V · Coming into the Event
Words 29 · RF@80 Series. Keynote Accompanying Notes Part 5 of 7 – Alexander Technique Congress. August 4th. 2025. Dublin.
Music so wishes to be heard that sometimes it calls on unlikely characters to give it voice, and to give it ears. This wishing-to-be heard calls the Performance Event into manifestation, where music, musician and audience may come together as one, in communion. This communion has six different forms of being and experiencing itself. These forms, or principles, are simultaneously present within the performance. These are the Six Principles of the Performance Event.
The First Principle of the Performance Event:
When people get together, something happens.
When people get together with music, something remarkable happens. This something remarkable has an emergent quality. The Creation continues being created.
The Second Principle of the Performance Event:
In a performance, things come together, mysteriously, and go better than we might anticipate or deserve.
It took me several years of engaging with this principle before I appreciated how much the performance itself wishes to become, to move from potentiality in an eternal moment to actuality within the timestream.
The Third Principle of the Performance Event:
Each performance is unique.
We have never been here before, nor will we be in this moment again. How we collectively engage determines the event.
A performance may take on a life, character and spirit of its own.
The Fourth Principle of the Performance Event:
Any one performance is a multiplicity of performances.
Each of us has our own experience. So, this performance event is as many performances as there are participants. If our experience has an intensity, governed by the quality of our free attention, it remains with us. So, we may return to our experience, perhaps even in ten- or twenty-years’ time, and interrogate that experience. Which may give us answers to questions of which we are presently unaware.
The Fifth Principle of the Performance Event:
The possible is possible.
The possible is possible, because it has to be. In practical terms, an event is governed by contingency: personal and impersonal, inside and outside, subject to the overall conditions of time, place, person and circumstance.
The transformational aspect of performance is governed by the degree to which we are able to be present, and to be who we are. We participate in the performance to the extent that we are able to be who we are. It is possible to be who we are. So, the possible is possible.
We begin with the possible and move gradually towards the impossible.
The Sixth Principle of the Performance Event:
The impossible is possible.
This is the principle I love the most. The possible is not enough, although I am increasingly respectful of simple competence. Engaging the impossible is to call on what is highest in us. So . . .
We begin with the impossible and move gradually towards the possible.
Of the Six Principles of the Performance Event there is a Seventh Principle. The Seventh Principle resides within Silence, so of the Seventh Principle little is spoken. Were I to offer a few words, perhaps . . .
May we trust the inexpressible benevolence of the Creative Impulse.
Alternatively, the simple proposition. . . When I am, here, now so is God. Whatever the God of our understanding.
And now, may we return the Seventh Principle to Silence.