The smiles on our faces are there because of the smiles on the faces of Byrne and Tina Weymouth and Chris Franz and the rest of the band. We are watching a group of performers at their peak. They move with such grace an beauty that their motion becomes poetry. Byrne's quirkiness plays so effortlessly into the personas of those around him that they echo his movement and actions. We'd be fools not to realize that this is a well performed, precisely enacted, rehearsed performance caught on film.
Every movement is preordained.
But Byrne and his costars make it seem spontaneous. Their joy of performing, their love of the material and their seeming love of each other transcends the rigorous precision of the performance and catapults it into an ethereal plane where art and mind combine. Byrne deconstructs the concert film genre by having the stage constructed around the band as they play. So, alive in the format, the Head's perform to a neon backdrop of projected colors, words and images as they continue to engross us in their experience. Their fluid stage movements and interaction become the definition of simpatico.