7 deadly sins

The seventh and last Deadly Sin in this series happens right where the rubber meets the road - on stage.  After everything else has gone right, losing focus can still snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

Great performance depends on the audience to participate - they must be present in the moment, they must focus their attention on what's happening on the stage, and they must suspend disbelief, that is, allow themselves to be caught up in the reality being portrayed, ignore all the limitations of the medium, and fill in all the other gaps that might otherwise distract them. When you watch TV, you let yourself believe that the action is real rather than staged, and you restrict your attention to the bounds of the television screen, blocking out the rest of your visual input.  The audience's great gift to you as a performer is their willingness to do that for you!

But audience attention and suspension of disbelief can be pretty fragile.  If I'm watching a play and someone's cell phone rings, suddenly I am back in the theater, no longer immersed in the reality on the screen.  Even worse would be to have my attention drawn to something on screen that doesn't fit with the reality, like recognizing scenery from Hope, BC while watching First Blood, which was supposed to take place in the US.  Another pet peeve of mine is when someone asks me about the actor instead of the character while I'm watching a movie.  "Hey wasn't she in that other movie we saw?"

In a live performance environment, what distracts me is when the performer has a lapse of attention, when their eyes glaze over for a moment and they cease to be in the story, or lavishing the audience with their communication and attention.  Generally this happens when the performer gets distracted by something in their own mind, like worry about a difficult passage, or recognition of a mistake they just made.

I believe that the audience will think about whatever is on the mind of the performer.  There are a million reasons why this is true, beyond the scope of this article (hey, another article idea!), but it seems to hold true.  If the artist is thinking technically, the audience will evaluate them on a technical level.  If the artist is really in the moment and immersed in the authentic expression of their story, as long as their skills are adequate to the task, there is really nothing to evaluate at a technical level, and that's when really great performance can take place, the kind that can really move the participants and keep them coming back for more.

If you want to be able to keep focus throughout your performance, half the battle is in the preparation.  If your story is clear and decorated with vivid images and movies that evoke the proper emotions in you, it has a great chance of holding your attention while you perform.  If you rehearse enough to remove technical distractions from your own attention, you're setting yourself up for success.

The other half of the battle is akin to meditation, and learning the discipline of controlling your own thoughts.  When you first learn to meditate, of course it's extremely frustrating, because no matter how hard to try to empty your mind, stray thoughts keep popping in!  And if you let yourself get frustrated and angry about that, a state of inner peace is not in  your immediate future.  Better to acknowlege the stray thought, and allow it to go.  It's the same on stage - if you sense a distraction, don't beat yourself up.  Just let it go, and find the images in your story again.  With practice, you will find that your mind will interrupt you less and less, until eventually you will be able to maintain a state of absolute presence in the moment and in the performance story from beginning to end.  Then you will wonder where the time went!  And you will probably be mobbed by fans telling you how much they loved it.

This concludes the Seven Deadly Sins series!  There are more sins, of course, I've never heard of the Eight Deadly Sins or the Eleven Deadly Sins, so we'll move on.

Deadly Sin #6 - Failed to be in peak form on the day / prepare the instrument

Consider this nightmare scenario.  You've invested years in your skills and your reputation as a performer.  You have great material that you understand thoroughly, you have a high-impact, authentic story, you have a well-crafted and effective plan, and you've rehearsed your performance to professional standards.  You are ready for the stage!  Then, on the day of your debut, you forget to warm up your voice, and you BOMB.  Ouch!

Now you can't protect yourself from freak blizzards or meteors that strike your venue, but there's still an awful lot you can do to increase the odds that you'll be able to put your very best performance on stage when it counts.  Some are long-term, and some are short.  Read on.

Let's start with the long-term, continuous projects.  You need to keep in good general health, good physical fitness, and good vocal shape.  Nothing will get in the way of your expression more easily than a painful stiff back or a crick in your neck, or a lack of energy.  As a stage performer your body is your instrument, and you would never catch a bassoon player treating their instrument like most people treat their bodies!  A big part of training for the stage is keeping the body strong and flexible.  This means protecting time in your day for exercise and stretching, and eating well.  You should do this stuff anyway, and you know it!  But as a performer you really have no choice.  To fall apart physically is to kill your career, amateur or professional.

