The Essence of a Great Performance

Many people mistake performing as a self-indulgent act. But I think of it as naming an arrival and then getting myself and my audience there together. My piano students will appreciate how I make them audiate and visualize the arrival note of a scale before they even start.

Performing for my audience is about giving my presence away, fully and intensely. The music happens in the space between us, which we maintain with our mutual attention and respect. People are surprised by the priority of the “we,” because they imagine being on stage as enjoying a celebrity kick of fame and glory. It is actually a place of serving at great risk, putting everything on the line, and trying to communicate to listeners what they need to know from the score. It is about making the moments in the music so obvious that they can't help but hear the essence.

For non-performers, the ludicrous idea of wanting to be scrutinized under a spotlight makes no sense. Sometimes I hear people talking about performance as an inauthentic bid for attention and public adoration. But the truth, for me, is that every performance is a bid for human connection. In the isolation of my youth, as a little kid who carried a strange love for Western classical music, and as an immigrant trying to understand why my classmates wasted every free moment at a mall, I lived for the moments when I could create a time and space for everyone to connect.

To perform well requires listening well, and that translates to any field. Without listening to the intent of the composer, the energy of the audience, the acoustics of the hall, the response in my own soul, we would not be able to integrate all these details into one unified vision. Then there would be no satisfactory action.

If we approach performing as a collaboration with our audience and community, we become more charged, focused, and visionary in our pursuit. To be sure, some celebrities and politicians perform as an extension of their self-aggrandizement, but they will be trapped by a never-ending metric of spectacle and entertainment. Rather, we can choose to be vulnerable to the world (listen to Brené Brown) as the only way towards meaningful satisfaction. That is what it feels like when I go on stage.

I want to encourage people around me to become aware of our innate appetite for human connection for our well-being. More than ever, people don’t return eye contact or respond when I reach out to them, as if I was just another avatar. The value of giving our presence to each other is being lost in our age of virtual reality. Of course, there are ways that social media is helpful in creating community, but it cannot substitute for live interaction. For both our individual and collective health, we need to understand the value of interacting with the live person physically standing in front of us.

“To perform well” is not to be perfect, calculated and staged. It is to consciously decide to be the best version of your authentic self so you can connect, whatever your mood may be.

So, this article is asking for your involvement as parents, relatives, teachers, and peers to intentionally build our social connection.

1. Perform at your best every day by aiming for a specific aspirational goal! Be the voice that explains your values and why they are so important.

2. Call out the moments of disconnection with family or friends. Get meta and bring awareness to others. Name it in the moment. Say "Did you hear me?" Or "Are we connecting?" Or "Do you see that I'm giving you a compliment and I want to encourage you?" Cue others to give their attention to each other. Encourage eye contact.

3. Expect mistakes and disappointments to happen — that’s life — but don’t let it make you miss out on the next beat. A great performance is a journey.