Participation and Transcendence

I like to close my eyes and take in the music at a concert, esp. at a concert I've been dragged to by friends with different taste sets than my own. Last February, for instance, I attended a show that had people sitting outwards in a circle in the dark listening to the sounds of a dying espresso machine. It was majestic.

Seeing as how we are all being goaded into participating in culture in some way, some are already wondering what is going to happen to little things like reflection, privacy, individual authorship, etc. Now we have to put up with the little snot-nosed darlings ruining the theatre experience:

Yes, this remote [online] participation is a very different and possibly less "genuine" experience compared to the real-time fun of panto, but anyone who has recently sat in a play next to a school group knows that their online confidence seems to translate into an assumed right to "interact" with real actors, whether welcome or not... My suspicion is that the real creative experience kids are lacking, and which theatre is ideally placed to provide, is the opportunity to shut up, listen and lose themselves - to actually cast aside their self-consciousness for a couple of hours and quietly become immersed in voices and lives other than their own.

Imagine. To lose oneself in the experience of others. Transcendence is a basic human need; this is why people in virtually every culture take drugs or have some kind of ritual that allows the individual to disappear for a moment. I don't know about you but all this talk of performance and identity and lack of privacy makes me want to run and hide under a pile of books or a hut in the deep woods somewhere.