Once the overall fitness it taken care of, you will have some specifics that depend on your chosen craft.  If you're a singer, speaker or actor, your voice needs to stay in shape.  That means basically two things: don't get dehydrated, and use your voice properly every day.  It's just a matter of discipline.  If you play an instrument, you can relax a bit about your voice, but you will need to be concerned about the various useful muscles and callouses that adapt you to your chosen instrument.  Play every day.

That's the hard stuff.  Just accept that excelling at your chosen craft is going to dictate your lifestyle to some extent - that's a fact, so don't fight it.  Anyway you aren't getting anything useful out of watching TV or playing video games - ditch the useless time in your routine and use it to further your valuable performance goals instead.  You will be happy you did.

Now the short-term stuff.  Leading up to a particular performance, you'll need to focus on a few more things to give yourself the best possible chance of being 100% on the big day.

I know it's obvious but try not to get sick!  You should be healthy overall, but that doesn't mean you're immune to nasty bugs.  Avoid sick people like... well like the plague!  They shouldn't be out infecting people in the first place, but surely they will understand if you decline to shake their snotty, germy hand.  Your most vulnerable point is your eyes - far and away the most common route for infection is from your environment to your hands to your eyes.  So wash your hands regularly and break that chain.  Especially if you have a burning need to rub your eyes!

There's also a lot you can do to keep your immune system in fighting trim.  Eat well, like you should be anyway - lots of vegetables and fruits, a good multi-vitamin.  Get enough sleep.  If anyone complains about your suddenly taking on healthy habits, tell them you're got an important performance in a few days - that will probably keep their derision at bay.  (Geez you might even spread healthy habits to your family and friends!  A pleasant side-effect...)

Finally you need to be in the right frame of mind when your strong, flexible and healthy body hits the stage.  If you have issues about stage fright and anxiety, deal with them!  Develop a pre-stage routine that calms your mind and removes distractions, so you can focus your attention on your high-impact story while you run your plan.  I already wrote a pretty good series on preparing for the stage, which you might want to study.

After that, you will have done everything you can do.  If a meteor lands on your house it's still going to disrupt your performance, but at least it won't be your fault.

OK let's say you're a singer.  You have enough technique under your belt so that you can carry a tune, and you can hit all the necessary notes well.  You've got some material that is matched to your technical skill, neither so easy that you will be bored, nor so difficult that you will be anxious.  You've decided to perform for the benefit of the audience rather than ego gratification or to please your teacher, and with that goal in mind you have breathed some life into that material by creating a compelling story that connects it to real life and authentic emotion, and you have some idea of a plan that will convey your story.

Got all that?  It's not as difficult as it might seem.  Technique -> Material -> Story -> Plan.

The purpose of rehearsal is to take all that conceptual stuff and make it real.  You don't sing a song by writing down your plan - the song only exists when it is sung, and the first time you actually sing it, you can expect to learn all sorts of things about your plan that don't work, and maybe you'll want to revise elements of your story too!  Funny thing about reality - it's a lot easier to see than abstractions.  And when you can see it, you can decide whether it works or doesn't work.

The biggest sin of rehearsal is so obvious it's almost embarrassing to say it: you have to rehearse what you intend to perform!  Many groups get together and work exclusively on technique, perhaps because they view singing as a technical challenge.  That's a bit like viewing a book as a printing challenge - it's missing the point.  I mean it's true that if you don't get the words on the page, nobody can read them, but what people care about is exactly what the words say!  The meaning of the book is delivered *through* the printing, not *by* the printing.

So for many people, the biggest challenge is simply accepting their level of skill, whatever it happens to be.  There is no such thing as perfect, and striving for perfection beyond a certain point is all about you, and having fun trying to master the game of technique.  There's nothing wrong with doing that of course, but don't confuse it for a performance goal.  The audience cares about their experience of your performance, they do not care about your skills as long as they aren't getting in the way.  So if your skills are good enough to remove distractions for your audience, as far as performance is concerned any further work on skills is a waste of time.

In reality of course nearly every performer will need to work on skills.  But as long as you realize that the skills are only a carrier for what your audience cares about, you should have no trouble organizing your rehearsal accordingly!  Try splitting it 50/50 for a while - spend the first half of each rehearsal working on skills, and the second half working on higher level concepts.

For example, talk about the story of your piece until you are crystal clear about it.  Make sure every bar of your music has some meaning attached to it.  You'll have an easier time accessing that meaning if you have a rich set of images or movies that relate to the story, that you can run through in your head as you communicate your piece.

