POWDER ©

My favourite seat in the theatre is in the centre of the front row. That way I feel I’m touching the world of the play and its moving sculptures.
I can look up at the actors and dream of entering their dimension through the invisible fourth wall. It’s like the fantasy of entering a painting.

On a very sunny afternoon on the 17th July at precisely 13.10, a little red flag popped up on Facebook chat.
My friend James wrote: “Fancy coming to a show tonight? I have a spare ticket.”
“Ok, what’s on?”
“James Thierree”.
“Who’s he when he’s at home?”
“He’s Charlie Chaplin’s grandson and we’ve got front row seats. » wrote one James about the other.
“Yeah but he’s not Chaplin. It’s so warm, why would we shut ourselves in a dark theatre for the evening?”
At exactly that moment Dionysus popped up on chat as well. He wrote one word: Go!
You’re the God of hackers now? I wrote back. I don’t think he found it particularly funny because he didn’t respond.

And thank God I listened!

James Thierree is a creature that gravity has decided to exempt from her pull.
For a while I couldn’t focus on the play because it felt strange. I wanted to go out and fetch the tramp costume and beg him to please put it on.
Charlie Chaplin’s movements were always full of energy. An energy that seemed to struggle against his skin to contain itself. His grandson, James Thierree, shares that quality.

What a world we saw. He turned chairs into giant walking insects, a silk sheet into a jellyfish that moved serenely as if it was at the bottom of the ocean. He weaved cotton into an elephant’s ghost and suddenly he flew across the stage and out into the audience, stopping just above me.

He touched my hair, smoothed it off my face and we looked into each other’s eyes.
The whole world stopped and the scent of powder filled the air.
I had always heard that Chaplin was quite a ladies man but I could never understand why. As Thierree hovered in the air above me and looked me in the eyes it became quite clear. This man who looks like he has been cloned from his grandfathers DNA is simply irresistible. My femininity woke up with a start from her deep slumber.

I recommended the show to countless friends and they all responded with similar enthusiasm. I got thank you texts and emails that said they’d never seen anything like it before. Some friends even admitted they cried in the theatre whilst watching him.

Why?

I thought of it for a very long while and finally it was Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of “Eat, Pray, Love” who gave me the answer when I watched a lecture she gave on You Tube.
She said: “Centuries ago in the deserts of North Africa people used to gather for moonlight dances of sacred dance and music.
They were always magnificent because the dancers were professionals. But every once in a while, very rarely, something would happen and one of the performers would actually become transcendent.
It was like time would stop, and the dancer would sort of step through some kind of portal. He wasn’t doing anything different than what he had done 1000 nights before but everything would align.
All of a sudden he would no longer appear to be merely human. He would be lit from within and lit from below and all lit up on fire with divinity.
When this happened, back then, people knew it for what it was and called it by its name: “Allah, Allah, Allah”, “God, God, God”.
When the Moors invaded Southern Spain they took this custom with them and the pronunciation changed over the centuries from Allah, Allah, Allah, to Ole, Ole, Ole which you still hear in Bullfights and Flamenco dances”.

After the show I walked into the night air feeling inspired and awake in every way. What a blessing to be able to do that for another human being.
That afternoon I was completely ignorant of his existence. I wondered how many more wonderful experiences and human beings are out there that I am completely ignoring because of the choice to be stuck in the past.

OLE to you James Thierree and may you continue waking people up everywhere you go.