This evening we are in an art gallery space in lower Manhattan, iterating on a virtual reality dance performance that we will soon be putting on. Everybody is working very intensely, iterating, fixing bugs, tweaking colors and timing, as well as all sorts of other things.
I am discovering that these sorts of production meetings can end up being their own kind of performance. There is an ebb and flow, a rhythm to the evening, that in its way is quite compelling.
I am reminded a bit of the first time I saw “behind the scenes” footage of the Beatles working in the studio. Their end goal was to create a set of polished songs to the world, each one to appear as a flawless gem of musical perfection.
Yet the messy process of creation itself, the sequence of iterations, the failed attempts and near misses, were in a way more fascinating than the final product.