When it was my turn to witness the performance, I settled into a chair across from Vogel and she handed me a stethoscope. This was preparation, she explained before the performance started. Here we go, I thought. I’ve become expertly attuned to my heart’s idiosyncrasies. I’ve taken dozens and dozens of EKGs and felt my pulse thousands of times. But I realized I’d never used a stethoscope. I panicked as I tried to find my heartbeat—nothing. Vogel waited patiently. Finally I lied and told her I found it, self-conscious about delaying the curtain for my own one-person performance after she had already performed ten times that morning.
ConCordis is a deceptively simple piece. A tiny puppet named Titilo (from titilar, the Spanish verb for twinkle) moves through the chambers in his house: his music room, his library, and his observatory where he looks to the stars and then breaks down into tears. His house, of course, was also his heart—or Vogel’s heart, or my heart, they had all converged. A house is my cardiologist’s favorite metaphor for the heart, which can have plumbing issues, or electrical issues. (Mine has electrical issues; Vogel’s lambe-lambe heart briefly had plumbing issues. While she was conceiving the piece, she couldn’t figure out how to construct the night sky until she had an epiphany with a found length of toilet pipe on the side of the road one day.)
Once it began, the piece was mostly wordless. Ambient music piped through the big over-ear headphones Vogel provided. I could feel my heartrate and breathing slow as I watched the puppet climb a long, spindly ladder from his heart to his brain where he peered in and found nothing of use. I thought of a quote I keep on my desk from the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz: “Once I had brains, and a heart also. So, having tried them both, I should much rather have had a heart.”
Even when we were confined to our homes or, in my case, when I feel trapped inside my own anatomy, the vastness and infinitude of the universe is always within us.
As he perused the volumes of his library, I got to read along. Vogel handed me a small sheet of paper with a short text from Samuel Benchetrit. It was a cri de coeur for vulnerability. “There are not enough brave hearts. There aren’t enough hearts outside,” the text urged. My hand went to the battery pack on my defibrillator, which pokes out from under my skin. I traced the hard rectangular outline of what I think of as my backup heart. Some people wear their hearts on their sleeves. Mine is about an inch under my clavicle.
The predicted tears welled hot under my eyes when Titilo and I peered through the telescope. The peephole enveloped me, and the hot summer morning became a cool, clear night. My tears made the stars and moon blurry. This moment reminded me that, even when we were confined to our homes or, in my case, when I feel trapped inside my own anatomy, the vastness and infinitude of the universe is always within us.
In conversation with my students at Štvanice, Vogel called lambe-lambe “the most generous art form in the world.” She was speaking of a reciprocal relationship between the performer and the spectator. She gives each audience member her whole self for the few moments the performance lasts, and in doing so invites the spectator to give themselves over completely to the performance. After we looked at the stars, Vogel cued me to take off my headphones. She handed me back the dreaded stethoscope. This time, as I fumbled around the site of my defibrillator, I heard my heartbeat: faint, but there.
Then Titilo joined me, his body barely larger than the stethoscope’s bell.
Together we listened to my heart. I waited for palpitations, bigeminy or trigeminy beats, but my pulse was steady and rhythmic. Vogel handed me a final slip of paper, the size of a fortune cookie, to conclude the performance: “Have you listened to your heart today?” Listening to my heart is a survival mechanism, but in that moment it was also an act of joy and of connection.
