Mood

When you are nameless and formless, how do you move through the space? When you are speechless and silent, how can you make your presence known?

The ghost list illuminates the empty space. The observer watches, and turns out the light.

At first it’s all chaos and cacophony, bodies moving through a space vibrated by sounds of pleasure and pain, joy and sorrow, hope and envy and wishes and regret. And you move through this space, feeling nothing, feeling everything. Sometimes you reach out and make contact. You check in, though this is more a courtesy than a necessity. We all know what we’re doing. Going through perfected motions. Soon, there becomes nothing left for you to say. And so you watch. And you walk. You touch, absorbing the essence into your body, taking in every object, connecting with all flesh. Embodiment of mood. A silent observer. Attentive and alert. Audience, presence onstage.

The transition is an ordered chaos, and you watch and walk.

It changes, and you can feel yourself changing with it. Speechless, nameless and formless you take in your surroundings, you become the atmosphere. Silent as you are, the sorrow is overwhelming; it becomes too much to bear. Pouring out onto the stage, filling the space with its weight, the heaviness sinking into you. You find yourself moved to release, rising with the intonations bursting forth. And the sorrow comes, flowing in speechless sound, meaningful yet meaningless. And the sound takes a form, extending out, twisting and writhing in the space, in the small space, deep in the shadows. You can hear it. If you look closely enough, you can see it. It underscores the pain. It ceases, without notice. At the pauses, the space rings with silence.

The transition is an ordered chaos, and you watch and walk.

You know better than to be deceived by laughter and smiles. Embodiment of mood, you know what is yet to come. You can feel it shifting in the atmosphere, shifting in your formlessness, giving rise to a new shape. This is sorrow, and yet it is not the same. This is guilt and confusion and shame. This rises deep within you, vibrating upwards until it is breathed out, a doleful sigh.

But ceaseless sorrow would cause the form to break, and so you retreat into the darkness.

In the space, the chaos runs wild.

The transition reclaims the order, and you return, and watch, and walk.

In the background, as always, watching. The atmosphere has changed, embodiment of mood expectant, waiting. Three simple rings of an ominous bell, each taking something away, removal of that which will never return. Death. A small one occurs with each turn.

You hear the reflection of that outpouring of emotion, the sorrow that caused you to flow and move. It fills the space, underscoring the sorrow, rising and falling and fading away.

Forms cease, and silence reigns.

The ghost list illuminates the empty space. The observer watches, and turns out the light.

– Jaya Z.

One thought on “Mood

  1. Jules Odendahl-James

    Wow. This is an amazing, arresting piece of writing, Jaya. I really wish there’d been a way for the audience to experience your POV via writing as well as the way you subtly and masterfully embodied all of what’s inside this piece in your on-stage role. I was so struck by something you said in our last class discussion about feeling both “inside and outside” of things in other domains of life but never having that feeling be “this corporeal before”. The Performance Studies scholar in me was stopped in my track by that because the notion of embodiment as epistemology — a way of knowing the world — as much as it is ontology/being itself seems so central to what this role did for and to you and for the audience.

    It is no easy task to give so much to a position that asks you to exist on the edge, the fringe and it’s no easy task to embody metaphor or mood as you so insightfully say. I can only hope that we gave you as much as you gave us in this process. I’m so glad you chose to make this post public because I want as many folks who visit this page to read it and consider its provocations.

    No pressure but I wanna see your name on some Japanese plays in translation in the future! And I wanna see you onstage before you graduate in a role that puts you firmly on the inside track of a three-dimensional character portrayal. I look forward to both immensely.

    –Jules

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