Owning The Stage

Keeping everything in mind at once about performance can be tough!  There are so many things to consider when you're working up an authentic performance that it can be daunting, and frankly pretty time-consuming as well.  The practicalities of having to get your product to the people quickly mean that you may need to practice ruthless prioritization, and do only the most important things.

So if you live in the real world, as I do, you'll like this.  Here are (in my humble opinion) the most important things.  Really, these are the four basic things you need to understand before a performance can be made authentic and real.  There are many, many other things to consider, but if you have these four you are getting eighty percent of the bang for just twenty percent of the buck.

The four things are: who are you, who are you talking to, what do you want, and what happens.

Who are you?

This is pretty self-explanatory.  Are you yourself?  Are you an old man?  Are you the Queen of England?  Are you a golden retriever?  It makes a big difference!  Every aspect of your performance comes from your assumed identity.

You might want to try on a few personas, to see which one feels right, or creates the most compelling scene.

Sometimes of course, you are you!  This may be the easiest kind of scene to play, or it might not.  Some people have a much easier time being someone else.

Who are you talking to?

Once you know who you are, you have to figure out who you are talking to.  You haven't got a chance of coaxing your subconscious communication skills into action without a clear "other" in the scene.  The image of the other is the biggest part of the vision - still or movie - that you'll be holding in your head as you perform.

What is your objective?

Once you have an identity for your self and the other, the next thing to figure out is what you're trying to accomplish.  Are you convincing them to go out with you, or to go away?  Are you trying to explain your innermost feelings?  Are you trying to extort money?  You need to know this.

What happens?

Since the typical attention span is pretty short, you've got about 20 or 30 seconds before something has to change in your scene and therefore in your performance before people start to wander off.  Not only them, but you as well!  You have to keep your own attention, to stay in the scene and crowd out technical thinking and things that induce stage-fright.

Perhaps not by coincidence, the form of a typical song divides it into chunks of about 20-30 seconds in length!  How convenient!  So make sure each major musical section has its own idea.

The great thing about this approach is that it's very quick.  When coaching, I can get this much information out of a group in just a few minutes, and we're well on the way to an authentic performance.  At the very least, it gets everyone on the same page!

Sometimes it can be difficult to decide what to work on next, to get the most bang for the buck.  When I'm working with performing groups they often ask me if it's too early to get into the "emotional stuff" with a new piece, if they haven't even quite got the notes and words nailed down.

My short answer would be "no", but I can imagine why they might think so!  First, when you're a hammer everything looks like a nail.  Lots of performers, especially musicians, are first and foremost great technicians.  They love to fine-tune their technical skills, above all else!  Just like a bowler who spends hour after hour down at the lanes, trying to bowl strikes.  It's very "flow" - clear rules, instant feedback.  It's fun!  But bowling isn't a performance art.  I mean, people may like to watch it, but it's a sport, not an art, and the spectators aren't having to suspend disbelief.  Their expectations are rather low, in terms of the emotional depth of the experience of watching a bowling tournament.  So treating stage performance like bowling isn't the best approach.

Also there's a prevailing attitude that the "fluffy stuff" is pointless until the technique is in place.  And to some extent that's true - if you don't know the notes, you're not going to make big gains by delving deeper into the character and the objective!

However, that's not the end of the story.

Firstly, the strategy of "finishing the technique" before getting into the emotional guts of the piece is fatally flawed because the technique can never be finished.  There is no perfect.  If you wait for perfection before moving on, you will never move on.

Secondly and maybe more importantly, having a clear concept of the piece at an emotional level gives you a framework to hang all that technique on.  If you ground your musical and performance choices in the human purpose of the piece, you might actually remember those dynamics!  I wouldn't take the artistic analysis to its conclusion right away, but if you can just figure out the basics (who are you, who else is there, what's the relationship, what are the changes), you will find all that technical work will be more exciting and more efficient too.

Finally, you get a whole lot of technique "for free" when you give yourself over to the human, emotional concepts that form the purpose of the piece.  A thousand little details fall into place without discussion, springing naturally and forcefully from the scene.  And just like the tennis player who finally just watches the ball instead of obsessing on the details of their swing, letting your "self 2" take over will let you get out of your own way, letting your best technician shine through for a change.

So it's never too early.

Recently I read a book entitled "The Listener's Guide to Great Instrumentalists" by David Hamilton, and found another perspective on performance that dovetails beautifully with what I believe, and adds a perspective unique to the performing musician.  Let me quote from the introduction.

