For a long time, I counted performances. It was a way of measuring the year… how many premieres, how many festivals, how many trips to see work outside Lisbon. At some point I stopped counting with that purpose. The numbers kept growing, but what interested me was no longer the quantity. It was what the quantity was doing to my eye.
Watching more than a hundred performances a year is not a neutral biographical fact. It is a practice that transforms how you read a scene, a light cue, an entrance onto the stage. Like any intense practice, it has effects you don’t choose.
The first is some loss of innocence. There is a kind of surprise that only exists before you know a field well. The first time you see an object theatre piece, the first time you witness a dance performance where the body is pushed to its limit, there is an openness that is also ignorance. Over time, that openness changes in nature. It doesn’t disappear, but it is no longer naive. It becomes informed. What you lose in immediate wonder you gain in the ability to understand what is really at stake.
The second effect is a tolerance for risk. Watching a great deal of work, including work that fails, teaches you to distinguish interesting failure from empty failure. A performance that doesn’t land but was genuinely attempting something tells me far more than a technically accomplished piece that risks nothing. Over time, I grew suspicious of technical perfection when it exists in place of artistic necessity.
The third is harder to name. It has to do with attention. Watching performances regularly demands a kind of presence that everyday life rarely requires. An hour and a half without a phone, without interruption, body still and mind active. That repeated exercise changes something in the way you inhabit time. Not only inside the theatre. Outside it too.
What changed in my eye, concretely? I pay more attention to what is not on stage than to what is. To the decisions of absence, the choices of silence, to what an artist decided not to show. That is often where the most interesting thinking lives. I also learned to separate what affects me personally from what works artistically. They are different things, and sometimes it’s easy to confuse them.
There is one last thing that a hundred performances a year teaches, and it is rarely said: humility before the process. What you see in two hours is the result of months of work you never see. That awareness changes your relationship to judgement. It doesn’t make it more lenient. It may in fact make it more demanding. But it strips away the easy arrogance of someone who evaluates without imagining what it cost to get there.
I still watch performances. I no longer count.
Photo: © Davide Ragusa | Unsplash
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