Being there: On performing the “Experience Abroad”

Each semester, there comes a time when thoughts about the transitive nature of being an exchange student truly consume me. Usually, it’s around the time I should be studying for my first wave of exams and papers, but instead, I just stare aimlessly at the ceiling for hours (and watch Marvel’s Daredevil on Netflix until the wee hours of the morning). Last semester, it was a sort of existential crisis about how nothing I was doing truly mattered to anyone else around me, and the sheer loneliness that came with occupying the limbo space of being everyone’s temporary acquaintance. Now, it’s all of that, compounded with a future-focused sort of disconnect – filling my headspace worrying about a job and a place to live once I graduate and have to leave here.

And then Rihanna’s Stay feat. Mikky Ekko suddenly comes on Spotify and all the sentimientos really mess me up. Thanks a lot, Rihanna.

Anyway. I don’t always feel that way.

A few nights ago, I saw Mujer Bomba, an adaptation of Croatian playwright Ivana Sajko’s Zena-Bomba, with some friends in a theatre space so small that the audience of about 20 people had to wedge right up by the tech crew consisting of one dude who was controlling the lights and sound from a laptop in the corner. While I’m no theatre expert, this was probably the best play I’ve ever seen in my life — and I’m not just saying that because I appreciated the various renditions of M.IA.’s Bad Girls and Evanescence’s My Immortal, not to mention the cocaine-snorting God.

There’s a lot more to say about the play itself, but the experience of seeing such a powerful performance got me thinking about the role of performativity in my own life. On one hand, a theatre performance forces you to be there, both physically and mentally, because things are happening in real time in front of you – can’t rewind if you missed it (no subtitles if your Spanish isn’t good enough to have caught all the lines completely). But at the same time, the non-linear nature of the play, which made references to global historical events and pop culture, pulled my thoughts in multiple directions. We were there, but being there involved constantly looking out beyond the space for the context.

Likewise, I’m here in Santiago, but I’m also always somewhere else. I don’t feel entirely present in my physical space. It’s like being in a constant state of daydreaming.

Sometimes the performance of the “experience abroad” entails an online performance of blogs such as this one, or of posting super cool pictures. It’s an implicit process of comparing and separating and showing how different things are from “America” (note: Chile is also in America), without much critical thought as to why. To be clear, I don’t think that there is anything inherently wrong with being performative, or introspective, or reveling in the novelty of a new life experience on the Internet, which is a valid social space in which we relate to other humans.

But I’m trying to be more critical of having this be my only kind of social performance and focus on other kinds of performativity. Being there, being here, doesn’t ever guarantee any kind of permanence. You’re always moving, always transitive. You’re here, you’re there, you’re everywhere – to quote Dr. Seuss.

There was such intensity in each of the actors in Mujer-Bomba, a kind of intensity that demands your immediate attention here and now, but is so intense that it forces you to look away or squirm back into yourself. The play was alive, dynamic, moving, and, well…transitive.

So it’s not so bad to be transitive, right?

Or at least this is what I tell myself when the existential crises hit.