Episode 40: The Performer

The lights go down, people settle. A violin starts to play. Stage left, an elderly man walks onstage, alone, in a suit and tie, wearing a hat. This is John Cartwright, aged just 87 - The Performer.

What follows is many things - a meditation in improvised movement, a sequence of poems, an exploration of space and time. A dance, a gift, an experiment, a story in fragments. A reflection on ageing, with a nodding welcome to mortality, and the lens it provides.

The performance is a pact with an audience, a tender and trusting exchange. Vital, ephemeral, and beautiful. A refraction from within the kernel of a particular existence, turned outward and inward, shared. In many ways, a mirror of life and death.

The audience applauds, warmed. We shuffle out, head our separate ways, holding the memory of the experience. We’re reflecting on what things mean. On who we love, and how we do. The stars in our own little life show, silently reciting our lines. Perhaps we sense a flickering curtain. Or can register the fading light. Or perhaps we’re entirely unaware that this is it, that life is no rehearsal…