Owning The Stage

I've been coached a thousand times on my singing and performing by (I would guess) more than a hundred different coaches, and thinking back, I'm surprised how often they have tried to represent their approach as the "right" approach - as if they could lay out on a platter the one true vocal approach, the best possible interpretation plan, etc. If I've learned no other wisdom in the past twenty years, it is that there is no right or wrong in performance. There are only choices and consequences, sometimes difficult to predict! You only have to watch two great performers to realize that each one has their own approach.

If only performance were so simple that all you had to do was learn the correct way!

For example, in working with a group of four voices, the best skill of a coach is to imagine the way they might blend together into a flexible and expressive whole, rather than to make them sound like some kind of "ideal model" of a vocal group. Every actor should be the best actor they can be, doing the kind of work that they do, and not a copy of Sir Lawrence Olivier. That should be pretty obvious! Yet how may actors spend their brief, depressing careers trying to be someone else?

I think when coaches represent their suggestion as the "right" way, they are confusing the need for consistency with the need to target an ideal model. Any audience member who is paying attention can tell if something changes in a way that seems "not on purpose." If you go for a high note, and the tone suddenly becomes strained, everyone will cringe. But (believe it or not) if it was strained the whole time and that seemed "on purpose", the audience would soon come to accept that vocal tone. [I mean, to a point. If you sound like a chicken, you sound like a chicken. But I stand by my statement.]

If you're listening to a whole bunch of barbershop quartets in a row, and quartet number 6 is only half as loud as quartet number 5, you notice it, and then 5 seconds later it doesn't matter any more. Your mind has reset itself to the new decibel level. A watercolor may not be as vivid as oil, but once you've realized you're looking at a watercolor it won't bother you. It's quality that matters in expression, not quantity.

From "inside" the bubble of an art form, it might seem like there is a right way. Every serious cellist probably knows the name of the best cellist in the world (I'm no cellist, but would that b Yo Yo Ma??) and they probably know how they play. And a good many of them might believe that if they could only copy that "ideal model" of a cello style, they would be just as great.

But that can never be authentic and from-the-heart. Even if you succeeded and replicated that fantastic performance exactly, the audience would have witnessed you trying hard to execute your memorized plan. That's "lukewarm applause" territory, for sure.

Do you think Yo Yo Ma does it the same way every time? No matter how he does it, it's right.

What's the message here, you might be wondering? Figure out who you are, and be yourself on-purpose, as truly and with as much passion as you can!

I got an interesting email from a reader the other day, and I bet that her thoughts will resonate with a lot of people who follow Owning The Stage.  She is a musical director in a choral group.  Here's an excerpt:

My problem is with 'the plan'.  Surely no-one sets out to do a lousy plan? I'm soooooooo scared of doing the wrong thing. I've analyzed our new songs to death and I feel really strongly that the way forward is NOT to copy someone else's performance to the letter.. but it's really hard to know what to do!!  Our marks in contest last year had us teetering on the edge of an entirely different level- so i know it's more crucial than ever. I feel like a complete novice and I'm supposed to be one of the ones in the know! it's almost as though the more i read, the more nervous i get...

There's no question about it - when you sit down and try to make a whole plan appear from nothing but your own intuition, it's a daunting task.  How do you make all those decisions about how to approach a song?  How can you be sure it's going to work?

As I've written previously, there are some sure-fire ways to screw up a plan, like trying to create one without creating a story first, or trying to create one that's fully-formed and rigid right out of your head, or even plain stealing copying someone else's work!  But here's the good news - if you avoid these pitfalls, pretty much anything you come up with will be good.

Yes, you heard correctly - it's hard to go wrong!  Why?  Because you are a human being and a musician, therefore you have access to a lifetime of experience with this world that gives you insight about the human condition, and you know good music, so once you know what you want to say to your listeners (a.k.a. your "story" for the piece) you will be able to make good choices.  And for heaven's sake, it's ART!  It's entirely subjective!  The value in art is in the mind of the beholder, and if you're making good musical choices and not getting in the way, the art will work its magic.

