Resenting the audience

Sometimes, the performer may grow to resent the audience and the control she feels the audience puts on her. The audience couldn’t truly understand her. She can’t do everything she wants to do, can’t make them feel exactly what she wants them to feel. They’re slow and demanding and also fickle. They change too much and don’t change enough. They want to be coddled. She feels the limit of performance as a medium, the fact that on the other side of it, you truly cannot control what happens inside of another person. She wishes for true artistic freedom, for the freedom to do whatever she wants and for the audience to want it.

She forgets that the audience is not there for the performer, but for the performance. Sure, the two may conflate. The audience may think that they are there for the performer. But without the performance, she is nothing to them. In fact, more than being there for the performance, they are the only reason the performance can exist. Her frustration comes from something she can never have: complete artistic freedom in a medium that fundamentally dependent.