Once the story is clear, spend some time performing, and decide what needs to change about your plan.  What techniques could make the story more clear to the audience?

Get objective feedback - record yourself, audio and video, and then review the recording.  Does everything seem to work?

Rehearsal can be incredibly rewarding and enjoyable in itself if you do it right.  Try to turn each rehearsal into a "flow" experience by making sure that it has clear goals, instant feedback, and that you really concentrate your attention.  (If you can't tell from that last paragraph, I've just read "Flow" by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.  There's a book review post on the way soon!)

It may be common sense stuff, but if you can make your rehearsals really effective, you'll have a big advantage over 90% of the other performers on the planet who commit this Deadly Sin routinely.  There's an awful lot of wheel-spinning going on out there!

One thing is for sure, you can't have a great performance if you have no idea what you're going to do when you hit the stage.  You need some kind of a plan!  This is pretty obvious for musicians and actors, but even a seasoned public speaker with a reputation for "winging it" will have thought through what he's going to cover ahead of time.  The exception that proves the rule here is improvisation, but then the whole point is to make it up as you go along.  So to put it another way, unless you're planning to improvise, you need a plan.

Then the obvious question is, if I need a plan, how do I make a good one?  Let's start by describing some "deadly sinful" planning strategies that you should avoid.

First, you'll want to avoid the deadly sin of copying someone else's great plan verbatim.  It might have come from the original artist's authentic inner self, but when you do it it's just copying, and everyone can tell because you look like a person trying to remember a plan, instead of a person living one.  The result is a hollow performance - the shadow of a great plan.

Another great way to get a hollow plan is to have no story (see Deadly Sin #3).  If you don't know what you're trying to convey, the planning process always tends toward chaos, and you'll wind up assembling a plan from random bits of cool technique.  "Let's put a crescendo here and let's really chew on the word 'love' in bar 63 and let's use a nice smokey tone quality in the bridge."  The whole house of cards collapses the first time someone pipes up and says, "why?"  (I always encourage chorus singers to reject technical directions that seem to come out of nowhere, in the hope that it will encourage directors to let their singers participate in the creative process, rather than asking them to blindly replicate a sequence of artistic devices.)

Yet another sinful way to approach the plan is the make it too rigid.  Every performance is different, and if you can't go with the situation because you're determined to stick with the plan, you are no longer in communion with the audience.  The feedback from the audience might be subtle or it might be like a bonk on the head, but they do hold up their end of the conversation, if you're willing to listen.  A rigid plan also means your focus is to "get it right", which has all kinds of negative consequences.  First, trying to be right takes your attention away from your story, giving you that glazed over, inside-my-own-head look.  Second, if you believe that the pinnacle of performance is to be "right", you're really going to beat yourself up when something doesn't go according to the plan, even though the audience will neither notice nor care.  Don't try to be right - be present instead!

So enough of that, how can you create a great plan?

The first critical element of the great plan is the great story.  If you understand the piece or the scene, it might not give you a plan on a silver platter, but it will let you choose elements of plan based on whether they support the story or not.  So no more arguments about technical details - make sure you all share the story, and then let the story decide.

Once you've got the great story, just like a painter you need a rich palette of techniques to create your masterpiece.  The more choices you have, the more expressive you can make your plan.  If you are new to the art form of your choice, get a good coach!  They will be able to help you to bring your story to life through good planning.

However, I believe there's a lot to be said for the trial-and-error approach.  Get crystal clear on the story, do a rough plan, and then try it!  See what works.  Try it in front of some people and see what works for them.  Not only will you be able to make a better plan incrementally in this way, you may learn something new about your story, as storytellers often do during the telling.

You've got to have a good story. A lousy one, might be worse than no story at all!

So let's back up a second - what is a story anyway, and why do you need one? Well it's a word that hasn't been used a lot in this context, in fact I heard it first when thinking about marketing, not performance, but I think it's the best word to use for this purpose. The story encapsulates the meaning and the emotional impact of a piece, and bridges the gap between the technique and the plan.

For example, if you're an actor, you start with a script, which is pretty bare-bones - the playwright will have written down the dialog, perhaps some rudimentary blocking and notes, and that's it! Not much to go by. It's the director's job to read the script, understand the humanity in it and the emotional impact, all the objectives and motivations and what Stanislavski would call the "super objective" a.k.a. the "point", and then make sure the actors are acting accordingly.  Without that story, the play may as well be read by robots.  Needless to say, nobody would attend.

