Shape of friendship. I went to my friend, David Finnigan’s, performance piece at the Barbican Theatre, last week.
I took my 10 year old. From what I could tell, there were no other young people in the audience which was a shame in many respects.
A shame because this form of theatre is more relevant, more exciting, more dramatic than, say, a standard piece of Shakespeare performed in a standard type of way.
A shame because if we want to engage young people in live performance, we are still an art form where liveness and vividness counts.
You can observe this in the music gig scene which is still strong.
I also think you can engage young people in serious, fun and thoughtful art from a very young age and that’s better for everyone. In a world where rich nations are - in part - moving more digital and remote, then the importance of liveness and vividness increases.
The Barbican is a living piece of visual and performing art history. Considered a brilliant example of Brutalist architecture, it was considered by the Queen in 1982:
“...one of the wonders of the modern world”
The Barbican is built from and atop ruins from World War 2, atop ruins which stretch to Roman times, atop ruins which stretch back further.
The site is within a javelin distance of where a Roman Amphitheater used to be. There is history that stretches back and back…
Performers and audiences on occasion are sensitive to this history. I have worked in and around the Barbican area, on and off, for 20 - 30 over years.
By no means, do I see even a small sliver of everything at the Barbican but the space has held some of the most profound pieces of human expression that have occurred in modern times across music, dance, theatre and arts.
And so into that space we walk.
David is a friend and we have collaborated. You can listen to us/read on podcast here and below.
It’s a privilege then to see how a show develops (I saw it in one of its earliest incarnations) and live with its creative’s hopes and fears.
Shows performed by friends then have a special resonance. You can not watch them as strangers any more than you can watch friends kiss differently from strangers arriving at a station.
This echo plays into the lives of those who create – and we all create – so plays into all our lives.
My son can have a level of emotion and experience richer for knowing David. Especially in a piece such as this which plays to stories in David’s life.
The show I saw might well be the last time the performance is ever staged.
Certainly, it is the last time it will be staged in that time and place and audience (and so we can suggest all performance is fleeting like this). There is an aphorism which comes about in Open Space and UnConference that people in the room are the ones that matter and thus we can only have the conversations we can have.
Live performances have these lives and these lives are mostly short-lived.
There is a sensation joyous and deep in experiencing live and vivid art with other humans in a fashion never to be repeated.
At its best an urgency and richness which changes you and leaves you changed forever more.
Unlike books or even visual art, performance is not an object to last, performance is a shared experience.
Books and paintings, arguably, are not completed without a reader or a viewer but they can have a life of their own.
Performance lives when experienced together. Anything else is mostly only rehearsal.
Perhaps that is partly why performance through storytelling or dancing seems to have been around before writing and likely at the dawn of homo sapiens.
There is a sadness as well for events that can not be replayed. There is a part of us that wishes to capture part of that dream and bottle the feelings as keepsakes.
Therein lies all the countless visual snaps and videos of live gigs and events hardly ever to be viewed again. The liveness was in the moment and – if we were to be honest – never to be captured again. Live performance shared is a singular experience. Those video snaps are wasted. (Be like the lady at the top photo).
I am both happy and sad then to be part of a final showing. There near the beginning of its journey. There near its end.
David is a newer friend. We first met in the tail end of the last decade. I cherish being able to make new friends and create experiences together.
I cherish that we collaborate deeply in making art.
But, we also tell ourselves the myths that all our types of friendship last forever. Relationships form and crumble. Made and re-made.
Some burnout due to their intensity, others fade due to accidental or intentional neglect. We can be sorry for these things too.
I still have friends from school, but I think I have lost many more. That is not to devalue the friendships when those relationships are alive.
And like that – friendships also are like live performance – they thrive in shared experience, they can end in sadness and in joy, they can go on long lifetime journeys.
We can fool ourselves about them too because someone always dies, and shows always end.
Still – we can and should nurture and celebrate them where we have them.
Tend, repair and grow – and dare I say perhaps prune – like flabby parts of performance – parts which are already dying
But, if possible, in full recognition of the joy they gave while alive.
What are the shapes of our friendships and relationships? Pocket-shaped, world-shaped, love shaped?
We would not think to measure and manage them.
And so… my tangent into “ESG” - these are the intangible (though sometimes tangible) often difficult, sometimes impossible to measure parts of business, they have a shape and importance, but exactly what that shape is… well perhaps like the shape of friendship.
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