The Power of a Performer

Climbing the gently inclining ramp that lead onto the stage, my black boots’ petulant opacity clashed with the specular glare of the yellow overhead lights reflecting off the varnished wooden flooring. Following them with my eyes, I wondered why they felt the need to announce my every step with a noisy flap of the soles.

As I approached the grand piano standing portentously centre-stage, the sniffs, shifting fabric of clothing, soles tapping and overlapping ribbons of voices varying in tone and inflection that naturally amassed into a lattice from which no single conversation could be cognised — all faded organically into silence.

Silence; empty, expectant, awaiting something to fill it.

I chanced to peer behind me under the blurry grey shade of my lashes at the rows of pews that spanned the deep carmine carpet that lay beneath the stage. Bottle-green seats were speckled with people in the general manner of a miserly cook’s hasty sprinkling of pepper over the night’s sixtieth dish of limp cabbage leaves. On the front row far left, a pale-faced woman with a neat dark bob and fringe dressed in a simple, shapeless dark grey a-line dress complimented with a standard string-of-pearl necklace was seated beside a smoother-skinned, wider-eyed version of herself with a translucent pearl earring that coruscated modestly and a similar outfit. Eyes scanning the yellow programme booklet, the woman noticed her daughter’s gaze over her shoulder and almost imperceptibly shifted her hand so that the booklet was equidistant on either side between their two pairs of knees.
A few rows behind and adjacent, a pair of navy padded blazer shoulders loomed above the pews, dark eyes peering at me from behind the reflective lenses of rectangular spectacles and a mouth set in a practical hyphen and ahead situated so squarely atop his torso that he may well have swapped his spine for a rod of iron. Slouched beside him, what was presumably his son danced his fingers along the long-sleeve cuffs of his off-white, crumpled shirt. Eyebrows drawn in, he was too preoccupied with the outcome of his own impending performance to glance up for mine.

My shoulders slouched. Upon reaching the piano, I sat, placed my hands on the keyboard, and started. Surrendering my fingers to the memory ingrained in their muscles, my mind drifted gradually from the sound as a single cloud — grey vapours condensing lethargically — emerged at the forefront of my consciousness.
‘The audience is so small.’
During the car journey on the way here, I’d sat daydreamed an abundant audience, marvelling at the numbers of ears ready to hear me play the piano.
‘Barely anyone’s listening.’
Flicking back to the hours upon hours that I’d spent toiling at the piece that I recalled now, my mind recoiled at the sickly shade of the empty pews that comprised the majority of my audience.
‘What’s the point in making an effort?’
I blew a gale in the cloud’s general direction. ‘Focus’, I instructed myself; that was not what I should be thinking in this situation.
The minutes sloughing away like decaying petals, I observed the motions of my fingers similar to how an underpaid patrolling officer scans the empty supermarket on a silent Thursday night shift.

The final note sounded. I couldn’t recall its birth.
Disjointed applause — like a rhythm with notes crossed out. I rose and gave a rapid bend at the hip before descending the stage once more, leaving behind no trace of ever having been there.
Taking the narrow path between the pews, I approached where my parents were seated, my father’s smile and mother’s pearly, resplendent grin growing clearer by the second and my heart sinking lower into shame’s murky waters. I too sank — into the seat beside them.
Twin spotlights beamed down on me from my mother’s chestnut gaze, and I wished that I could divert them to a subject more deserving.
Instead, I pasted on a grin in polite response to my parents’ characteristic supportive praise.

But I knew the truth. I knew that my performance had been a repetition of stagnant practice, vacant of spontaneity or authentic interpretation. After sounding, each note had offered no resistance against the natural fading into oblivion consequent of time’s passage and done just that — evanesced and was forgotten. And I’d allowed them. I’d been content with the smallness of my performance.
When the boy in the crumpled shirt performed, he swept us each from our seats and lead us by a phantasmagorical thread through tales of our minds’ creations. We soared, plummeted, breathed with the rollercoaster of the melodies that sounded when his fingers danced across the keys.
By the end, each of us noticed the threads that he’d surreptitiously darned into our minds.
We could offer no complaint.

I glared down at my fingers. I could have done that. I could have stepped into my listeners’ open ears and implanted a tiny fragment of myself into their brains that would persist after the performance was done and they left the hall.
Regaled with the opportunity to partake in the universe’s gargantuan symphony, to contribute even a grace note, I’d retreated into the safety of a semiquaver rest, barely a breath destined to precede an indefinitely more stimulating melody.

For a moment, I allowed myself to wonder — with the scope of power that a performer holds, what miracles could be possible?

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