the history of live performance, this stands as one of the most mesmerizing, thrilling demonstrations of mastery. And what is mastery if not the ability to deal with the unexpected as though it was expected? To take an error and turn it into something better than if there had been no error at all? This level of mastery requires deep memory for the tools of one’s craft, arrived at through thousands of hours of practice, memorization of procedures, facts, and conventions, until one’s art or craft reaches a state of automaticity, what some call the flow state.