In a music performance, you start with even less than a script - just some notes on a page, and maybe some lyrics. Then, if the music is to live, someone has to figure out what it's all about! I bet you've seen many, many performances where nobody bothered to figure that out, and what you saw was an incoherent collection of musical devices.  At best, the musician was able to make it work through sheer force of musicality and intuition.  But it's awkward to have to count on musical genius - it's not so easy to find sometimes.

One great thing about a story - it's yours to write! You are free to use all your musicality and creativity to dream up a believable, high-impact story. Of all the things I do when I'm coaching, this is probably the activity that gets the most mileage, because it makes a night-and-day difference. A good story underneath the song changes everything.

To put it another way, a shared understanding of the story will let you decide which musical devices make sense, and which ones don't. Shall we have a crescendo or a decrescendo? Shall we keep tempo, or slow down, or speed up? Shall we use a focused tone, or a more breathy one? It all comes from the story. If you're having trouble deciding how to approach a piece of music, I bet it's because you don't have a good story yet.

I recall a class given by Geri Geiss at what was then called Harmony College - the big one in Missouri every Summer.   She explained how a great story (which she called a "scenario") made the song "Softly As I Leave You" come alive for the Alexandria Harmonizers.  You can find many recordings of the song online.  I won't get the story completely right because I'm working from a ten year old memory here, but basically there is a woman dying in a hospital bed, and her husband is at her bedside.  He falls asleep for a while, and when he wakes up, he finds that she has written a note to him, while he slept, and that she has passed away.  The note was as follows:

Softly, I will leave you softly
For my heart would break if you should wake and see me go
So I leave you softly, long before you miss me
Long before your arms can beg me stay
For one more hour or one more day
After all the years, I cant bear the tears to fall
So, softly as I leave you there

(softly, long before you kiss me)
(long before your arms can beg me stay)
(for one more hour) or one more day
After all the years, I cant bear the tears to fall
So, softly as I leave you there
As I leave I you there
As I leave I you there

These of course are the lyrics of the song.  And with that story in mind, the emotional impact was crystal clear for the performers.  It held their attention from beginning to end, and all of their music fit into that emotional framework.  I bet it wasn't necessary to argue about volume levels, or tone qualities, or tempo, or anything else, because with a strong story all that stuff just falls into place like magic.

Now Geri's scenario was not the only possible story for that song.  The lyrics could easily have been written about a person leaving their lover.  And that's another really important thing to understand - if you want to have a big impact on the audience, and really give them something worth remembering, worth talking about, then you should pick a high-impact story!

Stories are not just for tear-jerking ballads, but for every kind of performance.  People are wired up to understand and remember stories.  Our ancestors used to memorize thousands of lines of poetry, and pass them down through the generations.  It's not so obvious in this age of reading and writing and lately computers, but those skills are still intact.

So if you want your performance to have life, you had better figure out the story!

Ever watch a group perform and walk away feeling kind of sleazy?  You might even admire their skill, and think they are amazingly talented, and respect that talent, but nonetheless have a negative impression.

So if they are so wonderful, why don't you like them?

Perhaps you've walked away and thought to yourself, "they are amazing, and they know it!"  Well those people have committed Deadly Sin #2, by serving the wrong master - in this case, themselves.

In some sense performance is just like any other kind of job - you have to keep the boss happy!  If you don't know who is buttering your bread, you need to know: it's the audience!  The money they pay for tickets makes everything possible.  Even if they are a non-paying audience, the performance opportunity exists for *some* concrete reason, even if it's just advertising or marketing for some sponsor.  The head-count is all important, and if you're a draw, you're serving your purpose.  And this is not much different in the amateur and semi-pro performance leagues - if nobody comes to see you, you're not a performer, you're just a rehearser.  You might as well be bowling.

If you're wondering whether you are committing this sin, just ask yourself why you do it.  Why do you perform?  There's no need to be embarrassed if the answer comes back as "to feed my ego" or "to prove I can do it" or even "so people will like me."  But it might explain why you're not getting the response you were hoping for.  Somehow people know.  And if the audience doesn't like you, deep down in some level of their thinking, it doesn't matter much how good you are at your chosen craft.  Obstacles will pop up everywhere.

