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I’ve been reflecting lately on the difference between flow and performance. Recently I completed a group performance called “portal” that was developed with three other flow artists. Our creation process was improvisation-based. We focused on the intention behind each piece, on who our characters were, put on some music and played with our toys. Moments of flow were reached, and that’s how we found many of our movements with the props as well as our movement around the stage. But then it came time to choreograph, the mind switched to: “This sequence here, this sequence there, we split apart on the 3rd 8 count…” It becomes fitting uncovered flow into a shape, a container. The routine becomes primary.

Certainly in performance one can reach a state of flow – I’ve read accounts of ballet dancers and musicians reaching such a place, for example. I personally have never had such an experience while performing. Something about the presence of the audience inhibits the part of my brain that can just let go and I’m too focused on remembering the choreography or thinking “what do I do next” if it’s a freestyle. The same thing happens in the presence of a camera. I’ve posted a lot of videos but none of them have captured my freest flow.

Part of me wonders if it’s a matter of rehearsal. If the choreography was practiced to the point where you don’t even have to think about it. I’ve done many choreographed pieces but I have to admit I’ve never really gotten quite to that point. It somehow seems antithetical to Flow to do the same thing over and over and over again. But perhaps that repetition leads to Flow? Perhaps Flow isn’t all about improvisation?

My problem is after a certain amount of rehearsal I start to get bored with the piece I’m rehearsing. I pull back a bit then because I don’t want the piece to feel lifeless or done by rote on stage. But maybe that is a stage that needs to be worked through? Maybe on the other side of that boredom is the place where Flow blossoms in the presence of witnesses?

There’s a mode of performance in the field of Drama Therapy known as the Self-Revelatory Performance. In it, the performer crafts the piece around a particular issue they’re struggling or dealing with in their lives. The idea though, is to reach a moment of emotional breakthrough during the actual performance, with the audience bearing witness. There is no resolving it with a nice little bow ahead of time in the script. I’ve not done one of these, but I imagine the process is kind of scary. It requires a level of vulnerability that putting on a “performance persona” often doesn’t allow. In most flow performance, the performance persona is one of confidence, even sexiness, or it’s comedic or occasionally contemplative. Not vulnerable.

To drop into Flow, I don’t think that vulnerability, per se, is required. But that openness to whatever comes up is. In performance, that openness has to be combined with having what you’re about to do so embodied that you don’t have to think about it. It seems contradictory but maybe that’s just going with the flow. (sorry for the bad pun. But not really.)

Some interesting points Lara. Performance is always to some degree artifice. Yes. It’s an inherent quality I think.

Miss Saturn made an interesting point in her workshop at the 2010 Hoop Convergence on the difference between entertainment and art. She characterized it as: the entertainer is focused primarily on the experience of the audience, whereas the artist is primarily focused on his/her own process and/or vision. That is not to say that an entertainer cannot be artful or that an artist’s work can’t be entertaining. But the entertainer aims first and foremost to entertain the audience. The artist, on the other hand, is trying to express a particular vision or experience of the world…one could even say some “truth” that is generally more felt than can be articulated intellectually. The artist hopes the work will connect with audiences, perhaps provoke, perhaps inspire but the primary goal usually was, to make the work. To say whatever it was that could only be said by making the work.

For me the distinction between the two comes down to the expectations/experience of the audience. Entertainment tends to be a passive experience for the audience; “here we are now, entertain us”. They don’t want to think about what they’re seeing, really, they want to be dazzled, or turned on, or laugh.

Art, on the other hand, demands active engagement from the audience. They may in fact still be dazzled or turned on or laugh, but they are also thinking about what they’re seeing, making connections to other works or to events/issues in their own lives. Their own fears and dreams even. There’s something more going on than just “being entertained.” (I think the active engagement art demands/requires is partly why it is so marginalized in our culture.)

All this is a tangential way of answering your reframe of my question: “How do I inject my (performance, entertainment) with me, with flow, with what I experience outside of this stage?” The answer: make art!

Context is key of course. I look for art in Flow Show acts, for example, but if I wanted to book a performer for a party I probably would want more entertainment than art.