the work itself? Was there something subtly inauthentic, something I had failed to notice, in the words that the playwright had crafted? Was it in the spareness of the staging – the absence of a meaningful visual component to what was essentially an extended reading?

All of these were possible, but none of them seemed right.

After a night of reflection, I realised that the problem was in the delivery. It was in the spaces, the pauses between words, the imperceptible beat between passages of dialogue. It was in the moment where the actors were unsure of their lines and had to resort to thought to find them because they did not yet own them as their own.

None of the rest of us could catch this consciously. In real time it was little more than a hummingbird’s heartbeat. But we could feel it, just as you feel the coldness in someone you meet who takes a dislike to you but does not show it, or the lack of attention in someone whose mind is elsewhere when you are having a conversation. They may be masterful in their subterfuge, but, somehow, something reveals itself that cannot be hidden. It is there in a thousand microscopic cues that lie far beneath the level of the observable or measurable. It has to do with confidence and certitude and quality of presence.

T.S. Eliot gave voice to this, though perhaps with different intention, in his haunting poem ‘The Hollow Men’:

Between the conception

And the creation

Between the emotion

And the response

Falls the Shadow.

It was the shadow that was keeping that reading from coming alive, and it is the shadow that keeps our art from coming alive when we are not in full ownership of the act of creation.

We need certainty when we deliver a line or place a stroke upon the canvas. Hesitation, lack of conviction, may indeed last only a hummingbird’s heartbeat, but it is felt like a drummer’s lead beat that does not carry in it the presence of anticipation, even though it strikes exactly on the measure.

This certainty comes only with experience and maturity. It cannot be forced. It comes from a thousand failures and a thousand successes and a thousand moments of getting things exactly right.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.