“It feels a little like a rehearsal . . . but with none of that relaxation that you have in a rehearsal,” pianist Stephen Hough said after giving the first live performance at London’s Wigmore Hall since lockdown began.
In compliance with social distancing rules, just two music-lovers were in the audience that day: the concert hall’s director and a BBC presenter.
In many places, the near future will continue to look a lot like this. The English Premier League restarted this week in stadiums empty of the regular fans. When Bayern Munich won the German Bundesliga for the eighth consecutive time, they staged an awkward celebration before half a dozen club officials up in the stands. In Manchester, the West Indies cricket team — crowd-pleasers to a man — are in training for a closed-door Test series against England, inside a sanitised and Covid-tested protective ring.
In politics, critics of Boris Johnson have noted how the UK’s prime minister, an expert at playing to the gallery, has sometimes floundered during question-time sessions in a sparsely attended parliament without the vocal backing of supporters on the government benches.
On the far smaller stage where I occasionally strut, as a conference speaker and panellist, the absence of a visible audience has sucked some of the adrenalin and enjoyment from the virtual room. On the one hand, I would never have predicted being able to gather a Royal Albert Hall-capacity audience for a recent online discussion about supply chains. On the other, it was impossible to assess from the on-screen interaction whether the thousands online were engrossed or inert.
“It really isn’t just about applause,” Mr Hough told Channel 4 News earlier this month, “it’s about that quietness that people are listening and attentive and you feel an electricity there that you can’t replicate [in an empty hall].”
These are trivial sacrifices compared with the risk of contagion. They do, however, raise interesting questions about performers, onstage, on the pitch, and even in the office.
Cath Bishop, author of forthcoming book The Long Win, about how we value success, misses live performance. She gives her online leadership talks standing, as she would if she were there in person, but she admits that without an audience, “the chemistry is thinner”. Ms Bishop also recognises from her previous life as an Olympic rower that crowd support can give an additional boost to performance: “When you get next to the grandstand, it’s hugely uplifting in that most exhausting part of the race.” In the absence of that feedback, it is not surprising if some of us end the day like spent sprinters.
How audiences affect individual behaviour is a heavily studied area, from cricket (where fans’ absence will reduce “the emotional resonance of the sport”, according to one recent article) to crickets (male insects “initiated more fights and fought more aggressively when females were present”). A 2018 paper by Vikram Chib, a Johns Hopkins neuroscientist, and others, suggests the mere fact of being watched may improve humans’ performance of skilled tasks.
Psychologists have also studied what happens to players who crack under the pressure of the big occasion, intimidated by opposing fans’ taunts, or by the need to live up to their own supporters’ expectations.
“Home advantage” is one casualty of sport played in empty stadiums that resound only to the shouts of coaches. But the absence of noisy fans may benefit players who excel mainly on the training ground. A number of football managers told The Athletic they were considering giving more closed-door opportunities to the players whom former international Franz Beckenbauer calls “training world champions”.
In the virtual workplace, too, managers ought to start keeping an eye out for low-profile contributors, whose virtues are better displayed on a video call grid than in a real meeting room, where presentation divas dominate.
“The individuals who succeed [in face-to-face job interviews] are those with the physical performative skills to project authority, self-confidence and decisiveness,” three partners at headhunter Odgers Berndtson pointed out recently. Video interviews could be “the perfect job-hunting environment” for other candidates (notably women, they speculated) who demonstrate instead “patience, listening skills, [and] articulacy”.
“Zoom bores” will still try to overtalk and dominate online, of course. But the equally sized oblongs on the screen are a digital democracy. And once the call is over, the playing field is level for those who prefer to demonstrate their skills to a smaller audience. Who knows, this crisis may produce new stars who can turn out for the big game even after the crowds return.
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June 22, 2020 at 10:02AM
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