The Guitar Came Straight Back

In the compulsory round of the final, eight contestants first listened just once to the same unfamiliar song, then took the stage in sequence. No one could cut the recording in advance into a sixty seconds suited to themselves; the music was placed there first, and only then did the body catch up to it on the spot.

When one performer fell, his left hand was still moving along that horizontal stretch of air in front of his chest, while his right hand dropped back to his waist. His body lowered, tilted, and finally came close to the floor, yet the division of labor between the two hands did not break down. The slide after the fall did not fling it away, and when he rose he did not need to search for his hand position again. That stretch of guitar neck rose with his body; when he bent forward again, the strumming hand still fell in its original area. Not every movement looked like real playing, but the same object stayed in his arms throughout. That empty space was very thoroughly protected. After watching for a while, I began to believe: the guitar can be fake, but it cannot be lost halfway through playing.

That judgment did not last until the end of the next performer. At first, his hands were also separated in front of him, and the horizontal body of the guitar was clearly discernible. Then he pressed toward the edge of the stage, both hands reaching out together toward the audience, and the outline originally enclosed by his arms scattered. Before the outline disappeared, the left and right hands still had different duties; after they reached outward, the two arms did the same thing. The direction of the body changed too. What it faced was no longer the empty space in its arms, but the audience below the stage. The music did not pause for the instrument’s disappearance; he kept crouching and rising, and the following heavy strikes landed on gestures in front of the chest and abdomen and on opened arms. In those few seconds, neither hand was still left on the guitar neck, nor was it possible to see where the guitar had been put. Yet not long afterward, one hand had already turned horizontal again, the other had dropped back to the waist, and a brief strumming motion followed. The playing posture had been restored, but there had been no act of picking anything up in between.

In another performance, a green wig whipped over a shoulder, and a patterned skirt lifted with the heavy strikes. Shoulders, steps, and expressions facing the audience pushed the song forward; the two hands would occasionally separate in front of the waist, and just as the outline of the guitar appeared, the next step had already scattered it. She had not forgotten that she was taking part in an air guitar competition, and that guitar had not completely left the stage. But after calling the previous omission crisp, I still could not find the second from which this one began to have been away too long. The image did not provide that boundary.

When I saw the final ranking, I almost obtained another convenient explanation: the person who kept guarding the guitar all along came third, while the person who often let the guitar disappear won the championship. Written this way, the champion would seem to have found the most accurate measure between two kinds of movement, while third place would seem to have slipped because he guarded it too earnestly. But this was the cumulative result of two rounds, and third place had not failed either; from this compulsory song alone, there is no way to know what exactly the ranking rewarded. The ranking did not testify on behalf of that explanation.

The competition had already ended, but what was hardest to forget was not where the champion stood, but that small missing segment of movement before it. The two hands first left the guitar, the body continued forward, and the next time, both hands had already returned to the playing position. In between, there was never that bend at the waist to pick up the guitar.