ESSAY|MEMOIR|WRITING|CREATIVE WRITING
Naked Art
How baring it all brings both artists and audiences together
Most fairy tales have the same beginning: “Once upon a time…”. But what if your story starts with “It makes perfect sense that years later I remembered this moment for what it was: a combination of sounds. The incidental prologue provided by windows opening and closing around me on the street, the loud clutter of seats, the shuffling of feet and, of course, the concert itself.” What would you say to that?
It’d then make perfect sense to tell you that over the years I’ve reminisced more about the circumstances surrounding the event and not just about the event itself. Especially the windows. As I walked down 25th St., past the Faculty of Biology, the little stall with the funny, large, coloured umbrella selling hot chocolate and the old, crumbling building on the corner of 25th and G Avenue, it was the windows that alerted me to the sound of Havana slowly awakening from its sleep on this typically mild Sunday winter morning of 1992. On my way to the theatre, windows kept being snapped open or slammed shut, like a well-orchestrated, choreographic and yet, at the same time wild cacophony of urban sounds. Havana goes to bed late, so it takes its time to shake the bedcovers off.
