The fact that the Olympics opened last week under this ongoing sextile between Mars in Gemini and Sun in Leo feels incredibly on the nose. Not because this combination is particularly athletic (though it’s not not athletic), but more because it’s incredibly conducive to noticing or participating in a good performance. The Olympics are an athletic event, but they are also theater: a theater of nationalism, of tragedy and victory, of both the primacy of individual and that individual’s obscuration as a representative of their country of origin. The Olympics is centered around one performance, which is the performance of athletic competition, a performance lasting a few minutes where one team or an individual is pitted against another. It’s rational, specific, physical, with winners and losers and scrupulous records and logged hundredths-of-a-second. Of course, this is only one part of the show.
On my first day of a physical theater class I took in college, my teacher had each one of us walk across the room in front of the rest of the students while saying our name. Simultaneously, the teacher told us, we were to lift our audience-facing arm from our sides to above our heads, slowly. It was simple; silly, even. Just a way to get to know each other’s names. Then we started doing it. As the first few students began crossing a kind of silent, sweaty pallor overtook the room. This wasn’t meant to be easy; it was meant to be incredibly, violently revealing. It turns out that saying your own name while doing something weird with your arm in front of a group of strangers is an extremely efficient way to broadcast the shape of all of your deepest insecurities and weirdest physical quirks. I’m sure the rest of my classmates fell under the same dangerous delusion that I did, which was thinking I would be the one person to do it normally. I was not. My voice shook, my shoulders hunched forward, I walked too fast, I blushed. It showed each of us what we’d be working with for the rest of the class.
I have a theory about Olympic theater gleaned from watching exactly 2 hours of Olympic swimming yesterday afternoon: you can tell who’s going to win a meet by the way they enter the stadium. I have this theory because I accurately predicted a few of the afternoon’s swimming champions with absolutely no prior knowledge of the sport or the athletes competing just by judging the way they stepped out from the locker rooms. My proudest moment, by far, was clocking Italy’s Nicolo Martinenghi as the one to watch in the men’s 100m breastroke, the race that featured the UK’s golden boy/favorite to win, Adam Peaty. Martinenghi’s win was something of a surprise, from what I understand. For others, I guess, but not to me. Because Martinenghi did something important at the beginning of the race: he performed a perfect stadium entrance.
Because of the way they’ve set up La Défense, all of the competing swimmers have to complete a short walk from what is probably the locker/holding rooms to the diving boards. For some reason, whoever is in charge of stuff like this decided that the entrance should closely resemble a cat-walk with each athlete’s entrance backgrounded by an LED screen of their country’s flag. The swimmers are then faced with the task of choosing something to do as they cover this an awkward distance from the flag to the board. Some wave at the crowd, some pump fists, some ignore the crowd altogether and pull their jacket hoods over their eyes.
Nicolo Martinenghi did none of these things. He did not do a double-handed wave and then awkwardly grip at his pockets as tragic hero Adam Peaty would some moments later. Instead, he began to clap. Not in little pats in front of his chest or triumphantly over his head, but by swinging his arms directly in front of and behind him in one long, rhythmic arc, his hands connecting at the apex of each swing. The gesture was unhurried, illogical, confident, and completely without socially recognized meaning. As a performative physicality it was geometric and postmodern: an expressive punctuation that carried him most of the way to the diving board. It was something out of Trisha Brown; it looked like a dancer’s abstraction of swimming.
This week we have a New Moon at 12º of Leo which lands in a tidy sextile between Jupiter and Mars, both in Gemini. It’s a continuation of last week’s Glen Powell energy, but with the added asterisk of the fact that Mercury will be sitting at its station degree. This means that Mercury in Virgo will be ruling Mars and Jupiter in Gemini from a place of awkwardness and insecurity, about to begin a process of revision. Additionally, Saturn in Pisces is absolutely breathing down Jupiter’s neck and further cooling what should have otherwise been a pretty easy and unselfconscious lunation. Overall, this week has the quality of walking from the flag to the board while lifting your arm over your head and saying your name; an Olympic athlete looking, for just a moment, like a stupid mortal.
NOTES FOR THE WEEK
Monday, July 29
Physical instability followed by a feeling of intellectual prowess and security; nobody can see your hands shaking if you keep your voice steady.
Tuesday, July 30
Running a word-of-mouth campaign in a world where everyone else is running another, extremely similar campaign. Four Avon sales women end up, by some quantum mistake, at each of the other’s door simultaneously, each with the directive to sell and each with the generosity to buy. An equal exchange with no result.
Wednesday, July 31
A glamorous illness. The delicate bloodstain on Nicole Kidman’s handkerchief in Moulin Rouge. The porousness of beauty.
Thursday, August 1
Difference and safety. Confidence in everything except for the physical.
Friday, August 2
An expressive dance number.
Saturday, August 3
It feels like things should be moving but they aren’t and you don’t know why. Is it something you did? Is it the way you’re expressing yourself? Maybe you don’t know how you come off to others.
Sunday, August 4
A pause and return could be a good thing. It feels like quiet victory without a medal or a certificate but with a social consensus that everything is good and you are doing well. This will all be challenged with granular precision later on, but for now it feels right.
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