Performance is the creative act made visible in the moment of its making — unlike the written page or the finished canvas, it exists only in the present tense and cannot be revised. The performer's relationship to failure is therefore more intimate than the studio artist's: each night the work is made again from nothing, and each night it is either alive or it is not. This is frightening, and it is also, for those drawn to it, the closest thing to what pure creative presence feels like.
Mura