Essay – What does performing mean to me? (How do I connect with an audience?)

I was in a band club in college, and I wrote about what performing means to me.

 

I am not a professional, but nevertheless, the departmental band, of which I am a vocalist, is intended to perform. Of course, this doesn’t mean that the small clubs in my department are only for performance. But at least in front of others, it is a performance, and I am definitely a performer in front of an audience. The word performer, which means to direct and perform, effectively describes the love and passion for the entire process of planning, preparing, and actually performing a performance, beyond the moment of playing music on stage.
Being a performer is about wanting to connect with others in a different way, whether it’s in person, by writing a post somewhere, by writing a short journal entry on Facebook or Instagram, or by going out into the street and holding a candle. It’s about making your voice heard through music, and it’s about being a performer. It’s about being a performer, and it’s about communicating with the audience.
I remember crying with nervousness after my first performance, which was embarrassing. It was not easy to form a band and put on a concert with a group of like-minded freshmen in a department without a single senior. It was also a struggle to organize the club after receiving new juniors. In the process of barely leading the club, which seemed to collapse at the slightest shake, I couldn’t avoid thinking about the identity of the club as a band. The question, “What is this band and why am I so obsessed with it?” popped into my head dozens of times a day. After a year of intense reflection, I came to the conclusion that “a band is a club that performs, and a performance is a promise to an audience.”
A promise to the audience. It’s more than just the fact that we’re performing when and where. It’s hard to find that in a show where the performers are flirting onstage with each other, making jokes that don’t make sense, and only showcasing their singing and instrumental skills. A performance without a voice and a willingness to interact with the audience on stage is literally just a “talent show”. A feast of unintelligible foreign songs and insincere love songs. Can you call it a performance if the audience is alienated?
The audience is not there to listen to your songs and clap for you. The audience is the final wedge that makes the show and when they are excluded from the show, the show fails. If I want to share an exciting and joyful song with them, I have to think about bringing them joy, and if I want to share my struggles with them through music, I have to think about finding ways to comfort each other. If I simply want to share a good song with my audience, I might have to think about finding a good song. But at the end of the day, it all comes down to “What voice do I want to bring to them?”
That said, creating your own voice is not always easy. I wouldn’t dare to perform a song I wrote or composed myself because I’m not good enough. But at the very least, it’s not too difficult for amateurs to choose a song that they can relate to, enjoy, and feel with the rest of the audience. A friend of mine once told me this story when we were on stage together. The performer should have “tremors”. If you don’t feel any emotion or trepidation when you’re on stage delivering the music, the audience will only hear it as a passing sound.
Of course, a performance shouldn’t just be a space for the performers to inject their emotions and voices into the audience. All communication should be a two-way street, and that’s true for performances as well. However, it’s not always easy for people on stage to hear the voices of those below them. That’s why performances require special means. The atmosphere, and the response, becomes the channel of communication. What the audience feels about the music delivered by the performer is transmitted back to the stage through the “vibe” of the performance, and we have a conversation about the music and our feelings about it.
The performer must be responsible for the communication in this performance. The moment I decide to go on stage, I become a performer, connected to the audience by the promise of a performance. And from that moment until the show is over and the last audience member leaves the theater, I am the performer. A stage that consists of “Wow, I like this song” without thinking about what kind of stage it will be will get applause but no response. A performance without thinking about communicating with the audience is a performance without an audience, and such a performance is not complete. It’s the most basic courtesy to the audience that has taken the time to come and watch you perform.
A month ago, I posted my last performance under the name “Active Duty”. It was my last performance before retirement, so I prepared a lot and did my best, but right before I went on stage, my nerves were at their peak. My throat was in a terrible state, coughing constantly. I could hear my heart beating in my throat as the guitar and bass coordinated notes for a minute. All the struggles, conflicts, and hard work with the club leading up to the performance flashed before my eyes. The long hours of preparation for a brief moment of communication that lasted less than 30 minutes only heightened my nervousness, but the moment I brought my mouth to the microphone and my tightly closed lips parted with the beat of the drums, the tremors of nervousness turned into tremors of joy as the music vibrated through the room. The tremors on stage transmitted the music to the audience. I became an actor playing the music, and the audience, soaking in the music and responding to it, transmitted the shivers back to the stage. It may have been a bit of a stretch to say that I organized the performance to “share a story that you and I can both relate to.”
The audience’s reaction at the end of the performance, “It was like they were talking about me,” confirmed that I was right to create a performance that was meant to connect. The shiver of excitement I felt made my heart race, and I’m sure the audience felt it as it came through the microphone.
Someone might ask me, “Is it really necessary for a small school band to have such serious concerns while performing?” I would say yes. Whether professional or amateur, I am not a solo performer. I am a performer. A performer is someone who creates a show. A performance is a place where I have songs that resonate with me, songs that I want to tell, stories that resonate with many people, stories that I want to share with everyone. And in a performance, there is ‘me’, ‘the audience’, and ‘we’. A space where the performer plays music on stage and the audience responds to the music under the stage. That space is a place of communication. And if any one of us can lie in bed late at night, close our eyes, and suddenly remember my performance from the evening, then I have succeeded.