You don’t understand what it means to be in that room until you’re in that room. Not watching, that’s what tourists do, what the assholes with the expensive seats do. I mean in it, close enough to see the sweat, the micro-adjustments of his fingers, the way his whole body becomes an argument with silence.
Zakir Hussain doesn’t play the tabla. He doesn’t perform. He demolishes the space between intention and sound, between mathematics and ecstasy. And when he’s creating for dancers, it’s not accompaniment. It’s combat. It’s seduction. It’s a conversation happening at a frequency that bypasses your brain and goes straight to your spine.
Every time you step out on to the stage,
you learn something which helps you grow and be a better communicator.
It’s not like you’re the master.
You’re always a student.
The dancers are already moving before he strikes the drum, they’re moving because they know what’s coming, what’s inevitable, the way you flinch before the thunder when you see the lightning. And he sees them, tracks them, builds something that’s simultaneously ancient and being invented in real-time. Every note is a choice. Every silence is violence.
And I’m there with a camera, trying to freeze something that exists only in motion, trying to capture proof of magic for people who weren’t there and won’t believe it anyway. The privilege isn’t the access. The privilege is understanding, for those moments, that you’re watching someone operate at a level of mastery that most humans never even glimpse. That you’re witnessing the thing itself, not a representation of it.
It ruins you. In the best way.