Playing Scared by Sara Solovitch

Author:Sara Solovitch [Solovitch, Sara]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781620400920
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2015-04-16T04:00:00+00:00

Take it from me, there’s still gonna be

A summer, a winter, a spring and a fall

I was aware of her overly wide vibrato and cracked notes; it was the voice of an aging performer. Minnelli struggled a few minutes and came to an abrupt halt. She turned to face the band and muttered something about the second verse. Either she had just lost her place or she wasn’t happy with her singing. She wanted to go back and fix it. The pianist groaned but started again, a few bars before where they’d left off. This was her signature song, the one she made famous in the 1977 movie New York, New York, and now that she was sixty-five, the words sounded as if they were about her.

She started up again, and—though far from perfect—her performance came right from the gut. “Sometimes your heart breaks,” she sang, and it was all there: the hardships, the triumphs, the years of alcoholism and drug abuse. She knew it, and the crowd knew she knew it. A roar tore through the audience. “Did you hear that?” Beebe demanded. “That was more real, more electrifying, than any perfect performance. What was always scary about Liza to me in the past was that she was so perfect. Here, she’s working the dialectic between persona and anima. It gives her performance integrity.”

Beebe urged me to consider a little-known Jungian theory, “a lovely, lovely theory,” known as “deintegrative anxiety.” It is a model of child development that begins in infancy and describes how the self is built, one experience at a time. It happens every time a baby surrenders her self or “wholeness” and opens up to another. She takes her first tentative steps toward her parents: That is deintegration. They catch her with open arms, and she understands that she is loved and supported: That is reintegration. According to this theory, life is an ongoing cycle of deintegration and reintegration, a constant flux between breakdown and assimilation. Every time we open ourselves to someone or something new, we risk giving up a part of ourselves. A healthy self will deintegrate and reintegrate continually throughout life. Any change to the status quo represents a threat to the whole, but most of us assume some degree of risk and adventure, knowing that our lives will be more interesting and fulfilling for doing so. If we’re lucky and survive these risks, we will integrate them into our selves.

Consider making performance an experience of reintegration, Beebe advised me now, pointing out that no one who has performed has ever failed to experience some deintegration. The important piece in this is to factor in imperfection. “There is something about trying to be perfect that lacks integrity,” he said. “When you present yourself honestly, it’s hard for someone to knock you off, because you never pretended in the first place to be perfect. It’s about a mix of confidence and unconfidence—that’s much safer. It’s bulletproof. Liza Minnelli, she can’t break down because she’s already broken down.

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