Parable of the audience

Every table in the small meeting room had been taken for the annual meeting of the local branch of a national tolerance society. The evening's agenda, in accordance with previous years, was to be improvised around a ritual structure of performance and response. This was designed to demonstrate and renew the society's core principle. A line of performers waited beyond a side door. They were aware that the purpose of 'performance without prohibition' was to elicit the forbearance of those watching, and if possible to also extend the known limits of all that may be reasonably tolerated. They were commissioned to do anything, say anything. And on their side, every member of the audience was ready to play their part by rigorously exercising the virtue that had brought them to the meeting room. The first performer, amid the spectators' sense of growing expectancy, threaded through the tables towards the small stage at the centre. They took their stance, and readied themselves before the commencement of their turn. A moment passed,  then the first performer abruptly stepped off the stage and walked away. The next performer arrived, and at the same point departed in the same manner. The failure to begin was repeated by all successive performers. By the end of the tolerance society meeting, each performer had taken their stance before the audience and, just as it seemed their turn was to be drawn from them into the world, each had then found themselves at a loss, and was unable to go on. One said, 'in the moment before the beginning, I felt the desire to go on desert me. The effect of 'the principle' was like a physical barrier, or a burden, which exhausted my energies.' The audience, by a unanimous show of hands, agreed to pay the performers the agreed upon fee.