Stories of...Madrid

I’m losing faith. 
For all my life I’ve wanted to be an actress. 

But lately I’ve fallen astray: 
By the bureaucracy of an industry.  
There’s the art and then there’s business. 
I don’t know if I’m much good at the business…

Subtle power plays with people meant to help you. 
Gate keepers.
Those who influence you into believing what is good and bad art.  
The constant inconsistency. 
The happenstance of it all. 
Mediocre scripts with expensive funding to produce cheap entertainment. 

I’m not supposed to turn down those auditions because their “stepping stones”, I tell myself. Because the world isn’t wrapped in a cummerbund that says “Ava’s hopes and dreams” written across it. But God, the artifice of it all. The disempowerment of it all.

My parents are immigrants and we are Persian. Persian + immigrant means you succeed. You don’t survive. You thrive. You reach the highest degree of excellence. These are the stories we tell ourselves. The self inflicted narrative of who we are. 

I want that for myself. I’d be a liar if I told you I didn’t have an ego or the blood of high ambition searing through my veins. Who doesn’t want an award in their hand and an article to tell you you’re worth something. But what’s the price? 

I was in Madrid a few days ago. My friend, Maddie and I, wanted to watch a flamenco show. I looked out the window and saw a theater across the street from our Airbnb. I looked up its name. It just so happened that a show was starting in an hour. A lick of fate. 

It was spectacular. It’s one of few times where I can use that word and mean it with every syllable. It was spectacle but without pretense. Power without machismo. Men danced with their hips and stroked their own bodies and flipped their hair, while women stomped and widened their legs and led with their chests. It was a display of feminine and masculine and yet it was genderless. The rules of the world didn’t apply on that stage. It felt like they had been picked up from the party in their living room and dropped onto a stage to invite us all up. 

In theater we have something called the liminal space--the space in between. What separates audience from performer. Here though, there wasn’t one. I felt at any moment any one of us could have gone on stage. (Which, people did. I’ll tell you more about that in a second.) They had each and every one of us in the palm of their hand. 

My friend sent me an article the other day that talks about two forms of time:  
                                                             Kairos and Chrono
                                                      America and China= Chrono 
                                               Spain, South of Italy, & Greece= Kairos

Chrono appeals to clocks and calendars. 
Kairos however, is an intuitive kind of time. 

Kids are the best at it. They play and when they don’t feel like it anymore, they move on. The Chrono mother is the one who reminds his son to get up from the dirt and get ready for school.

With Kairos, things change when they are ready...So they danced longer if they wanted to. So others joined in if they felt compelled. After the flamenco dancer had finished a 10 minute routine, the guitarists rose and clapped for her. The rest followed. So, they were generous with one another.  At the end, the toddler son of one of the flamenco dancers came up on stage. He clapped in time, as he’d seen his daddy do many times before. Another man from the audience came on stage and they put a mic in his hand. Stripped of status and ego. 

Maybe they won’t get paid much. Maybe they won’t be on big billboards across Sunset Blvd. People won’t know their names. They won’t have international glory. (Or maybe they will, who knows anything.)

But they looked fulfilled. Unburdened by a value system and industry that vomits in your ear “Chrono. Chrono. Chrono.” 

I’ll never forget the flamenco dancer who danced with such power and seduction that she could have killed with a kiss. 

I’ll never forget the guitarist who dragged a chair center stage and played us a lullaby so moving that people in the audience called out 


Ole.        Ole. 
          Ole.          Ole. 

                  Ole. 


                                                                                                                                                 Stories of Madrid 
                                                                                                                             Friday, December 24th, 2021