I’d invited Adam to speak at Xcite Festival in London because I’d seen his work online and thought he’d connect with the audience. What I hadn’t anticipated was what it would be like to watch him in a room.
I knew, in the abstract, that he was a skilled performer. I’d watched videos. I’d read his materials. But video is video. It compresses everything — it flattens the three-dimensional quality of real performance into a rectangle on a screen, and it removes the one element that matters most: the actual, physical presence of another person in the room with other people.
When I watched Adam work at Xcite, something happened that I didn’t have language for at the time. I understood, viscerally and immediately, what I was not yet doing.
The Thing That Doesn’t Have a Name
Every craft has a version of this experience. You can study a discipline for years — reading everything, practicing consistently, building real competence — and then you encounter someone who simply lives in the craft in a different way. Not necessarily more technically proficient, not doing things you literally cannot do, but inhabiting the work with a different quality of ease.
It’s not relaxation, exactly. Adam is intense on stage. His energy is high, his attention is sharp, his engagement with the material is complete. But there’s an absence of effort in it — or the effort is so deeply integrated that it doesn’t read as effort anymore. He’s not working to appear comfortable. He is comfortable.
This matters in performance in a way that it doesn’t matter in most technical fields. In a lot of technical work, you can see the effort and it doesn’t undermine the output. But in performance, the visible effort is itself the problem. The audience’s experience of what you’re doing is damaged by their awareness of how hard you’re working to do it. The craft is inseparable from the quality of its delivery.
What I Was Actually Watching
The specific thing that stopped me that afternoon in London was Adam’s relationship with time.
He didn’t rush. Not in the obvious way — not talking too fast or cramming material — but at a finer grain than that. There were moments in his work where he simply allowed space to exist. A pause after an effect. A beat before responding to something someone said. A moment where nothing was happening except the room feeling what had just happened.
These pauses didn’t feel like hesitation. They felt like choice. The difference between hesitation and intentional space is significant, and it’s the difference a performer makes: hesitation signals that you’re waiting for something to happen; intentional space signals that you’re allowing something that’s already happened to complete itself.
I had read about pausing. I had practiced pausing. But watching Adam, I understood for the first time that there’s a quality of internal experience behind the pause — that it’s not just a technical decision to stop talking for two seconds but a genuine willingness to be in the room without filling it. A specific kind of confidence that the moment is enough without being augmented.
I was not doing that. I was filling. Not because I was nervous, exactly, but because the absence of sound felt like a problem I was responsible for solving.
The Relationship He Had With Audiences
The other thing I noticed was how Adam related to individual people in the room.
In my performance at that point, audiences were somewhat abstract to me. Not deliberately — I wasn’t indifferent to them — but they functioned as a collective entity. The room. The group. I was performing for the room.
Adam performed for people. Specific ones, in specific moments, with a quality of genuine interest that wasn’t manufactured for the context. He noticed things about the individuals he was working with and responded to what he noticed rather than to a plan for who they should be. When someone said something unexpected, he was actually interested rather than mildly inconvenienced.
This produced a different quality of exchange — and a different quality of effect on the room. Audiences are watching how the performer relates to the individuals in front of them, and they draw conclusions from it about whether the performer is genuinely present or running a program. When they conclude “genuinely present,” they extend a different level of trust. That trust changes what’s possible.
The Problem with Watching
Here’s the thing about learning from observation: it shows you the gap without showing you how to close it.
After Xcite, I knew precisely what I was missing. I could describe it — the quality of presence, the relationship with time, the genuine interest in individuals over the collective. But knowing the destination doesn’t produce the journey. You can’t will yourself into a different quality of presence. You can’t perform naturalness.
What I took from watching Adam was something more like orientation. A corrected understanding of what I was actually trying to develop. Because before I had that reference point, I had been working on the wrong things. I’d been working on technical craft — method, pacing, structure — as if those were the elements that would produce the quality I was after.
They weren’t. They were prerequisites for the quality. The quality itself was something that accumulated differently: through performances that were bad in the right way, through being in enough rooms that the anxiety about being in rooms began to decrease, through a gradual process of internalization that couldn’t be accelerated by more reading or more technique practice.
Steve Martin describes something similar in his memoir — the realization, after years of working in the Disneyland magic shops, that the repetition wasn’t just building skill. It was building a relationship with performance itself. A comfort in the space of being watched and responding. That comfort is different from skill. It comes later, on top of skill, and it can only accumulate through time in rooms.
What I Took Into Vulpine
When Adam and I began developing Vulpine Creations together, I brought a different quality of attention to the collaboration than I would have had without that afternoon in London.
I’d seen what was possible. Not as an abstraction or a described ideal, but as a real thing observed in a real room. That reference point changed how I listened in our working conversations — what I was hearing for, what questions I was asking, what I was trying to understand about how he approached problems.
Working alongside someone whose relationship with craft is different from yours is a specific kind of education that books cannot provide. The concepts are in the books. The quality of relationship with those concepts has to be seen in action.
I’m still working on the pauses. But now I know what I’m working toward.