Tremble: your whole life is a rehearsal for the moment you are in now.
Judith Malina
Look at him, Babatunji is DESTROYING himself in that studio and I mean that as the highest compliment I can give because destruction is the only path to the real shit, not the performance, not opening night where everyone pretends they understand what they’re seeing. This. The repetition. The muscle memory. The same goddamn sequence until your body finally admits defeat and does what your mind has been screaming at it to do for the last two hours.
Your whole life is a rehearsal, Malina said, but what she didn’t say is that the rehearsal IS the thing, the performance is just the echo of all these private moments of absolute commitment to something bigger than your own tired bones and screaming tendons. This is what separates the real ones from the pretenders: the willingness to annihilate yourself where nobody’s keeping score. No cameras, no critics, just the brutal honesty of your own limitations staring back at you in the mirror saying “not good enough, again.” And he DOES. He tries again. That’s the whole game right there, not inspiration, not passion, just the grim acknowledgment that excellence is built in moments exactly like this one, when quitting would be so much easier than whatever the hell he’s doing to himself right now.
The rehearsal never ends because the moment you stop rehearsing is the moment you start dying as an artist.