Musicians play the same four bars a hundred times so the show sounds like it’s happening for the first time.

Running the same handful of bars over and over makes them automatic, so that on the night your attention is free to go somewhere else entirely, into the room and the people and the feel of it. What looks like spontaneity is almost always rehearsal that went deep enough to disappear. Freshness on stage is not the absence of preparation. It is what preparation buys you.

Take one small piece of what you are working on and repeat it until you stop thinking about it. A transition, an intro, the first thirty seconds. The ease you want is on the far side of that boredom.