An empty refuge: a performance celebrating Ryan Tacata’s contribution to Stanford University’s Theater and Performance Studies (Stanford TAPS).
This performance, this gathering at Stanford, it’s the most honest transaction we could do. You take someone who’s poured themselves into a place, into their craft, into the unglamorous work of making art and teaching and creating space for others to create, and what do you do? You fill the emptiness they’d leave with presence. With bodies and voices and the ephemeral magic of performance itself.
It’s a beautiful con, really. For just a moment, you reverse the flow. All that energy they’ve been radiating outward? You bounce it back, concentrated, undeniable. You make them sit there and feel it, see themselves through the eyes of everyone they’ve touched. It’s uncomfortable as hell and absolutely necessary.
Because people like Ryan? They’re too busy building refuges for everyone else to notice they’ve become one themselves. A living space others inhabit. A corner that’s haunted by possibility and generosity.
So you gather around a fountain. You perform. You fill the void with gratitude and make the invisible visible, even if just for an a few moments one rainy afternoon.
To great dreamers of corners and holes nothing is ever empty, the dialectics of full and empty only correspond to two geometrical non-realities. The function of inhabiting constitutes the link between full and empty. A living creature fills an empty refuge, images inhabit, and all corners are haunted, if not inhabited.
Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space