On Showing Off
Do we have a duty to display our talents whenever we can?
Hi dear Ornament Enthusiasts.
Today’s post is mostly about my fear - or possibly mistrust - of those pianos you find in train stations, and the conflicted relationship I still have with making myself visible, or putting myself on display as if to ‘prove’ myself (whatever that means). Perhaps you will relate to some aspects of trying to bring your own treasures into the light.
Before we get stuck in though, 2 announcements:
My new scratch show Bad Attitudes is on NEXT WEEK at Camden People’s Theatre fo the Calm Down Dear festival of feminism. (please note new date)
BAD ATTITUDES
Tickets for Gone to the Dogs at the Edinburgh Fringe are now on sale! My maudlin and misguided Britannia will be singing her way through August for the full run, every day except Wednesdays (solitary crying day).
GONE TO THE DOGS
Our fundraiser is still open for a week if you’d like to contribute. Remember to drop a comment saying it’s for Gone to the Dogs (or leave blank if you’re happy to contribute to the collective fund for all 5 Thistle and Rose Arts shows).
If you’re not able to make it up in person this summer, this is a wonderful way to help support my work. Thank you so much.
You can find more information about the shows on my Instagram.
Now, on with the show!
(but what if I don’t want to?)
I don’t know if it’s because of the coronation last month, or the sun being out (this always sends us a bit loopy in the UK) but I’ve been thinking a lot lately about pageantry and showing off. About objects of beauty and treasures and who gets to own them and whether you are duty bound to display them if you do.
In the last few weeks I’ve been darting in and out of museums, doing some research for Bad Attitudes, which is just a scratch performance at the moment, but one I’m hoping to develop into a full show to take to Edinburgh next year. So I’ve been looking at old vases and statues and rare artefacts that have been salvaged from the earth, passed through collectors’ hands and auctioned off, sometimes moved between multiple institutions, to finally come to rest on a plinth or inside a glass case for a crowd of vaguely interested eyes to amble past, lingering for a few dutiful seconds before moving on through the gallery.
I think about the lives they had before they became artefacts - in their first era (presumably the only one that they were actually made for) when they were still being used and displayed as intended. Some public, in temples and squares; many more in private homes, seen by only the wealthy and their households.
Somewhere in my mind these two coalesce - the jewels and crowns kept in rarefied silence, allowed out once or twice a century; and these relics of a past time - objects of obsolete ceremony and private collections from homes long since destroyed, now living an unforeseen posthumous life out in the open for visiting strangers to gaze at.
Art and beauty have been in my mind a lot lately - who gets to look at it, and where it is owed an audience. Do we owe our art to the world? Do we even get a say in how it lives in the world once we put it out there?
I spent a lot of May in London, where ostentatiousness is very much the name of the game. The personalities are big, the buildings are grand, and everything - in town at least - is fast paced and dynamic. This is not a place for smallness, or for keeping things to yourself. There is a need to be at your maximum here. This is the place where things happen; the centrifugal point of culture; this is the place to shine.
A natural showoff
I have mixed feelings about shining. Despite numerous collaborations, a solo album, a one-woman show heading to Edinburgh Fringe this summer and a second album in the works, I am still trying to understand quite how I feel about performing - about showing publicly the skills and ideas which I spend so many hours (although never enough, as it feels) honing behind closed doors.
As I was brainstorming what to write this month, I kept getting adverts for Channel 4’s talent show The Piano (not the Oscar-winning film, which I think is much less uplifting). It’s been heralded as part of a renaissance of piano playing across the country, inviting amateurs to perform on those public pianos you find in train stations, showing off undiscovered talent for a panel of professional experts and an adoring crowd of whoever happens to be passing at the time.
This is exactly the stuff of my nightmares.
Give us a tune
For someone who plays music professionally, I am surprisingly reluctant about public performance. Pianos are a particular terror, because they can pop up anywhere - violins don’t tend to be left lying around in lobbies for passing fiddle enthusiasts to spin a reel on. No one sets up a microphone along a busy thoroughfare with a sign saying ‘have a singsong if you feel like it.’ (Having written that, part of me wishes it was a thing. But the other knows it would be the very worst aspects of X Factor and drunk karaoke combined).
But the piano - it is the people’s instrument! From the virtuosic concerto flourish to the good old singsong, it can contain multitudes - a readymade platform for the soloist to dazzle and amaze, but in the right hands, with the right song, fundamentally a communal instrument with the power to bring everyone together for a rousing chorus. (On piano, that song is never Wonderwall, which is why it is always more noble than guitar).
There’s something inherently public about a piano, wherever it is. By its sheer immovability, its heft, its solidity - the thereness of all the notes, laid out ready and tuned at the right intervals - it is a uniquely democratic instrument, inviting everyone to sit down and play.
Come, it seems to say, I have something for everyone - for the complete beginner finding their way through accidental cadences; for the veteran performer whose fingers can fly up and down the keyboard in a flash. In this, it also seems to be the ultimate instrument of meritocracy. Step on up - show us what you’ve got.