A musical performer engages simultaneously in several activities.  Although, as with any such abstract schematization, the boundaries are not always clear-cut, we might distinguish three such activities: execution, interpretation, and projection.  The relate, respectively, to the instrument, the musical work, and the listener.  The performer must have sufficient command of the instrument to execute the music that has been written for it.  He must understand that piece he is playing, must have (at least instinctively, not necessarily in a verbally articulate form) a conception of its shape and its sense.  And finally, he must communicate that conception, and a sense of his own involvement in the whole process, to the audience.

I think that's a pretty good summary of what's involved in stage performance - essentially technique and virtuosity, understanding at the level of emotional meaning, and the ability to project that meaning (or in some cases that technique) to the audience.

My general belief is that performers should "swing for the fences" and communicate something important or at least enjoyable at an emotional level, but the book reminds me that this is not the only option.  It's quite reasonable for a performer to show off their virtuosity and be appreciated for that skill alone.  Not every mode of performance allows this kind of approach.  Nobody cares if they are watching a "great actor" - in fact that concept can only distract from the great acting that (we hope) is going on.  But in the musical realm, there are lots of people who would pay twenty bucks just to see someone who has an amazing command of an instrument.  Chiefly I'm speaking of people who also play that instrument.  :)  It's like being impressed with a guy who can bowl a 300 game - it may not touch you at an emotional level, but being impressed is still an experience that has value.

There is a name for a piece that is written to show off skills.  It's called an "étude" which translates to "study" in English.  Chopin produced many such pieces, each focusing on a particular piano skill, like the ability to play a lot of notes very quickly, or to play chords that are spread beyond the reach of a normal hand, or to play a different time signature with each hand.  That can be amazing to watch!  However I believe that for enduring listening pleasure, we gravitate towards works that have more depth.  I'm not a person with an encyclopedic knowledge of piano pieces, but I love to listen to "Claire de Lune" or Chopin's "Raindrop Prelude" because those pieces seem to deliver the emotional depth that I crave in performance.  Rachmaninoff's "Prelude in C# Minor" is another of my favorites because of it's passion.

Following is a transcript (edited just a bit) of a great conversation I had with Cindy Hansen, a popular full-time professional performance coach.  She gets great reviews as you can see from her entry in the coach directory.  I hope you enjoy reading this as much as I enjoyed doing it!

Tom: How long have you been working with performers, and how did you get started?

Cindy: 30 years.  3rd generation barbershop brat – my grandfather started a chorus in Michigan and my father was in quartets and my uncles all sang.  When we had family gatherings it was barbershopping.

Tom: How much do you coach?

Cindy: I’m coaching full time.  I quit my job 11 years ago. I’ve been lucky to be one of the few who can make an OK living at it.  Not as much as I made in the corporate world, but enough.

Two years ago I was on the road for 307 days.  Then I got married and I wanted to be home a bit more.  About 200 days last year, and probably about 200 this year.  I can be as busy as I want; I’m turning stuff down all the time.

Tom: What’s your specialty as a coach?

Cindy: It’s changed over the last few years, as the venues that I coach in have changed.  I not only coach SAI and Barbershop but also some gospel and a cappella groups as well.   If I’m doing choruses, helping them to develop show packages and entertainment is what I like most. I can choreograph and have done that a lot but I don’t consider myself a dancer, per se.  Working with quartets, I prefer to help them develop their personality, because once they know who they are, the visual plan is very easy to apply and that makes the whole process very simple.

I think if you look at quartets who are successful, they know who they are, what they’re good at, and how they interact with an audience.  Quartets need help finding that.   Sometimes being inside it you’re a little too close.  Sometimes it helps to take all four personalities and help guide them by asking questions.  I ask more questions than anything, because they know their answers – we just have to get it out of them.

Tom: What do you think it is that makes you a person who gets great reviews and is a successful coach?

Cindy: I attribute a lot of that to my Masters degree in social work, believe it or not, because one of the things I can do is talk to a group and get them to believe in things they can be successful at.  My background in social work helps me get them to believe in themselves.  I think believing in yourself is the biggest hurdle to get over.  I’m not trying to get people to be arrogant or cocky or anything like that, but if you’ve got a product that’s good to sell and you know that, if you have a desire to go out and share that, it becomes very successful with the audience.  So I think getting people to believe in who they are, putting them in a position where they trust that what they’re doing in front of an audience is going to be successful, and also, feeling comfortable about the visual package that they have, which goes back to what kind of group they are.

