Jamie Lyons

Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Hamlet

Arnold doing “To be or not to be” with a cigar clenched in his teeth and a .44 in his hand is the most honest fucking Shakespeare you’re ever going to see.

You want purity? You want authenticity? Go watch some Yale Drama School graduate emote at you for three hours. What Schwarzenegger and that insane, self-immolating carnival ride of a movie understood, what they got in their bones, was that Hamlet’s always been about a guy who can’t stop thinking long enough to actually fucking do anything, and the only way to make that digestible for a mall-walking, popcorn-munching audience in 1993 was to have the Austrian Oak blow away Claudius mid-soliloquy.

Because that’s the whole sick joke, isn’t it? I know it’s absurd. The movie knows I know. Arnold knows I know he knows. It’s this infinite regression of self-awareness, like staring into mirrors facing each other until your brain melts out your ears, and somewhere in that funhouse reflection is something true about how we consume our mythology now… pre-packaged, self-referential, winking at itself so hard it’s practically having a seizure.

Arnold, God bless him, commits completely. He’s not slumming. He’s not apologizing. He is Hamlet, if Hamlet could bench-press a Buick.

The Thing About Knives and Beauty

So here’s Amélie Ségarra, a French ballerina, standing on top of a grand piano in some gorgeous, empty Baroque theater in Girona that’s seen better centuries. But she’s not wearing regular pointe shoes, those pretty pink torture devices that already mangle feet into gnarled question marks by age twenty-five. No, Pérez has welded kitchen knives to the tips. Actual stainless steel blades, the kind you’d use to break down a side of something once living.

And she dances.

The whole thing starts sweet, you know? Music box tinkle, ballerina doing her thing, that inherited vocabulary of grace we’ve all agreed means something about transcendence or whatever lie we tell ourselves. But then, the camera starts circling, and you realize she’s not transcending shit. She’s fighting. The knives screech across the piano lid, carving wounds into the lacquer, and she’s stumbling, screaming, trying to keep her balance on instruments designed to cut, eight inches above the surface on blade-tips that want nothing more than to find flesh or wood.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Performance

Artaud would’ve loved this. The violence of it. The way it makes literal what every artist already knows: that beauty is carved out of something, that grace costs blood, that the audience sitting in the dark demands you bleed out there under the lights until there’s nothing left but the shapes your pain makes in space.

Because ballet’s always been a beautiful knife job anyway. The eating disorders, the destroyed joints, the way little girls are taught that beauty means making your body do impossible things until it breaks. Pérez just made the metaphor scream out loud. He put the blade on the outside where we can all see it, where we can’t pretend anymore that what we’re watching is anything but sustained, gorgeous violence against the self.

The piano gets it too, that instrument of civilization, of culture, of all those recitals in all those parlors where nice people learned to make pretty sounds. Now it’s a scarred battleground, a stage that keeps score, marked by every failed attempt to maintain the illusion.

The Theater Is Empty Except for the Camera

And that’s the other thing, she’s alone in this darkened theater. No audience except the lens. Which means she’s not performing for anyone but herself, or for the idea of performance itself, or for everyone who’ll ever see the video and understand that when we say “I gave everything,” we’re usually lying, but sometimes, sometimes, someone actually does it.

Francis Bacon understood that.  The way people destroy themselves for their art, their craft, their obsession. How the line between dedication and self-immolation gets real fucking blurry when you’re actually good at something, when you actually care. How the people who make the most beautiful things are often the ones most brutally intimate with pain, with the knife’s edge, with the moment when you realize you can’t stop even though continuing might kill you.

Nine Minutes of Truth

The video’s nine minutes long. That’s it. Nine minutes of a woman trying not to fall while her feet turn weapons into an extension of classical technique, nine minutes of metal on wood, of muscle and will against physics and fear. It’s not comfortable. It’s not supposed to be.

Pérez titled it En puntas, on point, on the tips, which is both the ballet term and the absolute fucking truth of what he’s showing you. This is what it looks like when the mask slips, when the artifice reveals the reality underneath, when beauty stops lying about what it costs.

I want to look away. I can’t. Because hidden underneath all my cultural bullshit about art and grace and performance is this: someone, somewhere, is always standing on knives trying to make something beautiful before they lose their balance. And I am (maybe you) are sitting in the dark, watching, waiting to see if they fall.

Here’s the thing about live performance that all our academic seminars and theoretical frameworks can’t quite capture…  it’s a fucking high-wire act where the wire is invisible and everyone’s pretending it doesn’t exist until someone falls.

What we’re witnessing here isn’t just a “mistake”,  that reductive, bourgeois term we use when our pedagogical comfort zones get threatened. This is the performative sublime manifesting as pure panic, that Artaudian rupture where the fourth wall doesn’t just break, it vaporizes. Maria João Pires‘ face in that opening moment, man, you can’t choreograph that. You can’t rehearse genuine terror. That’s the body betraying the mind, or maybe it’s the mind finally admitting the body’s been running this show all along, storing Mozart’s D minor in the neural pathways like some kind of baroque RAM.

Chailly keeps conducting , because what else are you going to do, stop?,  and this becomes theater in its purest, most accidental form. The concert hall transforms from temple to laboratory, the audience from passive consumers to ethnographic witnesses of a ritual gone sideways. This is Schechner’s “restored behavior” colliding with what Brook called “the immediate”,  that unrepeatable moment when everything that can go wrong creates a space where something impossibly right can emerge.

What floors me, is watching her muscle memory kick in. The fingers know. The body knows. While her conscious mind is screaming wrong concerto wrong wrong WRONG, her hands are already preparing the soft opening lines, accessing decades of physical knowledge stored somewhere deeper than thought. This is Merleau-Ponty‘s phenomenology incarnate, the lived body as archive, as instrument, as survival mechanism.

And someone caught it. The camera caught it. Which means this unrepeatable moment gets infinitely repeated, analyzed, theorized.

The paradox eats itself.