I cried while tearing up paintings.

This summer, I invented a hamster hoover, made music from an artwork created by four-year-olds and cried while tearing up other people’s paintings.

That’s a fairly typical year at the place my family and I return to every summer. It’s somewhere between a campsite and a festival. We sleep in tents, and every day everyone chooses one of about thirty workshops.

It’s intense: workshops run all day, and in the evening there are exhibits and performances, which means you can add a rehearsal to your schedule if you’re in one of those. You might wonder why we like to do this for two weeks when we’re completely exhausted by the time we get home. Here’s why: despite being only a two-hour drive away, I don’t think I could discover more on a trip around the world. Every year I come back with stories, ideas, and insights that stay with me long after the tents have been packed away.

Adding to the sense of adventure is that every year there’s at least one of what I’ve come to think of as my whoopsie workshops: the ones I signed up for because I misunderstood the description. There was this one year when I thought I was going to learn a set choreography and ended up having to improvise a dance in front of a group. (YIKES! But I did it!) These often end up being the most meaningful.

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This year’s mistake was a workshop where I thought we were going to make rhythmic music as a group, using items that aren’t really instruments. The description did say something about endurance, but I thought that had to do with the fact that each person in this unusual orchestra was going to do the same thing throughout the entire piece, which I imagined could get kind of boring. In my mind, that was fine: I’d learn how to make cool sounds work together with my limited musical skills.

After I joined, the teacher explained his idea a little further, and it dawned on me that this was something else entirely. We were each going to design a ritual of sorts and repeat it for two and a half hours straight. This didn’t seem like something I’d enjoy, but it was now too late to switch.

Peter, my husband, was in the same workshop, and we decided to work together. The ritual had to incorporate rhythmic sounds, so we came up with this:

He handed me a discarded painting. I tore four strips from it. Using a broom, he swept the scraps into a growing pile one by one.

Scratch. Swoosh. (x4)

Then I would stand, fold up my chair and unfold it…

Squeak.

…put it back…

Boom.

…and sit down.

Repeat. For two and a half hours.

I started off wishing I had picked a different workshop. I considered withdrawing, but I didn’t want to leave Peter hanging, and there were eight other people in the group, some of them with much harder rituals.

A guy had attached a cowbell to a string that he would throw in a circle to serve as a timer. After each throw, he started a jigsaw puzzle, but after only a minute or so, the cowbell would reach the stick in the middle, prompting him to restart.

Ding!

There was a guy dragging a huge stone up a ladder and dropping it.

Boof!

A woman was shooting a can towards the wall.

Clang!

Within the first half hour, I noticed that the sun was exactly on the guy with the big stone on the ladder. I imagined he hadn’t foreseen that and felt so sorry for him that I couldn’t bear looking his way. But looking the other way, I saw a guy standing on a tile that was set up as a seesaw. All he’d do was count to sixty and change his position slightly.

Bonk!

Could that be even worse? This space began to feel less like an art installation and more like collective punishment.

Ding! Scratch! Boof! Swoosh! Scratch! Swoosh! Clang! Bonk! Scratch! Swoosh! Ding! Clang! Bonk! Squeak! Ching.

I started doing the math. If our thing took forty seconds, how many repetitions would we have to do in an hour? Two hours? Would it be easier once the end was in sight? Or harder, since I was starting to develop a blister on my right middle finger?

Within forty-five minutes, tears were streaming down my face. I don’t know if I have ever hated doing anything as much as I hated this. It confused me too, because just a few days prior, I had knitted, along with twenty other people, for eleven hours straight.

It was a statement about fast fashion, pointing to the people who work long days in sweatshops for pieces that we hardly wear before we discard them. Very early on, I knew that at the end of the day, we were going to rip it all out to end our performance. I was fine with that. My main worry was injuring my elbow or wrist. Mentally, I had no trouble whatsoever. It was only when I heard the gasp from the audience as we all undid our eleven hours of work that I felt a tiny lump in my throat.

This two-and-a-half-hour performance of ripping paintings apart was almost unbearable to me… until the audience came along.

Workshops always last until 5 PM, but because we were performing, we continued until 6 PM. That way, people could come and see us after their workshops. So for the last hour, we had an audience.

People were responding in silence. Some sat down, closed their eyes, and listened for a long time. They seemed to enjoy the Ding! Scratch! Boof! Swoosh! …

Others were looking at us the way you would look at an interesting painting. I couldn’t tell what they were thinking, but it was obvious to me that they were moved by our collective performance. While I found us disturbing, most of them seemed to enjoy us in some way or another.

I tried to mind my face, my posture, the way I put down the chair. I noticed our pile of scraps was turning into something quite beautiful. People were looking at the man on the ladder with the admiration he deserved.

The last hour flew by.

When our group gathered to discuss how it went, the guy on the ladder mentioned that the sun hadn’t bothered him at all. What made it hard for him was that the big stone had dug a hole that got deeper each time he dropped it. It made it harder and harder to lift. I had completely missed that. The woman shooting the can thought it was all quite enjoyable.

Peter thought the sweeping was meditative. We’d been performing the same ritual for two and a half hours. I assumed we were having roughly the same experience.

Somewhere during those first forty minutes, I’d stopped carrying only my own discomfort. I’d started carrying everyone else’s too—and made it even harder by imagining suffering that wasn’t even there.

This is one of the things I take home with me this year. I always approach creativity with a clear goal in mind: a message I want to convey, an idea I want to communicate. This workshop worked the other way around. It didn’t tell me what it meant. It gave me an experience and left me to figure out why it affected me so deeply.

What I came away with wasn’t an appreciation for endurance performance. It was the understanding that Peter remembers sweeping for two and a half hours as meditative, while I remember it as punishment. We went through the exact same ritual and somehow lived through different experiences.

Maybe that was the message.

For me at least.

With love,

P.S. I’m curious, have you ever seen a piece of performance art that spoke to you? Can you say why it did?

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