greatness

A good friend of mine used to say that he loved military metaphors, because war focuses the mind.  When the situation is life or death, the calculations are urgent and crisp, because there's no time to worry about grey area.  And in performance, the closest thing to war is the contest - a microcosm of the whole artistic world, reduced to its essence.  Studying the contest will teach you a lot about audiences, about perception, about preparation, about state of mind, and about truth and passion.  And in the process, I think competitors who follow along and participate can bet on a dramatic improvement in the odds that they will improve their standing, and that they will come out on top!

The contest scenario I'm most familiar with is the barbershop quartet/chorus contest, but experts from other fields will notice a lot of crossover to acting auditions, American Idol, and even the Olympics.

In this series I plan to cover the following topics, more or less:

• Knowing your stuff
• Understanding the judges
• Barbershop judging categories
• Choosing the right scenario
• Shock and Awe
• The two sides of identity
• The power of visualization
• Serving only one master
• Recency and primacy

Look for this series regularly on Owning The Stage!

Tom

Have you ever left it in the green room?  Most performers have felt that way - that they could have done better, and that what they actually brought to the stage was not up to their own standards.  Here's how one reader put it to me recently:

The obstacle that currently vexes me is the "level drop" that occurs between a quartet performance in a rehearsal or informal setting versus the one that happens in front of a large audience.

When we rehearse or sing out in an informal or relaxed setting (e.g. after chorus rehearsal, or to our chorus-mates at retreat, or on a street-corner after a fun evening out ~ the product astounds us. We are so proud of it, and it matches our expectations. We have fun producing the sound, and are truly performers.

When we get in front of a formal live audience, I feel a significant level drop. Chords we always sing in tune are suddenly faltering. The strong resonant sound we always produce is intermittent. The product lacks the "pride" and the performance doesn't feel "fun" like it does in the informal setting. Video and audio recordings reveal some evidence of nerves, but nothing unexpected.

I am left feeling disappointed after a public performance, thinking that it "could have been so much better". My initial solution to this is to just keep doing it. The more audiences, the more exposure to this, the better we can learn and adjust to keep the level up.

And so, my question to you: what is your advice on how to help the level of rehearsal translate to performance?

Everyone situation is different, so face-to-face I would always ask more questions and dig a little deeper before offering advice.  But going by what this reader has written, here's what I would say.

First, it's quite possible that there isn't a problem!  Because it's not about how you feel when you perform, it's about how other people perceive it, and what it does for them.  I bet that a group like this leaves behind a lot of happy audience members, even if they feel like they didn't do their absolute best.  Find some people that you trust for their perception and their honesty, and get them to watch your performance.  Then ask them for their opinion, which is 100% more objective than yours!  You might be surprised.

There was a big study done about this perception gap, and I read about it in Psychology for Performing Artists, an excellent book that is listed here on my resources page.  After viewing a sequence of five performances, the audience often disagreed with the performers about how good each one was.  Sometimes when the performers thought they were exhibiting nerves, the audience perceived more passion!

However, assuming that there are some real things "going wrong" then we're looking for interference, as in the Inner Game concept P=p-i (Performance = potential - interference).  So what's getting in the way?

The reader does talk about nerves, and that's a biggie, even if they aren't any worse than expected.  And there are some great methods of dealing with them head-on.  I've tried to give a summary of those methods in my series on stage fright, which might be worth a read in this case.

Ultimately, I feel that the reader's intuitions are correct - performing more will probably lead to closing the gap between the mastery of technique in rehearsal vs. performance.  That's kind of how it works!  There's no better way to get better at something than to just do it!  Do it, notice what happened, and do it again.

There's an important point buried in there - you want to "notice" what goes wrong, and not to try and correct it in real time.  That, however, is a topic for another day.

There are a lot of things that go into great performances, but there's one thing at the root of it all.  If a performance has something in it that touches people at the level of their human nature, consciously or unconsciously, it is fulfilling its purpose in our society.  It is teaching us individually about life and about some aspect of our social or natural environment, and it is making us smarter as a species.  Nothing is more important, especially with the monumental challenges we face in today's world.

That key ingredient is truth.

I'm not talking about sincerity.  Of course sincerity is important in a performer, because people can spot a fake instinctively.  Nothing will shut down your speech or your musical piece faster than a lack of sincerity.  But of course it's not enough to be sincere.  I can stand up and tell you that my eyes are blue (which is true) and that would be totally sincere, but it also wouldn't be doing much for you.  And a lunatic can be sincere about any crazy thing he believes is true, like trickle-down economics for example.  Don't get me started.

We're also not talking about accuracy.  A physicist can stand up and tell you that the acceleration of gravity is 9.81 meters per second per second, and be pretty darned accurate.  It would even be teaching your something factual about the universe!  But unless you are doing a physics problem, it's not going to improve your quality of life much.  Truth is deeper than facts.

Truth is the critical part of the performance ecosystem.  Truth inspires the composer and moves through the performer to the audience.  The audience knows it is truth because they are in touch with the same source of truth that inspired the composer in the first place.  Great art reveals what we knew was there all along, even though we could not see it.

People react in some powerful ways when they see truth in a performance.  Sometimes they choke up, or tear up, or cry.  Sometimes they cheer and applaud.  Sometimes they sit silently, as it sinks in, not wanting the moment to end.  Often, they laugh, because finding the truth can be intensely funny.  Humor may be humanity's way of dealing with truth.  I'm not talking about Laurel and Hardy slapstick, or gimmicks or surprises, but the kind of humor that comes from awareness of our situation.  The kind of humor that should be in every scene of a play.  As Michael Shurtleff says in Audition:

Humor is not jokes.  It is that attitude towards being alive without which you would long ago have jumped off the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge.  ... When we say about a life situation, "And it's not funny, either," we are attempting to inject humor into a situation that lacks it.  We try in life to put humor everywhere; if we didn't, we couldn't bear to live.

That's the kind of humor that should be in every performance.  That's what people really need.

The truth we seek is the "cosmic truth" - something that speaks to our greater human nature, helps us understand our place in the world, and how to get along in it.  A performance that reveals that kind of truth can be truly inspiring, and life changing.

I've heard that if you don't know where you're going, any direction will get you there!  But if we're going to talk about how to be a better performer, we should probably agree about the goal.  How will you know if it's working?  What does it feel like to stand on stage and "do it right"? Well I happen to be a guy who has been performing on stages an awful lot for the last 20 years, and I've been fortunate enough to back into some amazing stage experiences.  A few of them stand out above the rest for me, because they felt so wonderful, and based on the audience reaction I'd say the audience thought it was special as well.  So for what it's worth, I'll give you my opinion.