It’s a truism that live performance, whatever else it might be, is a
collaboration between audience and performer(s). It’s a truism because it’s
true. It identifies a phenomenon I think we’re all aware of when we’re part of
it but which is very difficult to describe or even visualise.
I imagine the shape of the show as
something we hold between us, lightly, as you hold a kite by the fingertips,
singing to the wind in the seconds before you let go. I see it as a sculpture
of looks and words and movements, as though we juggled and shaped it among and
above us, fluid, hollow, transparent as light. I don’t see it as any of those,
exactly, not even all of them together. It's not like that at all. It is kept
in the air, though - suspended, like disbelief, raised like a circus tent and
kept in the air by ropes held in human hands. And like a circus tent, the more
of you there are, the easier it is.
One
of the things I do theatre for, ever since I was a kid, is that collective
awareness, that sense of being part of a whole that is greater than the sum of
us all. What I celebrate in the work I love is the extent to which it feeds
that interconnectedness, what I critique in the work I dislike is the way it
works to thwart or betray it. And I don’t mean that sense of shared presence as
something that’s all sweetness and light, though I think even the bleakest work
owes its audience a degree of nurture, of loving-kindness.
Kindness
because it’s a kindness people do, when they come to see your work, over and
above the price of the ticket, the traveling, the childcare or any other
arrangements they’ve made; the simple act of agreeing to give you their
attention is a kindness and you owe them at least as much in return.
Outside
those immediately connected with the show, 10 people did me that kindness this
week. I can see each face as I write, each gaze that connected with mine and
fed M.A.I.R.O.U.L.A, and I love them all, a little bit, I treasure their
complicity in what I made with them.
But
to return to the elaborate metaphors I launched in the first paragraph, I am
also very tired, and somewhat drained. Because the fewer you are, the more
effort goes into keeping the performance afloat. We did it; my three friends
(the audience) and my producer in what I called a ‘dress run’, but was of
course a performance on Wednesday in the rehearsal room. We did it on Friday at
UCLan; the woman who’d, unfathomably, come all the way from London, my two
friends and fellow UCLan alumnae, the performance–maker I toured with once who
teaches there now, the man whose face I recognised but name I didn’t know, the
event organiser, the usher, the lecturer I never got on with when I was a
student. The show, in spite of everything (my mistakes included – I asked far
more of them than I intended to, of which more in another post) did stay suspended,
and we were in on it together, ‘til the end.
And of course we’re not in the business of perfection, we’re in the business of experiences that live and enrich. So perhaps it shouldn’t bother me so much that I wasn’t able to add as much nuance and detail as I’d like, not even close. That I dropped one of my favourite moments, and failed to shade things that needed shading, just because there was so much of me used up in keeping the show in the air. Those small audiences were tired too, especially Friday's. They were with me all the way to the end, but they were tired. And that though M.A.I.R.O.U.L.A is fed by this week, the show is awake again and ready to fly, I am a hollow thing, drained, a husk, holding some insights to herself from the experience, some tasks, but no euphoria. I did know that performance doesn’t owe me a high. I knew. But having a show go well and feeling empty... well, there it is.