So here's the recipe, if you're worried about doing a lousy job:

1. Establish a great and truthful story that supports the piece.  For this, you need little other than your humanity.  If you get stuck, get together with a few friends and talk about it.  Good things will emerge.  It never fails, because stories are what humans do!
2. With that story in mind, look at the piece.  See how it fits with the story.  Try it out in your head a few times.  Note the inflection points in the story, and how they fit with the music.  Paint the moods arising from the story, with a broad brush, onto the form and phrasing, as well as the choreography.  Don't get it too perfect (see 3, below).
3. Try it out, and see what works, just a few times.  If you're in a group, engage the group in the story to make sure it's vivid and clear.  See what they do with it.  Refine your plan organically, and it can only improve.
4. When the plan comes together, and you have the feeling that it's good and right, you can start to rehearse it for real.  But remember, it will never be "done" - only the pace of change will slow down as the group finds the groove.  Every performance is unique - be open to new ideas.

Most of all, don't worry too much.  If the plan comes from a place of truth within you, it can not be an awful plan.

It may be easy to make a real bad plan, but it's hard to make a real plan bad.  :)

Hi had a great conversation with an old friend the other day.  Conversation turned to "current projects" and I told him all about Owning The Stage, and how I'm trying to distill what is common about all the various modes of performance.  The assumption is that if we can all learn something new about how it works, the "framework of performance" if you will, we can do better at our chosen craft, no matter what it is.

Now my friend is not a performer, himself.  In fact he is a computer science guy.  But innovation often comes from unexpected places, where different fields intersect.  I was talking about the different modes of performance, such as singing, dancing, acting, public speaking, sales presentations, and so forth, and he jumps in and says "and the stage of your life."

I stopped short, as the gears in my head began to whirl faster than they were designed to go...

Now if we could learn something from stage performance that would help regular people with their lives, THAT would be something new and different.

In a way, it would not be a shock to discover this mysterious insight, because stage performance is the way our culture expresses important values, deals with large-scale loss, learns about itself, and so forth.  But bringing it down to a personal level was a new thought to me.

I'm certainly conscious of the fact that stage performers are often getting more out of it than the money.  (Ha!)  Stanislavski made a comment in his book on that topic, suggesting that nobody benefits more from a performance, at a personal level, than the performer himself.  Mastering any skill can give one a sense of well-being and self-confidence.

And I have to admit that there is a lot of similarity between stage performance and every-day life.  I'm beginning to think of performance as "organized communication in the moment" which is not unlike any of a thousand different interactions we have every day, when we're trying to make a point, influence someone, make a sale, etc.  Quite possibly if we can learn to be great performers, the skills will bubble over into the rest of our life interactions as well!  It might even help us with our solitude, since being a great performer involves mastery over your own thoughts.  Perhaps stage performance is an alternate path to 'enlightenment' in the Buddhist sense, or if not a complete path, perhaps it gives one a head-start.  Most people are inclined to keep themselves busy, or at least distracted, to avoid the chaotic thoughts that creep into their heads in moments of quiet.  That's why TV is so addictive in our culture, in spite of all its negative consequences.  Stage performance skills can help you tame the self-talk that keeps you down.

Short of making everyone a performer, I wonder what concepts we can take from the performance world that would help the regular folk?

Comment if you have any inspiration!

Tom

[Editor's Note: Liz has put together a much more detailed article on Flow than the simple review that I wrote.  Enjoy! -Tom]

As Tom writes about here, a ‘flow’ state is one where you are completely immersed in an activity, losing all sense of self-consciousness, with action and awareness completely merged. It’s what athletes mean when they say they are ‘in the zone’. We should care about it because it relates both to high levels of personal satisfaction in what we do and to the development of high-level skills. Happiness and expertise go hand in hand, it seems.

