While the basic tala is always in a performer's consciousness, one of the principal methods of creating excitement in a performance is to play rhythmic patterns that contradict the tala but eventually return to its fundamental scheme.
At the same time, I am trying to gain some perspective on the perpetual performer's self-consciousness.
What I was doing then as a performer was not "raising consciousness" (a phrase often used in the '70s to mean moving it to the left), or even preaching to the converted, but only titillating them, and that required a predisposed audience.
Mr. Kweli, the concert's most vehement and crowd-pleasing performer, went for wholehearted consciousness-raising, mocking imitative gangsta rappers as "softer than mashed potatoes" and insisting, "The most important time in history is now".
The metallophone chimes at the end of each section signal changes in texture and harmony, a cue for the performers that permeates the consciousness of the listener like a reminder not to dwell on one thought or mood for too long.
And the formal courtyard of the former government offices at Somerset House will be invaded by hundreds of performers in a "cultural fitness exercise", a mass-action performance called Physique of Consciousness, devised by the Chinese artist Xu Zhen with MadeIn Company.
The performer's rambling, disconnected, stream-of-consciousness style, presumably reflecting a fragmented life, suggests that the singer has not traveled beyond the dream at all.
Physically, they are fine, but they don't have the consciousness or the technique of trained performers, and they can't shape their work expressively.
"[Equality] was one of the launchpads for the company in the 70s and it's still a consciousness that attracts a lot of performers," she says.
The opera asks a simple question, "Is there a place in human consciousness where the surveillance cannot go?" One performer is linked up with an Emotiv EEG headset that monitors brain activity.
What they gave Ms. Hay was the chance to expand her own experimental practice, which requires that a performer make an exacting effort to explore different states of consciousness.
