ChoreoNotes
On Crystal Balls, Fear, and Waiting

By Letty Bassart

Kelly wrote “scared” inside the crystal ball; the rest of us wrote “enthusiastic,” “excited,” etc.  What really lies between squawking and soaring, between faith and doubt, the obvious and the mysterious?

As she savored her last bits of oxygen and chose the last images her eyes would soak in, she had chosen to tell me, “Don’t let your world get small.”

***

Artwork by Laura Luna

There are as many texts written on fear as there are on beauty.  Amid all the frustration that comes from tears that brim, knuckles that turn white, and those things which take our breath away, rest countless uncontainable questions. 

Panic, I am told, is nothing more that fear of fear.  Fear surrenders to waiting and a multitude of moments are never named.  In a place where surviving hurricanes and road rage is a badge of courage, people cling to gallons of water, generators and consumer reports for protection.  Waiting is filled with liposuction and vacations in St. Augustine; and complicity is interrupted by deadlines, sirens and sighs. 

In workshops for Giovanni’s Poem, fear was the alleged antagonist of desire.  For others, it is the counterpart to control, intimacy, loss and so on.  In the waiting room, fear nestles itself between magazines, leaves, crevices, spilled sodas, outdated newspapers, catalogs with blacked out addresses, bottles of water, trips to the bathroom and thoughts that enter and exit at will. 

Performers seem to go on more than any other breed on the risks of art making.  How does fear fall in?  When does its guillotine make work more powerful, when does it make work incomplete?