I met this band one night at the 42nd st. Times Square stop and I had to stop and take a picture. They are called the Meetles and their musical style is very reminiscent of the Beatles, as is their name. A huge crowd of people were surrounding them. So, I could only see the band play from behind the shoulders of others. I didn’t want to bother people and try to squeeze myself to the front. However, I slowly liked the view back there. The crowd becomes part of the performance. It’s exhilarating to see things from behind, watching heads bobs in unison, watching a baby smile, watching a cantankerous old man walk right across the face of the performers.
Now that I think of it, at almost every performance the class went to together, other people’s shoulders blocked my view of the main performance. At the Metropolitan Opera, rows and rows of people separated us from Gandhi. At Carnegie Hall, we were again at the uppermost seats. Even off-Broadway, many people separated us from Freud and C.S. Lewis. However, we got an experience that others didn’t. We saw people mesmerized by the Sanskrit lyrics of Satygraha. We saw the whole hall erupt in audience when the piano solo ended. We saw people lean back on their seats and laugh when Freud made a joke. At the backside of an audience, we got to see the whole surroundings. We got to see the emotions of people.
Sometimes, the sight of thousands of people watching a performance is more breath-taking than the performance itself. At each of the performances we went to, the greatest emotion I took home was that I was part of a huge whole enjoying a performance together. My mind was in the collective experience rather than just on the experience. I think the beauties of the shared experience is why live performances are always better than the recorded ones. The music may be better in the studio, but then you won’t be able to share the experience with the people in the concert.
Humans need to look at art together more. I am often perturbed by how many people wear headphones in the subway. They think that they’re enjoying good art alone, but from personal experience, even a mundane song heard with a group of people is better than the best song heard alone. The duty of art is to bring humanity together, and how will it ever achieve its goal if there are so many electronic venues for art that keep the people apart? I know that I stopped plugging my earbuds into my Ipod.
