This article features spoilers from the Revue Starlight TV show and movie.

The theater is the only place in the world where a gesture, once made, can never be made the same way twice.

This is one of the first things you learn if you've ever been in a play. You may enunciate the words correctly and make the correct gestures you've done in so many dress rehearsals ago, but you'll never get the same kick out of it.

It doesn't matter if everything goes smoothly -- the backstage hands don't screw up, the actors don't flub their lines, and the lights and sounds are on cue -- something will and can be different: the heat of the lights, the way the audience stares at you, the weather outside, the one or two coughs echoing around the room, and the shiny smartphone screens that glare into your eyes.

I played the lead in a high school play. My classmate played the other. She forgot her lines and whispered, "Sorry," as we looked at each other in the middle of the stage. As the plastic chairs began to creak, the silence in the room paradoxically grew. In my peripheral vision, I see darkness where the audience should be. Could the audience, especially her parents, tell that something had gone wrong?

I said something that brought the performance back to the script. Did I save the performance? I knew it wasn't perfect, but it seemed coherent. All I could remember was that she was with her parents after the performance.

This ambiguity, this uncertainty that plagues the psyche of a performer is hard to express in our current archival culture. In our popular imagination, our media records the best: hold an iPhone and you can archive your college friend's greatest juggling performance. But in reality, it only records a moment -- it doesn't record the unique conditions that made this one performance you recorded possible, because you can't compare it to other performances they've made elsewhere. There are no definitive editions, only variations.

Unsurprisingly, this creates contradictions between performances, between the actors who have their own idealized vision of how it should all go down, and between audience expectations. Such a force can become violent and alienating. Every performer has to put everything they've got into every performance, because they're all going to be different and there's always something to improve.

As a result, there are no perfect performances. The performers have to keep producing their best work. Creative labor never ends: it is demanded in every performance until it's all over.

Can the audience see between the curtains that the actors are living and dying on stage with each new performance?

The Revue Starlight TV show is an attempt to reveal this dynamic via duels. Inspired by Takarazuka Revue, the show focuses on the 99th class in Seisho Music Academy and their

It is sea of contradictions. It stands on its own, proud of addressing the many struggles actors have and resolving them without the need for overall coherence. Outwardly, its structure is uneven, even lacking. But it is satisfied: it doesn't apologize, it acts, and it ends with a confident smile.

Speaking with Momoyo Koyama, the actress behind protagonist Karen Aijo, was a particularly illuminating experience for him. Koyama had opened up about her struggles to get into Karen’s shoes; how, as a somewhat pessimistic person, she struggled to become an impeccable bright protagonist. Karen is the very embodiment of a protagonist, but that friction between the flawed human nature of the actor and a role that feels so artificially perfect got him wondering—what if Karen was acting as well? That impulse got him to dig deeper into the character, unearthing her worries and even the hypocrisies that he concluded the original series with. And so we have Revue Starlight The Movie, the story about Karen’s death and rebirth: gone is the girl who simply wanted to star in one specific play alongside her friend, reborn into a true actress who yearns for the stage.