Learning from @lydia_cello: Let the audience feel

This week on my site I want to highlight five people or videos on social media that have caught my eye lately.

First up is @lydia_cello on TikTok (Lydia Rhea in real life). Lydia recently graduated from Juilliard and has been posting about her life as a student for a while, and now about life as a professional cellist in NYC.

This particular video she posted recently speaks to something I see in artists and arts organizations often, which is not remembering something very basic about what we do: we share the work with others. In Lydia’s video she’s talking about it in context of a musician being overly focused on their own satisfaction with their performance and inadvertently being dismissive of the audience’s reaction. Specifically, that a musician is disappointed, but the audience is delighted. Here’s what she said:

When we perform, it is no longer about us.
If it were only about you, you’d just perform in your living room every day with no audience.

When someone says, “That was so moving. I really enjoyed it,” and you respond, “No, it wasn’t,” you’re invalidating their experience. You’re telling them that the beautiful moment they just had wasn’t real.

Live performance is a shared experience.
The moment you share it, you no longer get to control how others receive it.

It can be really hard to say “thank you” when you don’t feel like you deserve praise. I’ve been there. You’ve been there. We’ve all been there.

But that’s exactly when we need to take a step back and remember: even though we were experiencing one version of the performance on stage, the audience was experiencing something just as real and powerful from the other side.

I truly believe it is both an act of kindness and a sign of strength to offer yourself to an audience—and then allow them to take from the performance whatever they’re going to take.

You’re allowed to be annoyed at yourself. That’s a totally human emotion. Let that annoyance be motivation.

But you’re not allowed to be annoyed that an audience was there.

I hear artists and arts organizations complaining about audiences all the time in petty ways that just come down to: “they didn’t appreciate it like I wanted them to”. That’s not about sharing, that’s about control.

Most audiences think the work is just wonderful. Seeing a show is really different from most of the rest of their life. Many people don’t spend a lot of time in story and character, or color and abstraction, in just sitting with an experience like we do in the arts.

Allowing yourself to get back to that beginner’s mind that most of the audience has is the best way I’ve found to get rejuvenated and out of the worried state of mind that many of us live in as we work in this field. Try it.

Photo: @lydia_cello TikTok profile image