Performance
Performance is the moment of birth for the stage artist, the moment when months of labor culminate and the moment when the whole world can witness the fruits of that labor. We spend years upon years trying, training and perfecting in order to enter the stage. But what does the artist hope to achieve with performance, what message is she/he trying to convey? The answer is manifold. Richard Schechner aptly labeled ιnterlocking spheres of performance such as:
– To entertain
– To create beauty
– To heal
– To teach or persuade
– To foster community
– To deal with the divine and the demonic
These spheres of performance can interlock but they can also conflict with each other. We can also think of many other spheres not touched upon be Schechner. To heal you might have to face the demonic or to witness fear and pain rather than beauty. But sometimes you can heal by seeing beauty unfold before you. You can try to teach or persuade an audience but sometimes you might have to bring in the divine and sometimes the demonic to do so. However, you might fail to teach if you do not foster community.
Out of all these spheres and elements comes the experience of each performance, each one being a mix of ingredients that make it unique. And that is what makes it so fulfilling and fascinating, each performance is never the same one and never will be. And that’s why we keep going.
«… Ιncreasingly, I am reluctantly headed towards a powerful horizontal current, the site where time moves at such a high speed that our breathing still has to accelerate for us as human beings to survive. And it was in our slow exhalation, the place where the feeling of deep spiritual energy resides. In a world that is moving so fast, with the development of technology and information, I am somehow willing to go against the flow to understand what it means to be connected not only vertically but also spiritually.».
