Saudate, Ephemerality, and What You Will

What You Will is the talent night at ASCTC held last Wednesday, where the actors perform whatever they would like to perform. Barbara and Scottie (two returning campers) hosted the event with energy and charm, announcing every song or dance, every scene or jokes and combination of silliness. There were murders and songs about friendship. Scenes from Shakespeare, songs from Disney princesses, unrequited love, human furniture, and three beautiful pieces of original work. Katie (one of the first year campers), wrote a play exploring Shakespeare and nursery rhymes and growing to adulthood, Jocelyn (at our camp for the first time, and off to college in the fall) shared her haunting poem on the inefficacy of communication and Zach, one of our counselors, shared a piece he’d written for guitar.

He introduced this song as one he wrote for a girl he met at this camp many years ago, and said he called it Saudate, a Portuguese word without a satisfactory English translation. I’d heard of this word once before, when I was asked if I had been homesick at all in London. I had answered something along the lines of “sort of.” I was never really homesick for my hometown, but I was sometimes pre-emptively homesick for London. Aching with the knowledge that I’d have to leave before long. The woman I was talking to mentioned “saudate” as a word meaning the very thing I had been fumbling to express. This word, saudate seems to encapsulate so much of the homesick, the heartache, the loneliness, nostalgia, and the longing for something or someone which is so prevalent in theater, in a summer camp, and in our lives.

We saw the same sort of nostalgia in some of the other scenes last night. There were reprises of scenes from last year’s What You Will performances, and even throw-backs to last year’s performances. Jack Read and Caitlin Barns (counselors) with Tom Dumontier (Campus Life Coordinator & Co-Camp Director) did one of the scenes from Love’s Labour’s Lost, to everyone’s delight but to no one more than Elijah and Barbara, who played in the scene in final perfromance last year. Doreen Bechtol and Rebecca Speas both reprised roles they had played in different productions of Twelfth Night, Speas as Viola and Doreen as Olivia. Because performance is so painfully ephemeral, these reprises, these echoes of past performances strike a powerful chord in the emotions of everyone who’s shared in that experience.

Really, there’s something very sad about performance. Unlike statues, paintings or even playscripts which can outlive their creators, plays resist any attempts permanence. Videotapes, snapshots, descriptive essays, or notebooks full of journalings are nothing compared to the communion of live actors and live audience living in a moment room together. Summer camps are like this too. Part of what makes the experience of a camp so poignant is the fact that is short. Best three weeks of the year, perhaps, but it’s only three weeks, and sometimes while you’re in it, you realize how precious those moments are.

So, while Zach played his piece, those evocative chords encompassing our thoughts and emotions in music more eloquently than I can in language, this is what paced through my mind. But what happened at the end of that melancholy piece was nearly as remarkable as the artistry of the piece itself. All of us in the audience jumped to our feet and cheered. Our response to this strange thing we call performance is to applaud.