It loved to happen.

As Lisa Robert­son has said, I’m inter­ested in sincerity.

I’ve long since reached my sat­u­ra­tion point with irony. I’m sick of thin­ning my emo­tions with nuance, or cut­ting them with sar­casm. It’s why I fell in love with per­for­mance. Dra­mat­ics. Urgency. Tears. Rage. Love. Fate. Feel­ings. Per­for­mance may sound like the oppo­site of sin­cer­ity, but I think it has the power to refract and redou­ble our muted emo­tions. The result, for audi­ence and per­former alike, is some­thing more pro­por­tioned to life.

Robert­son con­tin­ues: “It’s usu­ally invoked as a sto­ical value, a holy human­ness. Moral and national weight attends it. I’m inter­ested in study­ing sin­cer­ity because I want and don’t want it. I mean, I want to be believed. But I also want to write through spaces that are utterly delu­sional. I need to be able to delude myself, for as long as it takes, as long as it takes to trans­late an emo­tion, a griev­ance, a pol­i­tics, an intox­i­ca­tion, to a site, an outside.”

This: “I need to be able to delude myself, for as long as it takes…to trans­late an emo­tion.” I am inter­ested in cre­at­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties for peo­ple to delude them­selves. And, maybe its me, but I felt it hap­pen the tini­est bit at a recent DoS gathering.

We planned an Evening of Inter­com Read­ings at the build­ing. The (sim­ple) idea being that lis­ten­ers would sit down­stairs in the venue while the reader sat upstairs and broad­cast their words over the inter­com sys­tem. Turns out that didn’t work, so we just sta­tioned a mic upstairs and used the PA sys­tem, instead. Still, the effect was some homely, undressed magic.

A small group sat in dim light and watched one another while a face­less, if famil­iar, voice boomed from above. We had poetry, black metal lyrics, young adult fic­tion, romance, a song, and some­one shared the sounds of eat­ing a cookie. The void left by the reader became a sort of stage that the rest half-consciously filled.

When it was my turn to read, my throat went dry. It was some­how more vul­ner­a­ble to have only my voice at my dis­posal. Deliv­er­ing some­thing mean­ing­ful, I felt the ten­sion of want­ing and not want­ing to believed. But the plain farce of the pre­sen­ta­tion dis­armed us. Our gen­uine attempts, mean­ings, sin­cer­ity: didn’t even get carded. It thrilled me more than I let on.

Thank­fully, a cool friend cap­tured parts of the event on video. Please enjoy.

It loved to hap­pen. from Alisha on Vimeo.