What if you gave the performance of your life and nobody showed up?
Well, something like that happened on Friday morning. Except I wasn’t the performer. I was the entire audience at the Hellenic Orthodox Church of the Annunciation. When I arrived, the liturgy was already in progress, and nobody else was there.
I quietly slipped into a seat in the last row, along the middle aisle, and began taking in the empty space, filled with powerful chanting and a ritual unfolding for an audience of one.
There I was, watching the clergy perform so beautifully, seemingly unconcerned with the empty seats.
For me, the experience became all the more intimate. My attention sharpened. I found myself listening closely, following the story of Jacob as it unfolded in two languages.
And, to escape my own feelings, my thoughts turned to performance-making. The work that takes months to create, only to disappear in an evening.
A religious liturgy is also a performance, though one in which the clergy aren’t seeking applause or recognition. Their purpose is rooted in faith, and the ritual carries meaning whether the church is full or empty. They weren’t performing to be seen. They were participating in something they believed in.
And suddenly, the distinction between religious performance and artistic performance became rather curious.
If an actor performs in an empty space, is it still a performance? Or does it become a rehearsal simply because nobody was there to witness it? If the performer experiences a transformation through the act of performing, does the absence of spectators make that experience any less real?
I rather like the idea that the audience doesn’t matter. Yet performances often begin as exercises in self-expression, only to evolve into invitations for others to participate, to question, to challenge, and to bring something of themselves into the experience. Without them, something is missing.
But perhaps what I witnessed on Friday wasn’t so much the absence of an audience as the presence of something else.
A practice that continues. A commitment that doesn’t need to prove itself with every performance. The opportunity to return, again and again. Same players, another occasion, another story. And the freedom to become completely absorbed in the experience, regardless of who shows up.
I had found myself there that morning to light a candle for my father, whom I lost on that very day, 26 years ago.
At the time, I was living in the Netherlands, studying scenography and preparing my final thesis performance. His death profoundly affected both me and the work I was creating. And here I was, 26 years later, in a church honoring my father’s memory while contemplating the nature of performance.
Nobody needed to witness that small gesture. I wasn’t seeking recognition or trying to communicate anything to anyone. I did it because the act itself mattered to me.
Meanwhile, the liturgy continued, the voices rising through an almost empty church. And I was listening. And thinking.
Who is a performance for, anyway? And how much does an audience matter for a performance to matter?