My side of the glass

[Sounds of a zoo environment: birds and elephants more distant, monkeys and apes nearer by]

I don’t like the way you’re looking at me.

Oh I know there’s a good solid chunk of tempered glass between us. Plus a railing. Plus a trench. Plus an un-festive ‘These Animals Can Bite’ placard. All of which add up to the obligatory five feet, give or take, of – how should I say it? – denatured space. The vacuum that Nature’s supposed to abhor, but which this year’s become second nature – to all of us, to you as much as me, I’m sure. But you can’t screen out mistrust. And that, given our positions, vis-à-vis one another, is what we have for each other. Your brown eye, glowering at me from under shaggy black hair, says it all.

Sorry for my sour tone. It’s not about you. I’m here under duress. I’m a performer, an ‘entertainer’, though that’s an old-fashioned and frankly offensive term for practitioners of my craft. For the live practitioners, I should say. Practitioners of the life. Those for whom performance is still about the senses, all of them. Eye-contact. The smell of the onlookers and the space around you. The prickling of the skin as the air changes with the ebb and flow of expectation. The knot in the gut, and the taste of your own…uncertainty. A recorded performance won’t give you that. Which is probably why it’s valued so much. Just the two dimensions, a flat surface. Only the remote senses required: seeing and hearing. No mess, no physical ‘uncertainty’. And let’s face it – who, in this time of universal mistrust, wants to add another layer of that?

Our director. Maybe she would. She’s an interesting one. She’s found her fight, alright, in this age when barriers are being flung up left, right and centre. “It’s our job, our duty, our privilege, to lay siege to boundaries and borders, wherever they lead to hurtful division or cruel misunderstanding”. I’m paraphrasing, but you get the gist. Laudable stuff, all very laudable, though you can never be sure exactly where these sentiments are springing from. A sense of injustice? A deeply-felt duty of care to the isolated in society, those most threatened by the current Great Withdrawal of Contact? Maybe so, maybe so. Maybe, though, it’s as much a duty to the enterprise, to the footfall, the tickets and the turnstile. And we are having a bad time of it, we live entertainers, we performers of and in and for the life. We are starved of our purpose. So, at our director’s initiative, we’re to find out new ways of ‘connecting’ with our public – whom, we now find, we needed more than they ever needed us.

So here I am, staring across the divide at you, in this strangely-familiarly-despondent place. Staring with more than a recreational interest, I’ll confess. I’m here (and I’m paraphrasing again) to “test the boundaries of communication” between performer and onlooker. My remit is to watch, observe, and learn. From you. I mean, ignore for a moment all the tedious demands for novelty and distraction – for ‘content’ – that plague my vocation. The essence of performance is nothing more than imitation. It’s through imitation that we uncover those unexpressed connections, not just to our own kind, but to all of life. You might say that imitation is my species’ daemon, our primal ‘drive’. A little part of me feels that we have that in common, your kind and mine. In fact, I’d put a day’s rations on it: at the end of the day, when the visitor leaves this enclosure behind, they’ll have internalized, without knowing or willing it, a myriad of little habits, tricks and behaviours, that aren’t native to them, so they imagine, but are called forth by a casual encounter with another creature. A creature not like them but inclined like them. So you see, I’m here for the ground-zero experience of imitation, those little reflexive moments of communication that jump across the species barrier.

Ah yes, the ‘species barrier’. Turns out to have been something of a misnomer, doesn’t it? I mean, if a certain bat, looking for a certain kind of human companionship, hadn’t been introduced by a certain intermediary panda or pangolin (I’m sorry, I don’t do mammals much outside the primate cohort) thereby sharing with one another their hopes, joys and private infestations – we wouldn’t now, you and I, be in this place, empty, almost, of human traffic, locked in this rather doubtful exchange. But they should all have seen it coming, really they should. We performers, we workers in the ways of imitation, know how easily a yawn can jump from one species to another. I see it myself on a daily basis and it never surprises me in the slightest. So why anyone imagined humanity might be immune to jumps of a more physical kind across the boundaries I’ll never guess. If our director dwelled for a moment on the penetrability of barriers, she might not be so keen to dismantle them, not even the notional ones…

Alright, I’m being obstructive. Again. I’m not playing the part I’ve submitted myself to play. Let me see what I can take away from this encounter, either side of the glass. That one and a half meters between you and me, that’s a given. What I need to do is turn it into a gift. If I can find, across this distance – across these distances – an echo of me in you and of you in me, I’ll still have a chance of reaching an audience that’s drifted away, and of bringing them back. For us performers, it’ll mean a new code, but it’ll be based on the oldest of codes – humanity’s enduring fascination with what it believes is not itself – with what it calls, sans irony, ‘the animal’. But let’s face it, that’s why I’m here to begin with, isn’t it? It explains the very fact of me.

I still don’t like the way you’re looking at me. But I’m starting to see why. We have already begun to recognise each other. And space is no longer an insurance.

[After a pause, there is the sound of human footsteps walking away. The noise of apes and monkeys remains.]