“Attention is the beginning of devotion.” — Mary Oliver
The room felt like a small promise. Seats folded down, and we took our places, no speeches, just agreement. The chair pressed my knees. A perfume I couldn’t name arrived before its owner. The air was cool. Phone screens went dark one by one.
We practiced being quiet together. Coats rustled. Someone coughed and then thought better of it. The ceiling held its breath. The floor waited. Armrests negotiated borders; elbows settled down.
Some nights arrive already awake, and we spend a few minutes catching up. This was one of those. Before anything happened, the room inhaled, and we let it.
A rectangle of light appeared, neat as a notice. Our spines tipped by the same small degree, a shared yes. One figure stepped in. The quiet deepened.
He spoke in verbs. Fold. Lift. Pause. Risk. Each one is simple, like a sentence you don’t need to raise your voice to finish. Heel to floor: a hush you could hear. A hand opened and closed, like a parenthesis you didn’t know you needed. The light didn’t chase him; it listened.
Something unknotted. Not revelation. Just the room’s pulse finding a steady beat. This is how it starts, I thought: one person precise, the rest of us remembering how to pay attention.
A second person joined him, and the first sentence became a conversation. Not a fight; two clocks learning to keep time together. One reached; the other answered by editing the air. They argued and agreed. A quicksilver sentence, revised by two bodies.
Shoulders kept a quiet secret while feet wrote it out loud. The music didn’t accompany; it remembered the same bright wish, again and again, and the room remembered with it. Where one line curved, the other set its jaw. Precision without sharpness. Tenderness without apology.
They made a hinge out of silence. You could feel the whole room swing on it, as if opening a door we were sure was locked. Two versions of grace chose each other. A decision, made more than once.
New dialects arrived. Some feet drummed like rain on tiptoe. Others floated a breath above the floor, treating gravity like a conversation, not a law. Spines wrote cursive while someone else printed. Elbows negotiated; wrists amended.
A piano tried to outrun a body and lost, smiling. Speed showed up like good news. One moment was red and careful, a story that knew how to hold a knife without using it. Another carried the brass and swagger of a port city without leaving the room. The light kept translating: rectangle, pool, halo, as if learning our language faster than we could speak it.
What stayed with me wasn’t the variety but the agreement underneath it. Every style said the same thing in its own accent: awake. The floor gave back what we put down. The room, a temporary city, reminded us we had a body, and it could hold more than one truth at a time.
After the intermission, the darkness returned, now with more oxygen in it. Entrances multiplied. Lines sharpened. Jumps landed like good news that arrived on time.
A wooden soldier with a sugar secret marched through a memory and softened at the edges. Discipline flirted with delight. Painted eyebrows watched from the wings while a skirt argued with gravity and almost won. The air tasted like salt and brass; shoulders squared to meet a wind that wasn’t there.
Tempo nudged us forward. Precision turned playful. Risk took off its helmet. Bodies threaded through each other like traffic that learned to be a parade. The music grinned and changed its mind mid-sentence. The floor kept up.
Velocity clicked on. It stayed. The yes got louder, not shouted but amplified by agreement. A second breath, then a third. The room felt larger without moving, and something in us matched it.
Two men entered like a thought completing itself. Not mirrored; they rhymed. One carried a little sunlight on his shoulders; the other kept dusk in his hips. Their timing made weather. They moved like different answers to the same childhood question, arriving at the same thing from opposite directions.
No one tried to win. They tried to agree. One offered steadiness; the other tested the step and smiled. The room leaned forward, protective without knowing why.
An old melody forgave us for living our own way. It didn’t brag about memory; it held it. A turn softened. A lift refused drama. They landed in the quiet you can hear when trust is heavy.
For a heartbeat, the air forgot to clap. Then the sound arrived, not loud so much as unanimous. It felt like watching courage choose tenderness and getting to keep the proof.
Then the rules loosened their tie. A grin ran through the music, and everyone seemed to know the punchline at once. The floor turned communal, no solos, only permission. Shapes collided and collaborated. Technique put its hair up and said yes to surprise. A word that usually ends plans turned into a trampoline. Impossible, it said, and then it bounced.
Someone up in the rows clapped too early; the room forgave them by joining in. Ten thousand lungs exhaled at once. The light stopped taking attendance and threw its arms wide. The border between stage and seats blurred. Same language as before, only louder with consent: awake.
Outside, with the night still buzzing in my ribs, I finally said its name. Despertares (Awakenings), Isaac Hernández’s gala at the Auditorio Nacional in Mexico City.
We spilled down the steps like careful confetti. Cars stitched a shoelace of light along the avenue. Someone hummed the forgiving melody. I went in tired and came out revived. And the city, our temporary chorus, kept breathing, a little more awake than before.
Credits. The quiet argument was “Rhapsody Pas de Deux” (Ashton/Rachmaninoff) with Sae Eun Park & Germain Louvet; the brothers’ piece, “My Way” (Stephan Toss); and the finale, the whole company to “Impossible” (Jax Jones Remix) by Lion Babe.