Realtime is a perfect example of that – you don’t have planned moves, you have theatrical designs with concepts, and then each guy gets to be successful at what he would be comfortable doing on the stage inside that concept.  There are others that are great at the theatrical side of performance, and then there are groups that are good at precision moves like Metropolis.  They do planned moves at certain times and that works for them, because they know that everyone is going to do it, they trust everyone is going to do it.  But they’re not always as successful at going off on their own to sell a song individually.   Some groups love subtle because they want to be easy and let the music to be the primary focus, others want to cover up some of their singing and do it with very flamboyant moves that distract a little from their singing, because there are groups that are very entertaining who don’t sing that well.

Tom: How do you help a group to believe in themselves?

Cindy: First of all, reminding them of what they’re successful at doing – where do they get standing ovations, what gets them the longest applause, what things are requested time and time again for them to repeat, and what is it about those things that you think the audience wants.  Some if it may be interactive with an audience, some of it may be comedic or novelty, just something out of the ordinary.    Others may be ballads that tug at the heartstrings because they have individuals that are great at crawling inside of a song.  Looking at past things that they’ve done, what they feel most comfortable singing.  Why they spend more time rehearsing some songs than others.

An example most recently was Power Play’s show package.  When they won their gold medal, I said they should only take songs they loved to do on stage.  They could not take songs that somebody told them they had to do, or because it was an arrangement that was going to score well, or to please an arranger, but only songs they loved to sing.  So they went and sang Love At Home, Singing With My Dad - all songs that fit with who Power Play is personality-wise.

Tom: Clearly you’ve been able to help a lot of groups do some wonderful things, so the way you think about it/ approach it is a very powerful approach.  What are some of the most important insights you can offer?

Cindy: Just like any person who is responsible in a chorus or quartet, you have to live with the music.  I listen to each song hundreds of times so I start to feel the music inside my soul vs. just looking at a piece of sheet music.  I like to talk to directors about where their dynamic changes are, what the style of the music is, so that they can understand key elements that make that music come to life.  When someone comes to me for coaching, I probably listen to the song 150 to 200 times before I ever get in front of anybody to coach it.

I ask the director, where are you having problems?  And if they say “I want them to sing softer here but they keep singing it louder”, maybe I can develop physical moves that will help the director achieve that result, and make that music come to life.

Tom: I feel that most of the singers that I see are better than they think they are, that they’re really getting in their own way, and I have a suspicion that when you go in and work on that visual plan it takes their mind off all the technical things that were getting in the way of their singing.

Cindy: Funny you should say that because Jim Casey and I did a workshop together and we realized that we were going after the same thing in different ways, Jim through vocal technique and myself through emotion and style and character.  So no matter what side of the river you’re living on, the musical side or the visual side, you should be getting the same message.   And as we tag-teamed on that weekend retreat, the chorus was continuing to get the same information just in lots of different ways.

Tom: What would you call the “thing” you were both working on?

Cindy: Good question!  For me it’s the impact on the audience.  When you stylize or sing a chord that rings, there’s an impact on the audience, and when you get emotionally behind it there’s an impact on the audience.  Whether that is soft and tender or exciting and passionate and powerful and makes your heart beat a little faster.   We’re going after the same things in terms of how the audience is going to experience your performance.

Tom: Thanks for chatting today Cindy!  Is there anything you ‘d like to talk about that I haven’t asked

Cindy: I think if you realize that when you’re coaching you are an employee and you are there to make someone else successful, that your coaching takes a whole different focus.  I have become successful not because of what I do, but by getting the groups to do what they do better.  If the focus is totally on their success and how they impact an audience, then you can’t fail, and I try to keep that very clear in my heart.

For me, this TED talk by Benjamin Zander really speaks to the power of performance.  Very much worth the 20 minutes if you can spare it.

Lives are improved by music, by stage performance, by art.  There is a huge gap between the value of these things, and the importance they are given in our culture.  We suffer from this, and we will continue to suffer from it until we get it right.  Perhaps the absence of this kind of culture is enough of a disadvantage that some other culture will take us over before we have a chance to fix it!  I'm OK with that - either way, truth and beauty and passion win in the end.

I've been having a great email conversation with a friend of mine and fellow quartet singer.  His group has been trying to come up with a dynamics plan for "Love Letters Straight From Your Heart" and he's been going about it in a really interesting way.

