Performance revolves around the concept of attention: the attention of the performer to the actions of the self in a body, but also the attention of the audience to the performer and the performance. I acted out this performance late at night in the large backyard of friends that was filled with 200 archivists from around the country, all eating and drinking and talking. The band, which the audience treated as background music, had stopped playing, and it was time for my unannounced performance.

I perform not in spaces but against them. A performance must occur in the context of a certain space and take advantage of that specific space, so in the hour before the performance I examined the space to determine how I could use it to hold the attention of the audience and to make that space dramatic. The backyard was expansive with a huge tree, with low-lying branches, taking up most of one end of the backyard, and a small bosque of trees at the opposite end, with openness in between.

The relatively open space was filled with playground equipment, including one huge slide held in place with buttressing poles. I began my performance by walking through the chattering crowd to the slide and quickly up its inclined plane. Almost no one paid any attention to me. The stage was not enough to provide attention, so I spoke.

I spoke loudly, forcefully, and insistently. My voice demanded the audience give attention. I did not stop speaking until the entire audience watched me, and I spoke in tongues, in no language, but with the fluidity of language. After the huge noise of the opening, I read two brief poems, both cryptic and difficult, both paratactic in their motions, both about humanness.

Then I sang in a language with no meaning but in a voice full of meaning. I climbed down the buttressing pole as I sang, letting go of my grip as I descended so that I seemed to fall, and the audience gasped, and I grasped the pole, slipping to the ground.

Back on grass, I sung myself into the tiny woods at the other end of the yard and stood, invisible, behind the trees there, and waited until all the attention moved away from me and the audience became a group of people talking over each other, their inattention extinguishing the performance.