If you're out on stage for a self-centered reason, you can't really do your job.  You will have no choice but to worry more or less constantly about what the audience is thinking of you.  Very likely you will get nervous, if you are at all inclined towards anxiety, especially if (god forbid!) something goes wrong!  Even if everything is going well out there, your attention must be split between the authentic purpose of the art you are creating, and how you think everyone is evaluating that art.  You can never be at your best, in a divided state of mind like that.

So if you're performing for your own glorification, things can not go well for long.  But there are many other wrong masters to choose from!  Performing to make someone else happy - your director, your parents, your teacher, whomever - is perhaps more noble than simple self-aggrandizement, but the audience can still tell it's not all about them, and again the focus of your attention will be split.

Acting is not so interactive as a musical or dance performance, but it's still quite possible to act for self-glorification, or what Stanislavski called exhibitionism.  And he called it "the worst kind of acting" - you can't be true to the purpose of the play if you can't stop saying "look at me" long enough to focus on the scene!  (My 2-year-old says "look at me" constantly, and he's pretty entertaining, but that's another story!)

My advice - to avoid Sin #2, find a reason in your heart to perform in the service of the audience.  Everything good in stage performance ultimately comes from that decision.

Ever see a dancer lose her balance, trying a very difficult move?  How about an actor who loses her way in a long and complicated soliloquy, or a singer who can't quite reach the high notes?  Was it fun for you, other than a kind of car-wreck fascination, or would you prefer they had picked an easier piece?

Performance is not like olympic diving.  There are no points for difficulty.  Imagine if it were otherwise:

Next up is Jenny Jones, the promising young performer from Oklahoma City.  She's been training very hard this past year, and as you can see she's in very good shape, perhaps one of the strongest performers in this year's festival.  Today she will be attempting an a cappella rendition of Igor Stravinsky's "Rite Of Spring", and she'll be doing so without a starting pitch, and with four ritz crackers stuffed under her tongue.  This certainly increases the risk of a disastrous performance, but but it earns her a difficulty multiplier of 1.35 if she can pull it off.  That might be just enough to pull ahead of the French competitor who did so well yesterday in the semi-final round with the underwater violin routine.

As you can see, it's nonsense to consider the difficulty level of the piece.  The "audience" (perhaps we should say "spectators") at a sporting event are interested in the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat.  Their emotional experience is going to be in a rather narrow range.  Half the thrill of watching some sports is the chance, however remote, that the competitor will fall and break a leg.  I won't even start a comparison between stage performance and Nascar racing, which should be obvious by now

There's a good reason that the degree of difficulty doesn't matter - audiences don't care about your experience, they care about their own!  I mean honestly, would you rather watch a singing group tackle something above their heads and be awful, or something easier that lets you (and them) relax, enjoy the music, and have your soul benefit from the authentic human message?  I mean, I love to get a thrill from a great performance, but not the thrill of wondering if they're going to make it all the way through without self-destructing.  It's the same for your audiences when you're on stage.  We can learn a lot by considering the audience point of view.

To compound the problem, if you know what you're attempting is too difficult, you're going to telegraph that to the audience with your own body language.  They'll get the cue even before you start.  Once everyone is in that state of mind, it will not be easy to recover.

On our sort of stage, you need to match the difficulty level of your material to your current skill level.  Here's a rule of thumb - if it doesn't work in rehearsal, it's certainly not going to work in a high-pressure scenario either.  In fact, sometimes it will be too difficult for performance even if it works every time in rehearsal!  If you want to test a piece, try rehearsing the performance, making it as realistic as possible, and just notice what goes through your mind.  Do you run a constant monologue of technical worries?  Then try putting something simpler in front of the people.

Trying harder doesn't work - it will get in your way.  Your left brain, the analytical part, can't handle all the many bits of control and feedback that would be required to make a great performance.  And if you are wasting all your brain power on handling technical challenges, you have less left over for the important stuff, like being in the scene, and/or being in communion with the audience.  I say "an/or" because actors are 99% concerned with their objective towards the other actors, and musicians should probably be focused 50-90% on the audience communication side.  Either way, you can't do it well if you're distracted by a performance piece that's too difficult for you.

Learn to accept your current level of skill, whatever it is.  Nobody needs you to be a virtuoso right away.  And once you've accepted it, make wise choices!