First you have to understand that my friend is a total geek, an engineer by trade, and so he's approaching the problem in a very left brained way.  Basically he has loaded several versions of the song into an audio editing program (Audacity), and he's looking at the waveforms to see how these other quartets sang their dynamics.  He loaded in the recent version by Men In Black, and of course the iconic Dealer's Choice rendition from the 70's.  Then he chose his favorite phrases from each rendition, and assembled a complete plan showing the phrases and lyrics with a stream of dynamic markings 1 through 10, and sent it to his quartet.

I know, I know, not one in a thousand people would ever really do this - that's what makes it so fascinating!

If you follow this blog, you can probably guess my initial reaction to this scheme.  His dynamic plan seemed eeriliy familiar to me, probably because I've been down many of these technical roads before.  And I've run into an equal number of dead ends trying!  I have come to believe that all aspects of the plan need to come from an authentic, emotional source rooted in the meaning of the song, and that anything else is likely to come across as false.  If you create a long stream of dynamic markings and try to memorize them, you're going to look like a person trying to recall a long sequence of dynamic markings as you sing.  I mean go ahead and do it, but do you think anyone will want to watch?

However, what's really interesting is what happened when he brought his plan to quartet rehearsal.  It may have been an incredibly left-brained, engineer-geek think to do, but it spurred the quartet into an energetic discussion about the phrasing and dynamics.  In order for the four of them to agree on an approach, they wound up having to discuss *why* each given device was good or bad, and that forced them to get into the purpose and meaning of the song!

So I guess what I take away from this is that sometimes it doesn't matter what path you take - if you throw your energy into making a great performance, you have a good chance of getting there.

Quite often I get questions from blog readers in email, and sometimes they seems like good fodder for blog posts. I figure if I answer in a post, everyone can benefit. Here's what one fellow asked:

I’d like to know how to get to the level of intimacy with the audience to be able to make myself vulnerable to them.  To me that is where the connection is.  I am willing to go there, I just don’t know where “there” is.

Very good question!  It's also great to see that this reader realizes there's something he doesn't understand, and that he's willing to learn.  We would all do better to cultivate "beginner mind" so we can keep on learning!

So how do we develop intimacy with an audience?  First of all, what's intimacy?

The Wikipedia definition of intimacy is a bit complex, but in a nutshell emotional intimacy involved breaking down the barriers between yourself and someone else, so that you are willing to disclose "previously hidden thoughts and feelings."  Telling someone your secret dreams and thoughts, and listening to theirs, forms the foundation of an intimate relationship.

Of course, in the every-day world, this can take months or years, and as a performer if you're shooting for intimacy you don't have that kind of time.  Also even if you achieve intimacy with an audience, you probably can't say you have a relationship.  (Even if some of them might think you do, and then come up to you after the show and talk to you like a long-lost close friend even though you have never seen them before... but I digress.)

So for a performer, just what does intimacy mean?  I'll take a stab at it.  Achieving intimacy with an audience means that at least one person in the audience feels that they got something honest from you.  For at least a little while, they feel that they have a connection with you, based on that honest communication.  It might not be a real relationship, but at some level it *reminds them* of one, and they come to associate your face, your voice, your presence with an emotional state of closeness.

Do you agree?  I think that makes sense.

So how do we get there?  First and foremost, you have to understand your material at a human level.  You can't convey anything if you've got nothing to convey.  Secondly I believe that because of the super-developed human bullsh*t radar, your best and perhaps your only chance to have them believe you're being honest is to actually be honest.  I don't think you can fake it, or if that is possible, it's much harder than just being honest.

This is where it gets hard.  Being honest at an emotional level means that you're going to feel vulnerable.  You're not *really* vulnerable, of course.  Nothing bad is going to happen to you because you told someone else how you really feel.  Quite the opposite.  But most of us get stuck to some degree in the kindergarten mentality that says we must keep our feelings to ourselves, or someone in our peer group will taunt and make fun of us.  It's true - kids can be cruel.  Five is a hard age.  But growing beyond that level, emotionally, is a prerequisite if you're going to be honest and not get massive stage fright about it.

If you're having trouble being intimate with audiences (or your spouse for that matter) because you're afraid to open the kimono and tell them the truth, you're not alone.  When you were five and the other kids made fun of you for having a pink lunchbox, you might have thought you would die, but you didn't.  As I told my five-year-old yesterday, "sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me."  You've got nothing *real* at risk, by being honest on stage.  And if you're putting up a facade, you have very little to gain from the experience.

So how do you do it?  You already know how.  Some part of you might have been inventing reasons why you can't be honest on stage.  Tell that part of you to shut up for a while, and try it!