Running, Out of Time
”Five minutes, Ms. Stahl!” It’s a long walk from backstage. Audience and performer face each other in this
moment of apprehension. Forty years of shows. I was young and told old stories. Listened to my elders, let their
languages and lands resound in translation. Carried across as best I could stories of elementary education. Tales of
earth, air, fire, water.
Stories are patterns, not scripts. Those stories gave me a correspondence course, patterns for a life. Each
performance was live, once upon this time. No record remains but in memory. The program stated it clearly: ”No
recording devices or cameras during performance.”
“A story, a story. Let it come. Let it go.”
The public show is over. I carried my show, baskets of stories, as far as I could. Now I walk backstage. I leave
behind the heady constraints performance puts on time and space. I pack the old stories, costumes and masks back
into their baskets. Happily, I hope ever after, I am out of time, in my own place.
Some stories refuse to disappear. If you are lucky and live long enough, work hard enough, then you can hear
your own stories. With a remarkable sound engineer, Jeremy Bowker, I record backstage musings, ways of working, a
weave of memoir and myth. The recording begins in water, jumps to the stars, turns with sun and moon, spirals down to
earth, then returns us home to tend the hearth fires. Ashes stir me to remember. Old fireside tales.
My CD, Out of the Ashes, does not capture performance but releases the story. The work is rooted in words,
their density and gravity, their ripple and play. Puns and riddles, alliteration and rhyme. Words. Their sound and their
deep silence. Two short segments for listening are given here.
Eyeing Each Other is a cut from the third track, On Both Sides. I tend towards both/and and rarely either/or. In
performances, audience members, chosen at random, crossed the stage border, wore masks, became actors, moved
the story. It takes both sides to present a show. Heidegger said there is ultimately no such thing as observer or object,
only “the between”. Eyeing Each Other is a story of the mirror between. Mother and daughter, sun and moon. Subject
and object. Think of a Venn Diagram.
The other segment for listening is Baskets, from the fourth track, Tree of Life. To keep and carry, you choose,
gather, then contain. The hearth contains the wild fire, releases it to warm the house. The mouth contains the words,
releases them on the breath. The CD is a basket. A round disc to contain the sounding of story. Out from the basket
come tattered reminders of a glorious past. Fraying threads reach back into story.
Out of the ashes and over the years, I come home. In the ending is the beginning. Happily, happily, it’s after.
The last story is always the second to last. Concealed within it is another that comes. After.
“A story, a story. Let it come. Let it go.”
