Here’s the thing about live performance that all our academic seminars and theoretical frameworks can’t quite capture… it’s a fucking high-wire act where the wire is invisible and everyone’s pretending it doesn’t exist until someone falls.
What we’re witnessing here isn’t just a “mistake”, that reductive, bourgeois term we use when our pedagogical comfort zones get threatened. This is the performative sublime manifesting as pure panic, that Artaudian rupture where the fourth wall doesn’t just break, it vaporizes. Maria João Pires‘ face in that opening moment, man, you can’t choreograph that. You can’t rehearse genuine terror. That’s the body betraying the mind, or maybe it’s the mind finally admitting the body’s been running this show all along, storing Mozart’s D minor in the neural pathways like some kind of baroque RAM.
Chailly keeps conducting , because what else are you going to do, stop?, and this becomes theater in its purest, most accidental form. The concert hall transforms from temple to laboratory, the audience from passive consumers to ethnographic witnesses of a ritual gone sideways. This is Schechner’s “restored behavior” colliding with what Brook called “the immediate”, that unrepeatable moment when everything that can go wrong creates a space where something impossibly right can emerge.
What floors me, is watching her muscle memory kick in. The fingers know. The body knows. While her conscious mind is screaming wrong concerto wrong wrong WRONG, her hands are already preparing the soft opening lines, accessing decades of physical knowledge stored somewhere deeper than thought. This is Merleau-Ponty‘s phenomenology incarnate, the lived body as archive, as instrument, as survival mechanism.
And someone caught it. The camera caught it. Which means this unrepeatable moment gets infinitely repeated, analyzed, theorized.
The paradox eats itself.