WE NEED THE UNNECESSARY

or How I Learned To Value The Things You Don't Need To Do

Wayne Gretzky, legend has it, scored his first official in-game goal as a young hockey player here at the Allman Arena in Stratford.

That piece of trivia quickly evaporated from my mind as the squadron of drones took to the sky from just outside the arena. Whirring and blinking then taking position and morphing into various shapes and words in the sky.

Drone shows are cool. They make an excellent fireworks alternative and they can do so much more visually. It also feels like we’re just at the beginning of that technology. Lots of great things to come.

The show was in honour of the opening night of the new Tom Patterson Theatre. Shannon and I had manage to find ourselves there for Richard III. The show was fantastic, as expected.

The 700 people at the show were invited out to the street afterwards to enjoy a 10-minute presentation by these skybots (I think I’m going to start calling them that).

Like the production of Richard III, the drone show was fantastic… inspiring… highly enjoyable… and totally unnecessary.

And that’s what made them both incredibly necessary.

Of course, when I say ‘unnecessary’ I mean in the basic sustenance sense. Every single one of us 700 people could have survived just fine without the show or the dancing skybots (See? It sounds cooler than drones, doesn’t it?).

Theatre, by its very definition, is unnecessary. A group of people gathering together at a certain time and place on the planet to pretend and act out a story, they could easily just read or watch on their phones, in front of another group of people?

Totally unnecessary.

Brian Eno defines art as “… everything you don’t have to do.”

I fully believe that’s why it’s so important.

Without any effort to create or do things we don’t *really* need to, we’re just what?
Keeping ourselves alive until we’re not? What a waste.

No.

We need to make life brighter for ourselves and others.
We need to make ourselves pause and think.
We need to force ourselves to perceive life from different perspectives.
We need to realize that necessity cannot be the only driving force.

We need the unnecessary.

So yeah… it was a pretty f*cking cool drone show.

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