Flow was first explicitly documented by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who derived it from accounts by expert practitioners in all sorts of fields, from artists to airline pilots, from musicians to mountaineers. He found strong common themes in their descriptions that allowed him to identify five key conditions that allow you to get into a flow state:

• There needs to be a balance between challenge and achievability: if the task is too hard you become anxious, if it is too easy, you become bored.
• The task needs to be clearly defined, so that you can tell if you have achieved it or not.
• Related to this, there needs to be direct and immediate feedback, so that you can adjust what you are doing in real time.
• You need to have a sense of personal control over what you are doing.
• The activity itself needs to be intrinsically rewarding, that is, it is an end in itself, not merely a means to an end.

So, it’s clear that musical performance has a very high flow potential –not surprising, given that this was one of the fields Csikszentmihalyi studied to develop the concept. And anyone reading this blog has already experienced it first-hand, whether in an occasional peak experience, or as a regular part of what makes music-making addictive.

But of course, not every performance achieves flow, so it is worth interrogating these points a little to see what implications they have for how we understand what we do.

1. Challenge level. This relates strongly to Tom Metzger’s recent post on choosing the right material. A major reason for anxiety in performance can be doubting your capacity to deliver.Conversely, material that lies so well within your grasp that you could perform it in your sleep can also prove an obstacle to flow, since it doesn’t require your full attention to produce a well-controlled performance. And unfortunately, music performed on autopilot can feel as anticlimactic to audiences as it does to performers - so it is important to maintain a degree of challenge. This is particularly an issue for professional performers who may perform the same material many times – either as part of a run, or as core repertoire they return to year after year.Fortunately, music is a complex thing, and we can continue to find new things to stretch us long after the technical issues are under control. We can seek to deepen our interpretive insight with each repeat performance, or to allow ourselves to become more emotionally vulnerable in our connection with the audience. But we need to keep growing with the music if we are not to find ourselves becoming cynical old hacks.
2. Task definition. It is the nature of music that it can be performed well or it can be performed badly, and – notwithstanding inevitable debates about taste - there is a good general consensus as to which is which. This is one of the things that makes flow possible: if it were a case of ‘anything goes’, then there would be no opportunity to get in the groove and really nail it. So, we have to accept the risk of bombing as part of what makes the artistic heights attainable.Of course, what counts as ‘bombing’ varies according to the level of the performer. For less experienced performers, this may be technical control; for more skilled performers it is more likely to be an artistic issue. Just last week, I heard one of our advanced piano students play Beethoven’s Op. 111 Sonata in a Performance Class. It was a captivating performance - technically impressive and imaginatively authoritative. Still, from her perspective, she hadn’t nailed it: ‘There wasn’t enough passion,’ she said, ‘it’s the end of the day, and I am tired, but it needed more passion.’ She gave her audience a compelling experience, but had not herself, on that occasion, entered into the depths of flow.(Incidentally, as a Music Category judge, this is the primary reason I value the relative strictness of the barbershop style definition for contest purposes. You can’t have a ball playing at the edge unless you know where the edge actually is.)
3. Feedback. In musical performance, we are constantly getting feedback on what we do: from our sound, from our co-performers, from our audience. And so, we are constantly responding, and adjusting what we do as we go.It is worth making the distinction here between self-talk (‘ooh, I was a bit sharp there’) and responsiveness. The former is unhelpful, because it is far too mono-dimensional and slow to feed usefully into what you do. By the time you’ve finished thinking that thought, the music has moved on, and you’ve missed a whole phrase because you were busy talking to yourself about tuning. The latter is glorious, giving that sense of being immersed in and contributing to an experience unfolding in real time – of being in the now.And the extra richness of feedback is why live performance is a heightened experience compared to rehearsal, and why so many performers cherish their work in small ensembles as particularly satisfying. (For a wonderful fictional evocation of the interpersonal magic that is chamber music – as well as an unbearably moving love story – try Vikram Seth’s An Equal Music)
4. Personal control. This one is interesting, because the same activity can give quite different impressions about levels of individual control, depending on your relationship with it. Musical performance has a lot of constraints, things you are expected to do as a matter of course – not just to do with notes and words, but expectations of performing traditions too. If you add in a strong musical leader (within the group, or coaching them) who takes most of the interpretative decisions, it can feel like you’re just a puppet operated by the will of others. But that’s not why people go into music – we all want, at some level, to express ourselves. And however dictatorial our genre’s conventions and our musical peers may be, they can never entirely determine what we do; we always retain the opportunity to use our own hearts and brains to contribute to the performance. And the more we choose to use that opportunity, the more chance we have of finding flow.
5. Intrinsically rewarding. Well, musical performance just is. If you’re here reading Owning the Stage, you don’t need me to make a case for that! Besides, Tom already did.

