The party you never leave
In every room you step into
Yesterday I mentioned in passing that we only really exist in relation to the people and things around us.
Today I want to unpack that a little, because it sounds like something a philosophy student might say to drive everybody potty. It isn’t. It’s a description of what is happening right now, wherever you are.
An improvisational theatre exercise makes this visible. I learned it from Keith Johnstone, and wrote it up in one of my books, and here: Funny, Sexy, Violent. Briefly: four people at an imaginary party, each behaving towards the others as if one were funny, one sexy, and one dangerous.
The “funny” one gets laughs at their most boring lines. People move their chairs closer to the “sexy” one and further from the “dangerous” one.
The individuals aren’t broadcasting those qualities. They’re endowments, bestowed by the people around them.
That’s it. That’s the whole thing.
Unrelated GIF showing detail from a picture in Contain Multitudes.
The exercise is a magic trick, but only in the sense that all magic tricks reveal something the eye normally misses. Every room you walk into is running the same exercise. Somebody has already decided, before you’ve said a word, that you are the funny one, or the safe pair of hands, or the person to keep an eye on.
They inherited the decision from the last person who described you, or from your job title, or from the shape of your face and the pitch of your voice. Having decided, they behave accordingly. They laugh at your throwaway lines or they don’t. They lean in or they lean away.
And you respond to that. Not consciously – you’re just having a conversation. But if your throwaway lines are landing, you get a bit funnier. If the room is leaning away, you get quieter. The you that emerges over the next hour is a collaboration between what you brought in and what the room has decided about you.
This is not performance in the cynical sense. You aren’t choosing a mask. The room is drawing something out of you, or refusing to. Different rooms draw different somethings. That’s why the version of you your oldest friend knows is not the version your postman knows is not the version your dog knows. All of them are you. None of them is the real one.
Which is more or less what I mean when I say we contain multitudes. It’s not that we have many hidden selves waiting to be expressed. It’s that we are made and re-made in every room, and the rooms keep changing.
Contain Multitudes, the show, is my attempt to hang some of that on a wall.
This is one of a daily series in the run-up to my exhibition Contain Multitudes at Burgh House, Hampstead, 18-23 August. Full details here.