Member-only story
Am I a real writer in the absence of audience?
Redefining my relationship with Eventual Reader
There can be no performance without the audience.
Is that so? And here, all us would-be artists, trying our hardest to work like we don’t give a damn about the audience. It seems, sometimes, as if the greatest freedom a creator can have is to shrug their bony, hunch-over, nicotine-backwards shoulders and say,
I did not care. I only did it for myself.
We envy them, don’t we? Those daredevil stunt-riders of stagecraft who step off and pronounce, with a sort of distracted amusement, oh, you were there? I hardly noticed. Our music is for ourselves. Our art. In heart, all us creative types long for that ability to say if you like my work, the more the merrier, but really, your thoughts and appreciation are irrelevant to me.
Are they? Can they be? If it’s only me between four walls, do we still call it performing? In certain crafts, the ‘no’ seems evident. A given. I film myself dancing inside my empty, eyeless room and when I play it back, look myself up and down like I’m a mad person. My dance is one of those times when I am at my most creative. Unveils such fragility of spirit and a myriad desires untold even to my closest co-conspirators.
