Stopped

On SITI's group blog, Anne Bogart recalls moments that stopped her dead in her tracks, and tries to tease out what that sensation can mean:

I am interested in the latent potential within the silence that follows a powerful or novel experience. When I am stopped by a fresh assault upon my senses, I am also wildly alive within that break and the repercussions can be physical, psychic and transformative. In this gap, this stop, this shake-up, this silence, a seed is planted.

...The paradox of theater, which is an art form that takes place within the confines of time and space, is the necessity for stillness and silence within the rush and onslaught of time. You have to ram a stake through the motion and find the stops in order to speak intimately about the eternal within the fleeting moment.

Shades of Lee Breuer's eloquent "The Theatre and Its Trouble," with its case for the "neutral gear" of poetic moments in the theatre, which I just read in the indispensible American Theatre Reader.

And that brings me, roundabout, to an announcement of moment: I've just accepted the position of Associate Editor at American Theatre magazine. I'm extremely grateful for the opportunity I've had here at TDF, a fine and venerable theater nonprofit whose mission I support, but the AT job is a welcome step back for me onto the journalism track. There will be more to say about this in time, but for now, I'm (relatively) speechless, and content to sit in this liminal space and feel the stop before it starts again.