JetUNsetter

Went to a ballet performance last night. A marvellous one. A modern take on a classic with perfect dancers, majestic lighting, excellent this and wonderful the other. In a word perfect. It was just perfect. One of the best I have experienced.

I was not the only one to say so. The applause lasted for ever just after the curtain dropped for the interval. And something I have never experienced before happened before the second half: people coming back from their break and taking their seat for the second act to begin, started another round of applause, shouting bravo and cheering up in huge and happy anticipation for the next part. There was this common belief spread across the auditorium that the second act be nothing but marvellous too. And it was. And the applause at the end of the show also marked it as such.

There was of course live music playing, as in any performance of dance with some ambition to be majestic. It was all aligned to perfection, the orchestra and the dancers and everything with anything. For a tiny second though the music stopped but the dancers had two more steps to take. I felt like waking up. Amidst all the perfection there was a moment where these humans did not coordinate. It was of course a tiny slip, likely it went unnoticed by the majority of those in the audience.

The beauty of this moment though was huge: up to that moment I had been carried away to enjoy a perfect show. Literally, it was perfect. That tiny little moment of imperfection highlighted the perfection of it all even more. I started imagining all the more little moments of imperfection, tiny mistakes and uncoordinated sequences this performance could have had and it did not.

All of a sudden, I started noticing the sweat on the primo ballerino’s forehead. He was a real human giving it his all. Not a robot executing a sequence of movements. I started appreciating the tremendous amount of effort these humans were putting in making that perfect show, I started thinking about their pain, disappointments, disagreements and the endless rehearsals. The hours they spent going through the steps over and over again. The resilience in training their bodies to look as if they defeat gravity when they can’t. It was that reminder of how human they were, that reminder that their little single mistake could have been tons of them but, no, they did make it look good. I admired how effortful, courageous and persistent their desire to make it perfect had been.

This is, I think, the kind of beauty AI generated anything will never give us: these humans on the stage last night were a reminder of how effort has perfection as its objective yet perfection might never be achieved. I could associate with that reminder, get inspired by it, get motivated by it. All these humans pushed themselves to achieve their best. What their moment of dancing in silence told us is that they were still humans. It was a reminder that humans need to try hard before they can reach mastery. Robots don’t have to. There would no sweat on a robot’s forehead. However, what is truly inspiring is the thought if that group of dancers, musicians, technicians and producers can reach such mastery so can we.

Maybe it is not perfection we are after in art, but mastery. Maybe, more widely, we are not after a world of no mistakes, but a world of so hard human effort that we keep mistakes to as little as two steps in silence.

Please help me make sense of this one too…