Interpretation

You cross the garden, the city, the landscape and you get to this very unassuming door. You open it and — there you are. In a different universe. Look around, breathe. It’s the rehearsal room.

In this place, which is, on one hand, a break with the world (in a certain way, contemplative monks and cloistered nuns have chosen to rehearse for life, right?) and, on the other hand, a concentration of the world (in the sense that a red flower brought to an empty room becomes redder, or that an unconscious gesture shot in close-up becomes a significative action) — it’s in this place (such an impossible place if you see it from the point of view of “real life”) that (from the point of view of the “lived reality”) truth becomes a possibility.

Sorry for the excessive use of parenthesis. I guess it’s a side-effect from thinking about rehearsals.

Everything, a question. There, in the rehearsal room, everything is philosophical — we’re there learning how to die, that is, how to live —, but in child’s-play fashion. Obliquely philosophical, and funny, alive, exhausting in the best way.

Outside, it will rain, most likely.

Outside, the world will be crumbling loudly.

In there, someone will turn on the volume and there will be this transparent silence in the heart of the music. Or someone will say a line and the intonation of a particular word will take us to this country of the mind where we can see our stuff, all our ghosts, face to face.

The rehearsal room is not an abstract, ideal place. Oh no. It has, for instance, this very unplatonic smell. A Stardust-type smell, in the Ziggy variant. (By the way. Amazing, isn’t it, how Bowie keeps showing us the wonder of being open, teaching us the work of imagination? Showing us how we may imagine ourselves from all the different sides of the looking-glass.) The rehearsal room has that atmosphere, that very special scent, the smell of imagination.

In an essay on art and hermeneutics, George Steiner writes about the central role of the “interpreter” and the importance of an active, dynamic, complex understanding — reading from the inside, let’s say. In today’s world, this sounds like a necessary provocation. Not only towards works of art, but generally, in life, I think. To take the world less as consumers and more like people.

Perhaps, we should build our own rehearsal rooms, and memorize our favorite poems, stories, plays (like in Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451). Perhaps, we could get inside the music we listen to, sing it till it becomes our body and our history, or dance every little, daily pause like there’s no tomorrow (while waiting, in some far-away station, for the Last Metro).

You cross the garden, the city, the landscape and you get to this very unassuming door. Who’s on the other side? Who knows. Maybe you open it and find yourself.