Barry Friedman, a performer and a reader of this blog, asked me to review his series of seven daily video tips on how to get corporate gigs.  Realtime has often talked about the need to get corporate gigs at some point, when our schedule settles down a bit, so I was interested in the content and decided to check it out.

Once you sign up, there are seven videos to watch, each about ten minutes long and covering another aspect of how to (can you guess?) get more corporate gigs.  The seven tips are all listed on Barry's blog, so I'm not giving much away if I outline them for you here.

In a nutshell, the seven videos are:

• how to make a good promo video
• about image and reputation
• how to stay top of mind with your clients
• benefits vs. features
• pricing
• a phone prospecting tip
• wrap up

The production value of the site and the seven videos might not be top notch, but the content is really quite solid.  Most of it is familiar to me from years of working in marketing, not only with Realtime, but in my "other" life as a manager in the software industry.

So if you're primarily a performer and not a marketing professional, I recommend you check out Barry's blog and read his seven tips.  It's good advice and it will serve you well whether your goal is to get more corporate gigs, or just do a better job of selling yourself in general.

The book is called "Flow" by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.  Thanks to Liz Garnett for bringing it to my attention!

I realize that the title of this post has given away my review, but I'm really enthusiastic about this book because at some level I needed to read it. I'm reviewing it here because I think you might need to read it too. This book is amazing and I can not possibly do it justice in a short review. But I will try.

The subtitle of the book is "the psychology of optimal experience" and it is full of wisdom and insights about how to enjoy yourself in every aspect of your life - your work, your hobby, your creative life, your family life and even your solitude. I had a dozen "aha" moments reading it, and I believe it will help me move my own experience of life to a better place, not that it was awful to start with!  And it's relevant to stage performance too: the various modes of stage performance are a powerful way to express your real self and enter into a flow experience, and organizing your stage performance (or any other) activities so that they encourage flow is a great way to make your whole experience more enjoyable and effective, from rehearsal to stage time.

So first things first - "flow" is a state of mind that becomes possible when you are involved in an activity that has:

1. Clear goals - you know what you're trying to do
2. Instant feedback - you can tell if you're making progress towards your goals
3. Challenges matched to your skills - it's not too easy or too hard
4. Action and awareness are merged - your concentration is entirely focused on what you're doing

Playing music, for example, has clear goals and instant feedback.  You know what notes are coming up, and you know if you hit them right or you didn't.  You can also pick music that is appropriate to your level of skill, so you don't get distracted by boredom or anxiety.  The same could be said of any other stage performance mode like acting, singing or dancing.

When your concentration is completely fixed on what you're doing, you will also be excluding irrelevant things from your attention, such as thoughts of your self that may lead to stage fright.  There is no attention spared to worry about failure.  You cease to be conscious of your self.  Often your perception of time will be distorted as well - this is the same as Eckhart Tolle's idea of being in the Now, unconstrained by the past and the future, hence outside of the perception of time.

Being in "flow" also reminds me of how Stanislavski discusses the ideal state of mind for stage performance, where you have immersed yourself in the "given conditions" of a scene so completely that you cease to be conscious of your self as separate from the action, and the subconscious takes over the direction of your activities.

