Co-create with your audience.

Whenever you perform as a musician, remember that you are not alone. Your performance is not in a vacuum. You are not alone in a space with others merely watching you. You are all together.

As our practice and musicianship grow beyond simply executing the music we learn, we can play with the energy beyond us—performance by performance, audience by audience. We can learn to feel into the energy of the room and interact with it. If the crowd is loud, we may match that energy. If it is quiet, perhaps we fill in the gaps. There's no formula beyond developing an intuition for what the audience needs and meeting them there.

Yesterday, I performed an hour-long improvised set on sitar for a yoga class. Before starting, I invited the participants to share an intention. Five participants spoke up: letting go, starting anew, floating away, fighting back, and finding your inner child. I told them I would weave these intentions into the music I was about to play. Much like an improv comedy set that asks the audience for a word, a place, or a situation, I was able to source content and create alongside the audience.

I love thinning the veil between audience and performer. I used to implicitly believe that the audience and performer were rightly separated by rituals—where the audience's role was to listen intently and the performer’s role was to deliver. But after living in Brazil on a research grant to study music, I realized this separation is not universal. Even at classical-leaning concerts, Brazilian audiences would shout out, ask questions, and banter with the performers.

The veil between audience and performer was thin.

Of course, neither a thick nor thin veil is inherently good or bad. They’re simply different cultural approaches to music. But recognizing the existence of this veil gives us, as artists, the ability to play with it—treating it as an expressive element of the art itself.

Next time you perform—whether as an artist, a speaker, a presenter, or something else entirely—remember that you have the chance to co-create with your audience. You can make the experience a collective one rather than a Cartesian one.

The divide is an illusion, after all.