I was so excited for this month’s topic - performance.
Our culture seems fixated on authenticity. We strive to show up as our ‘full self’ at work, ‘remove our masks’ in relationships, ‘speak our truth’ in conversation, all while avoiding ‘performative’ displays, lest we be seen as shallow or half-hearted.
It’s something I’ve been thinking about since I read ‘Talk to Me’ (a must-read) by actor and playwright Anna Deaveres Smith. In her words, “I actually think it’s not enough to ‘just be you’ in a bigger than life experience. In life and on stage, I think you have to rise to those occasions."
Sometimes, life demands that we access and express parts of ourselves that are hidden or hard to reach. While masks can be used to conceal or manipulate, they can also be used to activate our different qualities and characteristics - revealing the multifarious nature of our identities.
In this way, performance can be an invitation into deeper self knowledge and expression.
For me, this conversation reclaimed performance as a vehicle for deeper authenticity. A real performance takes guts. It’s scary. It may be fictional, but it always gets at something real. As always, I’m so grateful to the curious people who came along to drink tea and explore the wisdom of our everyday reflections.
The multidimensional self.
In the age of social media, while everyone’s having their 15 minutes of fame, we’ve built up a collective hostility towards the ‘performative’. But what are we really rejecting? As Milhara said, we’ve all played different characters and roles throughout our lives. In many ways, transgressing our seemingly stable character can bring a feeling of freedom and exhilaration, particularly if that side of ourselves feels unusually bold or vibrant. Even if only for a moment, performance can help us realise aspects of our character that are buried beneath the surface. Maybe, clinging to a single ‘authentic’ self is the real act of inauthenticity?
I am kaleidoscopic: I’m fascinated by my sparkling mutations Clarice Lispector
Performance is our nature
We tend to consider performance in very human terms - plays, concerts, films, sport, performance art. But as Peter asked, what about the performance of nature? When we get down to performance at the elemental level - energy, growth, movement, combustion, mastery, expression - it’s hard not to see performance all around us. In Spring, our parks explode into boisterous displays of colour, form and fragrance - it’s the natural world at the height of its creative potential. Funny, that we don’t deride the plants for being ‘performative’. Have they betrayed their essential nature? No, we let them shape shift across the seasons, expressing their multifarious characters with the changing conditions. So why do we demand a singular, stable ‘authentic’ self for ourselves?
One of the magical things about performance is its ephemerality. Performance happens in the perishing instant. A good performer holds us captive to the moment, while a good audience pours their attention into the present, gifting the performer their unwavering focus. This two way exchange carries an electric charge. You know the feeling - you could hear a pin drop, or slice the air with a knife. These moments are rare, they stay with you long after the show.
There’s a feeling in a performance, that something happens. We don’t walk out the same way we walked in. Milhara described this as an electric sensation, a nervousness or a shock. Nathaniel called it “the alchemy of performance”. We threw around words like electricity, energy, combustion, movement and manifestation to describe this feeling. In a culture that often resists emotions, performance gifts us precious moments to actually feel something.
The authentic audience
While a performer can hide behind a mask, so can the audience. As Peter said, there’s an art to being an honest audience member. It requires our presence and authenticity for something magic to happen. When we step into the darkness of a theatre or concert hall, there’s an opportunity to really give ourselves over to the show and give the performance permission to change us. As Claire said, this kind of deeply present awareness can make us feel we’re becoming one with the crowd. Another opportunity to ‘lose ourselves’ and become one with a larger identity.
