It was a crazy night. Ideally we would want to be performing in a noise free environment, for the audiences to be totally immersed, for us the same. That night, we had a security guard in the middle of our performance space. He was there to “keep us safe”. Instead, he was flirting with our photographer. At some point, a random guy storms through our corridor, the security guard asks ‘where are you going’ in a soft voice, but that guy continues moving violently, he pushed one audience member and attempted to go into one of the intimate performance rooms. I saw that and luckily I acted fast grabbing him\ from the neck and pulling him out. If you’ve worked in places like that, nightclubs, places full of drunk people, you know; people don’t listen, people won’t listen. During that time, the audience member I was supposed to be handling was left alone waiting, blindfolded in a corner. Maybe it was a moment of suspense for the audience member. It surely was for me too. But for totally different reasons.

****

I’m guiding people down the stairs while they are blindfolded. It’s a steep staircase, with two corners. 32 stairs. I went up and down twice for each one of our 40 audience members, plus definitely 3 times that amount more that number for various other reasons: preparations, problems and panic attacks. The very next day I couldn’t move my legs. Our get-in in the venue started at noon, and we left at 7.30am next morning. We were performing for 4 hours non-stop. As I’m moving audience members down the stairs, the very instant that I lost a little bit of my focus on what I was doing, resulted in almost a fall of both my audience member and mine. It was good that I saved it without any of us being hurt. We were just laughing. After that mistake, I was so concentrated on what I was doing that my brain felt numb after 4 hours. Did I mention that my body was numb too? And that I missed my bus stop when I was going home, because I fell asleep in the bus? And that I was waiting for half an hour in the cold for the next bus to take me back home? Eating some candies that I kept finding in a Tesco bag I was carrying, they wouldn’t make me less hungry nor less sleepy. And yes! I arrived home, at my bed. And yes! the last sentence was irrelevant. I shouldn’t be complaining.

****

I remember eavesdropping in a conversation that an audience member had with the
performer who was in line before me. ‘I feel I’m the centre of the universe’, he said.
It was my time to take him down the stairs. ‘Hello center of the universe’, I said in a teasing manner. I saw him smiling, while hiding under his blindfold.
‘Hello...’ he said
‘Hope you had fun down here..’
‘Yes...’
‘This is the final stage of your journey... Are you ready to go back into your world... into
your “reality”?‘
I remember him saying ‘no..’ and the rest of the conversation fades into a beautiful moment. In my mind, it sounds like a bass saxophone whose sound resembles a ships’ whistling sound as it leaves it’s port. And you’re traveling on it. Then, the sound of the drum stick that softly touches the cymbals and makes you want to hide inside your coat a the morning wind blows any bad memory from your previous night. The return to your daily routine is the sound of the traffic, horns tearing your ears. Back to the staircase, me and my audience member are hugging, sharing a moment. We both know. We love life for what it is, for what it takes, for what it’s worth. Thats why we do what we do.