Perfect babies and flawless performances

Remember the movie "Shine" from a few years ago? About the piano playing prodigy who almost got lost to the Australian psychiatric care system? Geoffrey Rush played him as an adult in the movie, but the person on whom it was based is named David Helfgott. Well Helfgott gave a concert
in Zurich the other night and we went to go hear it. And see it.

I know that his playing has not received top critical acclaim, but for my ear I thought it was quite good. I don't know the pieces well enough to tell otherwise. But it was much more of a reflective event for me than musical. He is probably bout 60 years old, he wears a shiny red tunic on stage, and sort of shuffles out to the piano in short steps. But as he goes, he looks at every orchestra member he passes, giving everyone a handshake or two thumbs up, stopping many times before making it even close to the piano. He looks at the audience (who is clapping at this point), giving thumbs up and smiles to half a dozen directions, back to the orchestra and hand shaking, before the conductor gently helps him to the piano bench.

And when he plays, he is hunched quite low over the piano. His lips move, and once in a while you hear a sound coming from him while his fingers pour over the keys. He squints, and moves
his head. He smiles a thumbs up to himself when he's gotten through some piece of the piano part. While he waits through parts with no piano piece, he seems to speak to himself, almost puts fingers to the keys and then pulls back, looks around to watch other orchestra members playing their parts.

You almost start to doubt that when he starts playing again it will be coherent, and then....it is. And smooth, and beautiful.

What is still in my mind about the performance is how different that behavior is from what is "expected." And yet there is no reason it was wrong. But it shocked both the audience and orchestra a bit. He kept violating the "i don't see you here" rule, where the orchestra members don't really acknowledge each other in the way they might on their way home on the tram, and there is almost a glass wall between the musicians and audience where interaction doesn't pass until the applause. He looked at people, smiled, gave his "thumbs up" commentary straight into the gaze of specific people. And this man who lives with mental illness played beautifully.

Right in front of people. In public, out in the open. You don't see that so often. Or at least that is how it felt to me and I found it mesmerizing. And perfectly acceptable.

Whether it was a flawless performance, I don't know. Like I said, I don't have the ear to discern that. But he gave an extremely human performance. I loved it.

Especially since it overlapped with a book I've been reading on the birthing culture in America (and Western Europe) as a rite of passage. Great book by an anthropologist about the loss of control women have gone through in terms of giving birth, and how much of it is managed by doctors in hospitals. How many procedures can interfere with natural birth but are used to make birth seem (this is the key to ritual) controllable and safe, thanks to modern technology. Practices which don't necessarily help the health of the mother or the baby. But that this ideal of a doctor delivering a perfect baby to society (the mother not really being in control, but more of just a carrier) has shifted the focus of birth. It is a great book, especially for a pregnant sociology geek like me.

And somehow, in a stroke of luck, I find myself in a country where most of my options for giving birth are actually more empowering of me than they might have been in the US. And with that same stroke of luck, I found myself in a music hall, entranced by the behavior of a decidedly unperfect baby, all grown up, playing piano. It was wonderful.