Once you can get into flow with an activity, it becomes enjoyable for its own sake.  Flow is enjoyment, and if you can spend your whole life in a state of enjoyment, regardless of the conditions in which you find yourself, you will have led a wonderful life.  In order to go along with this idea, you first need to admit that your state of mind is completely in your control, and not produced by your circumstances.

Applying flow to stage performance, just like an great art, is partly a matter of staying in the moment rather than executing a plan:

Whereas a conventional artist starts painting a canvas knowing what she wants to pain, and holds to her original intention until the work is finished, an original artist with equal technical training commences with a deeply felt but undefined goal in mind, keeps modifying the picture in response to the unexpected colors and shapes emerging on the canvas, and ends up with a finished work that is responsive to her inner feelings, knows what she likes and does not like, and pays attention to what is happening on the canvas, a good painting is bound to emerge. On the other hand, if she holds on to a preconceived notion of what the painting should look like, without responding to the possibilities suggested by the forms developing before her, the painting is likely to be trite.

In the present day, as it becomes more and more difficult to keep performance and art funded in the school system, it is critically important that we recognize and are able to articulate the value of stage performance and art in our culture.  Otherwise we will quickly lose it, and we will fail to reap its rewards.   The author sees art and culture as the vessel into which we put our hard-earned learning about our own consciousness as a species.  To be successful as a person and find meaning in life, you need to learn from those who have gone before:

The strategy consists in extracting from the order achieved by past generations patterns that will help avoid disorder in one's own mind. There is much knowledge - or well-ordered information - accumulated in culture, ready for this use. Great music, architecture, art, poetry, drama, dance, philosophy, and religion are there for anyone to see as examples of how harmony can be imposed on chaos. yet so many people ignore them, expecting to create meaning in their lives by their own devices.

That paragraph makes the point powerfully for me.  Protecting art and performance in our culture is critical if we are to develop as a species in time to save our world.

I sincerely feel that everyone should read this book, and put its advice into practice as I intend to.  I believe that you should read this book, because as a member of the human race I care about you and I want you to enjoy your life more, for your sake, and for the betterment of our world.

• We humans are authentically expressive. When we speak, thoughts begin a neurochemical reaction in our brains, leading to facial, physical, and vocal muscles expressing those thoughts and their related feelings. Invite a bunch of people to a party, aim a hidden camera at each one of them and follow them through the night, and you will see amazingly authentic facial expressions, body language, and speech -- all of it connected to the thoughts and feelings of these individuals. And all of it happening without the speakers controlling it, presenting it, or emoting it. Were Steven Spielberg to see the footage, he would be impressed with each and every person there -- their "acting" would be so real, so genuine, so authentic; their facial expressions, movements, and voices so congruent.
• We act truthfully under imaginary circumstances. When we use our imaginations to create thoughts, our psychobiological process is virtually identical to that of our truthful selves. The face, body, and voice react just as truthfully to imaginary circumstances. If one of the partiers shares details of a fantasy vacation, their expressions would be just as vibrant as if they were describing an actual vacation from which they just returned. No need to pretend, manipulate the face to fit the words, or go over-the-top with excitement. Authenticity happens, even when we're using our imagination.
• Our audiences connect as we do. Human beings can mentally model the events going on in other people's minds, leading to "emotional contagion." This means that our audience members will think and feel things similar to what we're thinking and feeling. In addition, we humans read faces, bodies, and voices -- beginning this ability during infancy and refining it to an art by the time we're adults. Therefore, audiences know when there is an authentic connection between the words being sung, and the truthful expression of those words. And they know when we're faking it. We humans are great BS detectors!
• So, to summarize, in our truthful and unmanipulative moment-to-moment lives, human beings have thoughts which lead to automatic and unbidden expressions. We may smile, grin, shout with joy, tear up with sadness, or glower with anger -- these are all authentic expressions directly connected to what we're thinking, and we embody such expressions on a daily basis. As we do so, we affect those in our presence as they affect us.