Lead in groups of twenty-five (this seems to be the preferred size for the Crescita) up a stairway and hallway overlooking the Cloitre Saint-Louis courtyard. Below a crowd gathers to hear one of the festival talks. We wait. A door opens at the end of the hall and we are lead into a small chamber.

We sit in one of three rows of chairs set against a black wall and face the performance space: a large white box with one side missing (the “fourth wall” that faces us). This cube is set just within the larger black box of the performance space and it is the whitest white imaginable. It seems to give off a light all its own, the cold incandescence of the institution. Sitting some way back in the twenty-five by fifteen foot box is a small boy. He is the only difference in a field of white. The boy sits on a basketball, dressed in athletic wear (a tee shirt and loose pants), facing upstage, away from us. He must be ten or eleven years old.

We sit watching him.

Slowly he raises his head to look at the blank upstage wall. A moment. He slides to the floor and lies on his back, his fingers tapping an absent-minded rhythm on the floor. He seems bored or waiting for something. Eventually, he rises to his feet and walks a few steps to face the wall again. Waiting. Then he picks up the ball and begins to bounce it calmly. The sound of the ball on the floor is heavy and certain. He is passing time with an object, audibly marking the passing seconds. But soon his attention turns toward the ball more forcefully, involving himself in the play with more intention. He is performing impressive maneuvers, almost masterful, switching hands, under one leg, even trying to dribble between them. We are rapt in attention and he does not for a moment acknowledge us. And then he tosses the ball at the back wall, bouncing it off the surface, kicking the ball or keeping it in the air between one foot and another—a kind of virtuoso performance. Every so often the ball is flung to the back wall and bounces back.

We are completely involved, but expectant, knowing that the wall is not really a wall. The white room sits inside the theatre’s playing space and it too is a character acting something out. The boy stops to catch his breath, lightly tapping on the ball in his hands. He tosses it at the wall, catches it.

And suddenly a voice whispers from somewhere behind the upstage wall: Sebastiano. He faces in its direction. Again: Sebastiano. And Sebastiano. The lights burst out into complete and utter darkness and a huge wave of noise envelopes our bodies, rushes through our system without end, and alongside it—or made by whatever it is—a cool breeze rushes upon us. And we are no longer collective, abstract spectators, but singular and totally isolated in the notch of experience, this cataclysmic sensation. The wind is not the constant drone of a fan, but the play of variation and difference felt in my body alone, a wind buffeting my body. The sounds shift registers, overtones, but in a way that is completely unknowable or retainable. My body immersed in difference’s variation. And I am screaming, perhaps, my hairs on end on every part of my infinite organs, and I am terrified. It is falling. It is the room given way to an empty space and rushing down a corridor without direction. And then, perhaps, I am laughing, gibbering to myself. It is complete darkness everywhere. Timeless. Endless. Not even a waiting, but such thick possibility.

And then the white room is back. The ball is there, wedged along one side of the wall, but the boy is gone. It takes a moment to realize, but the room has tilted slightly. It has changed irrevocably—the world, that is—or it may be that our own position has shifted, that our room is tilted, or that the entire world has shifted and only this one space remains the same? The noise has receded and now seems to hover in the white box, apart from us, away.

The black masking is pulled aside and light streams in…None of us move. We wait until someone comes in and ushers us out. We are dazed, silent.