The Wake

Fairytale inspired reality last week when actress Katie Herron attempted to answer questions posed by Margery Williams’ Velveteen Rabbit, when the stuffed animal wonders: What is real? And does being real hurt?

Through movement, math, music and monologue, Herron’s solo performance “Mirror, Mirror,” explored what it is to be real, what it is to be beautiful, what it is to be perfect, and what it is to struggle to find the balance.

Holding a public mirror up to her own battles with perfection and media-enforced images of female beauty, Herron gave everyone in the Intermedia Arts crowd something to reflect on.

In an opening scene, the audience is Herron’s mirror. Pieces of Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” and Aqua’s “Barbie Girl” play while Herron runs across a balance beam in a white tank top and pink robe, tying her red hair into messy pigtails. Next she skips across the beam carrying a laundry basket, stops, and hastily jumps into black dancing tights and yoga pants. She throws on a belt, and her face shows she doesn’t like it. Still, she throws on another, plus a sweater for good measure. Gazing at the audience, she rips off the accessories and bends down into a yoga pose on the beam. A mirror image of her own indecision and awkwardness, she falls off three times.

Later, she takes her battle with perfectionism into the realms of math. “No mistakes,” she says before reciting addition from “two plus two equals four,” to “8,388,608 plus 8,388,608 equals 16,770,216.” All the while, Heron is standing on the balance beam and supermodels and brand advertisements, images of “perfection” are projected across her chest.

Herron awkwardly and unsuccessfully twists and turns in attempts to mimic the poses of the strutting models until she is overwhelmed, and slips into the splits on the beam. Well, almost—picking up a ruler and measuring the distance between her body and the balance beam, Herron criticizes that the gap of a few inches between them might as well be the Mississippi River dividing St. Paul and Minneapolis.

“How far can you stretch a limit? How many times can something be repeated and repeated and compounded and compounded until it goes to infinity—or negative infinity?” Later, frantically scratching math problems onto a chalkboard Herron shouts these questions, which seem to apply also to her quest for perfection.

Herron seeks comfort and stability in the world of math rather than in the commercialized world of beauty. In math, a territory of distinct limits and rules, she still seeks perfection but has a little fun. In one scene, Herron bounces between three chalkboards, jotting down equations while singing and dancing to Tiffany’s “I think we’re alone now” like a bubblegum-smacking thirteen-year-old in front of the mirror.

Herron also lets us see her relationships through the looking glass. She blames her lack of long-term relationships on her insecurities. Talking faster and in a frenzy she asks, “What is it that he doesn’t know about me yet that will cause him to leave? Or what is it that he thinks he knows about me, but he doesn’t? When he finds out he’s wrong he’ll leave. Or what is it that he doesn’t know he doesn’t know about me because he doesn’t know he doesn’t know that he’ll leave?”

Another area of insecurity, which she rationalizes with the precision of a mathematician is her weight. “I work out six days a week for an hour and a half a day, so I should be drinking a gallon and a half of water per day and eating six meals per day, each meal consisting of 300 calories—30 grams of protein, 30 grams of carbs, seven grams of fat,” she lists off while jumping rope.

Later, Herron runs to an old-fashioned balancing scale and breaks apart carrots to balance them on each side. When satisfied, she eats a piece, in about six bites, and runs over to weigh herself on another scale. From here she runs to the balance beam, falls into the splits and measures the gap. Not good enough, she repeats this over and over becoming more and more frenzied. She tries different poses on the scale, even a headstand.

Unsatisfied with her failure to reach a balance, Herron rushes back into her concrete world of math. “Four ‘x’ minus 50, 52 minus…” she agonizes, writing equations all over her skin and shirt. The math can’t calm her down though, and she becomes more and more frantic in a culminating scene, where she stops and lists the things she cannot say in her relationships. “I hate you tickling me because you’re touching my fat… I have middle child syndrome… What would happen if I keep going?”

In an anxious, frenetic voice Herron rants, “How does it work, sometimes I think I can’t stop. So I do for a second… but it’s wrong and I’m cheating. And I get this, this feeling like an empty pit in the bottom of my stomach and it’s like a tunnel that I can’t crawl out of and I am trapped by myself! By myself. By myself.” Rubbing the ink off of her skin, pulling her hair over her face Herron bends into her beginning pose on the balance beam. And she can hold it this time.

“I hope that from my performance the audience can see that everyone struggles to some extent to find themselves beautiful… no one is alone in this,” Herron explains in a later interview. “There are so many opinions and perceptions of what is beautiful and who is beautiful,” she says, “but it’s important to find your own beauty.”

The character Herron plays—even the math obsession—is compiled from different times in her own life, she says. A Twin Cities native, she graduated from the University of Minnesota in 2004 with a bachelor’s degree in theater and a minor in math.

“For awhile I wanted to be a mathematician by day, and an actress by night,” Herron says with a laugh.

She has since given up on the math, but did become a professional local actor. She is currently a member of the Pangea World Theater Ensemble, located on west Lake St.

Writing and sharing her solo debut performance was “one of the hardest things I’ve ever done in my whole life,” Herron says. She hopes, though, that by sharing her own struggles and insecurities on stage, she will comfort some of the audience members.

Maybe once we all did know how to find ‘beauty,’ and recognize what is ‘real,’ and ‘perfect.’ A simple nursery story for children, it becomes a more complicated equation as we grow older. In Herron’s final pose on the balance beam, the lights dim black, and the Velveteen Rabbit plays over speakers.

“‘It doesn’t happen all at once,’ said the Skin Horse, the Velveteen Rabbit’s wise friend, an old worn out toy. ‘You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.’”

Herron’s performance was November 9 –11 and was coached by Shawn McConneloug, under a Naked Stages grant and mentorship sponsored by Intermedia Arts and the Jerome Performance Art Commissioning Program.