Pacing

Tom thinks about how he’ll perform the story as he is preparing and practicing it:

I have to get my pacing down,

which is one thing I learned from improv –

that a pause

is more important

than that many more words.

And I still struggle with slowing my pace down.

These are performance things, but seem to me very tied to meaning. The pause is meaningful. You have to speak slowly so people understand you. They don’t seem overly performance-y. But as I’m writing this, I wonder if performance can be divorced from meaning. And also, with all the different types of performance - maybe this isn’t that connected to performance of self. But maybe it is part of cultural performance or aesthetic performance. Timing. Timing is everything. This is related to timing. How does timing connect with performance?