Performance

Why do we, as human beings, feel a need to perform? I would honestly say that I believe that most living people, at some point in their lives, feel the need to perform. I mean this in the broadest of terms. Performing can be telling an adventurous story to family around the dinner table at Thanksgiving or it can be teaching in a classroom, performing for your students. Performance is hardly limited to actors and dancers on stages or musicians in concert halls and ampitheatres.

We need to perform. Here are some of my thoughts on why people need to do it:

1. Performance teaches. This one is simple. When we perform we learn both as the performer doing something which therefore helps that knowledge to solidify in our brains, but we also teach something to another person. Performance is a way of teaching people and a means of learning.

2. Performing feeds our ego. How many concerts have you attended where the conductor of a choir or orchestra feels the need to take several bows which often seemingly last as long as the concert? Or how about the high school drama teacher who gets invited on stage at each performance and is given a bouquet of flowers from her students? Or even the staging of a curtain call for a play? Sometimes these things are more elaborate than the rehearsal process. Good or bad, performing has a natural tendency to feed our egos, to make us feel important, special, appreciated. If we didn't care about recognition, we wouldn't bow at the end of concerts or plays.

3. On the other, more idealistic side of the spectrum, performance allows us to express that which is most "us." It is an offering up of ourselves to the world, our voice, our body, our movement, everything. Performing provides a way for us to express our experience as human beings in ways that writing or painting or sculpting or speaking cannot. A performance requires the whole self. It is risky, it is terrifying, but we must do it for we have something we must share with the world.

I know there are many other reasons why human beings perform, but these are three very broad categories that I have observed in my time in theatres, choirs, and churches (not to mention playgrounds, camping grounds, and baseball fields). I believe we all have varying combinations of the "ego-serving desires" of performance and the "offering of our selves to the world" side of performance. I'll admit I strive for the latter and much prefer to witness the latter when I see a production.

So the next time someone tells you, "I'm following my dream. I just have to perform!" Think about their motivations for this choice. Is it to learn something about the world or to teach something to others? Is this need driven more honestly by a desire to be famous, to be part of the in-crowd, to be considered elite, to be envied? Or might you be able to see a need of this person to share themselves with their world, to express fully what they see, feel, touch, taste, smell, and hear. To desire above all else to inspire wonder, fear, love, hate, action, questions, connections for others.

Let this be a our goal in all performance. I need to share this. I need for you to know this. I need to perform.