On Slipping (2025)

It is late afternoon and I am driving west down Parramatta road, directly into the setting sun. I squint through my dirty windscreen as the Sunday traffic groans forward; the glass is smeared, glowing gold and near impossible to see through. Behind me is a teal Toyota Landcruiser ute with P plates. I check my rearview mirror a few times, concerned that the intensity of light in the inexperienced driver's eyes might cause him to rear-end me, but each time I look back he is giving me plenty of space. I stop at the traffic lights which turn off towards Summer Hill. The sun is especially sharp here, at the crest. As I wait, I look again into my mirror. I see, in searing detail, an image of the inside of the ute—lit as if with a spotlight, crisp like a studio photograph, framed twice-over by my mirror and by the teal edging around the ute's windscreen.

In this image, there is a boy behind the wheel and a girl in the passenger seat. My guess is that they are around nineteen years old. He looks like a typical Western Sydney teenager—mullet, sunburnt nose—and she has dyed blonde hair and a piercing in her lip. I am immediately endeared to them; their naïve invincibility at odds with the awkwardness of their new adulthood. The boy is laughing and smoking a cigarette. He looks over at the girl and I can tell in the way that he does this that he is in love. She is looking down, probably at her phone, while they have a conversation that seems regular and easy. At the edge of the image: a chorus of engines, the smell of exhaust, the lingering heat of the day. When she looks up, responding to something he has said, the boy meets her eyes with such uninhibited adoration that I catch my breath; the frame tightens, everything else recedes into blur. And, just as the light turns green, I watch as he licks his thumb and reaches over and gently wipes something from the corner of her mouth.

Though it lasted only a few seconds and took place years ago this is an image that I return to often. It holds something beyond language, something that I can only write around in circles and never quite touch: a quality of realness that we do not usually see in strangers—a sincerity that surfaces only when we think no one is watching, when we just are. No show; no bullshit.

What the image captured, I think, was a lapse in performance. For Shakespeare, "All the world's a stage, / And all the men and women merely players.” Variations on this metaphor—that we are often, in some way or another, performing—are well-worn in philosophy and sociology. It’s a way to talk about the fact that authenticity isn't the norm in social interaction. That we tend to conceal ourselves under the various nouns we are bound up with and the typical behaviours that are prescribed to them—teacher, mother, student, pedestrian, motorist. This is a helpful function of our social fabric, of course, but the fallout is a kind of flattening of affect; a formulaic glaze spread over human interaction. Dramaturgy, a theory in sociology, takes Shakespeare's metaphor quite literally: we have frontstage and backstage behaviour—who we are when we think everyone is watching, and who we are when we think that no one is. Frontstage, we are on, but backstage, in private or with people we trust, we afford ourselves more freedom—we are unguarded, less tactical. The image of the couple in the ute was a backstage moment that I had secret audience to; a slip between stages, a rippling of a curtain in the wings.

It’s not the why behind these slippages that make them so compelling, but the way they puncture the mundane. Picture this: A woman crying in the supermarket, inexplicably holding an orange. Is it that the orange reminded her of something or someone? That she has just received some terrible news? Or maybe just that there are no lemons and she really wanted to make a lemon meringue pie? The reason is inconsequential—it’s the image that catches us, like rain coming through a crack in the wall, something breaks, but the world is more dynamic for it, or at least more honest.

Sydney, like every city, is overwhelmingly public; a sprawling frontstage. Here, players are compressed together. Apartment walls are thin, toilet stall doors don’t go all the way down. From my bedroom, I can see into four different backyards. I can hear when the couple next door argue, smell what they are cooking for dinner. Sometimes I watch a neighbour I have never met hang out his washing, and I wonder if they ever see me—tea in hand, half-awake, or lit up at night before I draw my curtains: a one-woman show in the dark. In the city, there is always an audience. This is exhausting. Fatigue sets in; the edges of the stages begin to fray.

I've been observing where the exhaustion shows; where we falter. Late on a weeknight in the CBD, an executive leans against a dirty wall in a suit, biting his nails, stress bowing his posture. A foggy train carriage at peak hour in summer, makeup melting off women's faces, a sort of carnality bursting through the seams of uniforms and office-wear. And increasingly, as the digital overlays the tangible, the rules of performance blur. An influencer dances in front of a tripod and ring light on the Opera House steps, performing for the hyperreality that glows from her phone. I see myself from above on a security monitor at 7-Eleven; I adjust. Context is eroding, gestures are becoming more obscure.

In theatre-slang, these slippages in show are referred to as corpsing; when an actor unintentionally breaks character mid-performance—goes off-script, laughs, lets something of themselves through. Imagine the tomb scene in Romeo and Juliet. Juliet has just awoken to find her beloved Romeo dead beside her. The mise-en-scène is primed for tragedy—blue light, long shadows, rising strings—and just as she reaches for the dagger, Romeo’s corpse bursts into involuntary laughter. Corpsing—slipping—is never in isolation. Its power lies in how it reverberates through the scene, contagious like a yawn. The actress playing Juliet stutters, suppressing a smile. The audience’s disbelief is refreshingly unsuspended. There is an amusing irony here: to corpse (verb) is to bring something that looks dead back to life.

But can we corpse—can we slip—intentionally? I went to Luna Park hoping to provoke such a moment in myself; to see if a jolt of adrenaline might loosen my body from its performance. I am standing in line at the ticket counter. It is the sort of overcast October day that traps the heat—no wind, the sky a single sheet of grey. They are back-burning up in Hornsby; smoke folds into the smell of spun sugar and fryer oil. Around me, the carnival spins: carousel music, screaming children, crying gulls. I'm here to find an ending for this essay, but I know this is a flawed plan. The paradox of capturing a slippage is that turning the lens on oneself seems to collapse the possibility—like a double-slit experiment, the act of observation alters the outcome. Still, I want to try.

At the counter, a boy with ginger hair and a piercing through the centre of his bottom lip explains, in the soft tone of someone trained to placate vexed parents, that you can't buy a single ticket—only the full-day pass, sixty dollars. This is too steep for my "research," so I thank him and step aside. Disappointed, I linger around, watching as a nearby ride spins so fast the riders' screams lag behind their bodies. I wait for revelation, but nothing gives. I walk the perimeter—past warped mirrors, past a sea of rubber ducks floating in a circle—still hunting for something to salvage, some neat turn of phrase. Eventually, I leave. By the harbour, old men fish beneath the bridge—patient and unhurried. Eucalypt smoke rolls across the water. I watch them for a while, then keep walking.