Stardust

http://polaroid41.com/stardust/

Sunday, March 14th, 2021 - 4:11pm.

The French chemist and philosopher Antoine Lavoisier was one of the first to demonstrate the law of conservation of mass. He stated: “Nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed.” There’s something deeply comforting in this...everything changes but nothing is lost, everything that ever was and ever will be is here, now.

My son, Elliot, loves listening to a science podcast called Olma. In the episode about stars we hear from astrophysicist Hubert Reeves who reminds us that stars are like nuclear reactors: they take a fuel and convert it to something else. Hydrogen is formed into helium, and helium is built into carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron and sulfur—everything we're made of. The elements our bodies are made of were formed in stars over the course of billions of years. Essentially, we’re made of stardust, and very old stardust at that.

There is nothing new under the sun.

So then, what does it mean to be an artist and to create things for a living?

In English when we are making a new show we use word like ‘devising’ and ‘workshopping’ and we talk about ‘the process’...in French we say we are “en création”...in creation.

And what does it mean now that theatres, cinemas, museums, concert venues have all been mostly or entirely closed for the last year?

Over the last ten days, actors, directors, technicians, dancers, opera singers, have been occupying over forty theatres around the country. A cinema in Bordeaux was reportedly projecting films to an empty house in silent protest. I’m not sure why, but my heart broke a little at the image of rows of empty red velvet seats, the images on the screen flickering alone in the dark. A cinema in Bayonne reportedly had an ‘illegal’ screening of a movie. Yes, in a radical act of protest, a small independent movie theatre screened a movie on a Saturday afternoon…

There’s a video circulating of a flashmob ‘happening’ in Gare du Nord last week. Of the six train stations in Paris, Gare du Nord is probably the roughest. On average 700 000 travelers and commuters come through the station each day. Last Thursday, on the one year anniversary of the first theatre closings, amidst the thousands of weary travelers, there was a small and beautiful moment of protest:

The video opens with a lone man playing an accordion, soon he is joined by a woman with a violin, a man with a guitar, another man with a trombone, a conductor appears and then a few classically trained vocalists begin to sing… for six minutes they join together and sing their frustration, their disillusion, their resistance, their hope, their desire to dream, dance, make music and come together. People circle around them, filming with their phones, looking dazzled. Some start to dance, weaving in around the musicians, a man flips upside-down and starts to dance walking on his hands.

A brief burst of joy and life.

My husband and I watched it together, he marvelled: “I can’t tell which ones are the artists and which ones are just joining in.” Me either, and that’s the magic of it.

For a few minutes on a Thursday afternoon artists and passersby together reached up and pulled down a bit of stardust and made something new.

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The complete 'polaroid' - text, photo and minicast - available at: http://polaroid41.com/stardust/