2004-08-21 - 1:27 p.m.
Seeing someone I knew perform at a place where I previously had only seen people I didn't know (a "real venue?")made me think about how it is to view someone as a performer. When I think of someone as performing, I know he or she is in a very overt way expressing something personal.
So I saw the most emotionally overwrought performance I have ever seen (keep in mind that I have seen bright eyes twice) and the whole time I kept watching the girlfriend of the guy who was performing. I wonder what she thought of it. And then Karl got up there and was a very different sort of performer and I couldn't help but wonder how the performance differed for people who knew him and the people who didn't.
We are all performing all the time (you know "all the world's a stage" blah blah blah), but I don't usually think of it that way.
Something that I think is related is the exhibit I saw in the library yesterday. "Representations of Japanese Self and Other." I felt refreshed to see "my kind" represented as other. In a way, it reassured me as well. But it all goes back to how others see us as opposed to how we ourselves and how people we know see us as opposed to people who don't know us. And how we look when people know we are performing to how we look when people don't.
I don't know where I am going with this.