Don’t look!
I was never a natural performer. The further I got up the grades, the more self-conscious I became. By the time I finished grade 8, hauling myself through by - literally - the skin of my fingers, I was a nervous wreck. Throughout my 20s I barely played, public or private.
And all this time, I lived in constant dread of being asked to play something. For the nervous performer, some of the most terrifying words are simply: ‘go on then, give us a tune.’ At the same time, I felt constant guilt that I had worked so hard to get the grades, only to now be effectively silent.
I felt like I occupied two contradictory states: both a musician and not. I had the receipts to prove it - but I literally couldn’t sit down and show you
And during this time every piano lying slyly in wait - the prime culprits being those bastards hanging around train stations - served as a reminder of everything I wasn’t, but should be. A real musician would be able to sit down and play. A real musician would have tunes flowing from their fingertips. A real musician would leap (or sit) at the opportunity to show off in front of others.
But here’s the thing - all that time I couldn’t play, I thought the answer was to get good enough so that I could play. I thought the problem for all those years was ability - and if not ability, then certainly confidence.
You can do this, I told myself. You just need to get over your fear - then you’ll be able to perform in front of everyone!
Spoiler alert - I got good. Through a cunning mix of a quarter life crisis, uprooting to a new city, learning a new instrument (guitar - sorry guitar for my earlier comments) and sheer stubborn bloody mindedness, I eventually threw myself onstage enough times that the nerve-shattering fear dulled to a low hum: a buzzing fly rather than a screaming siren. I have proven to myself, and others, that I can really play.
Anticlimax
And guess what? Those train station pianos still fill me with dread.
Every time I have come into London in the last few weeks I passed one of those pianos at St Pancras, and someone was playing it. Some bad, some good - but always, people happy to be heard.
Each time I wondered if I would stop and play; each time, I told myself I was too busy to wait around.
And I was too busy, and honestly my feeling towards train stations is that there is no reason to stay in them once the primary purpose is complete - namely, catching a train or getting off one. But also, the too-busyness was an excuse. The fact is, I didn’t much want to.
I spent years telling myself the reason I didn’t compulsively want to play in front of people was because I wasn’t good enough - when actually, I think it’s that I’m very choosy about who I play for.
Now the fear of not being good enough has been replaced by a new guilt - that of not wanting it enough.
If I was a real musician I’d want to play any opportunity I get. If I was a real musician you couldn’t keep me away from the keys! These are the new criticisms that have replaced the old fears of not being able to.
Sometimes I think the hardest disappointments are not in learning that you can’t do something (often you can) - but that what you want is not what you expected to want.
It’s not that I’m not a capable performer. It’s that I am not the type of performer who craves an audience constantly, the sort who sees a public piano and spots their chance; the sort who always wants to be witnessed.
I am a different sort of performer entirely from the one I spent so may years striving to be, and that perhaps is the most disconcerting thing of all. I thought that once I put in the work I’d be the sort of performer I imagined you were supposed to be - one constantly happy to have an audience, and constantly seeking it out.
It is bewildering to realise, after the turmoil it took to get you there, that you can be comfortable performing in front of people and yet not want that all the time.
Display only
Which, somewhat circuitously, brings me back to my initial thought - of hidden objects and ownership. Who gets to see art and beauty, and if a beautiful thing witnessed only sparingly is a tragedy or has no bearing on its value.
I had a privileged upbringing and I feel a constant pressure to use this to the fullest extent. I can’t make or do anything but I feel duty-bound to display it in someway, as if wearing it on the outside is somehow proof of its existence. As if my doing it, my loving it, crafting it, is not enough.
This is not about perfectionism - although I certainly fight with that too. This is about whether you think something is valid only if it is witnessed by others - and, by extension, if as creators and performers, we are only worthy if we are constantly ‘on’, constantly craving to be visible to the world.
I come back again and again to Michaela Coel’s acceptance speech when she received her Emmy for I May Destroy You:
In a world that entices us to browse through the lives of others to help us better determine how we feel about ourselves, and to in turn feel the need to be constantly visible — for visibility these days seems to somehow equate to success — don’t be afraid to disappear from it, from us, for a while and see what comes to you in the silence.”
Michaela Coel
I keep it on a note on my desktop so whenever I’m feeling a little swallowed by the world I can remind myself that silence and disappearance and sequestered solitude is ok.
As an artist, we must share our work sometimes - and often the more we share, the better known we become, that is true. But I think it is important to retain some parts for yourself, and not to make the measure of your art - or even yourself - the amount you are willing to throw yourself in front of other people’s attention. You can be good at performing and not crave it all the time, I think.
Some people like an audience more than others. And I think that’s ok.
When I last passed by the piano in St Pancras, I wondered if I would sit down and play next time. I think I would, I decided - if the station was deserted and I was alone.
This perhaps is the revelation most disappointing and liberating of the last year or so. That while I like performing, and I create things for audiences, the person I most enjoy playing for, at least for the sheer joy of it, might be myself.
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