play

Kari brought this snippet of an article about Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis to my attention today:

Martin and Lewis' official debut together occurred at Atlantic City's 500 Club on July 24, 1946, and they were not well received. The owner, Skinny D'Amato, warned them that if they did not come up with a better act for their second show later that night, they would be fired. Huddling together in the alley behind the club, Lewis and Martin agreed to "go for broke", to throw out the pre-scripted gags and to improvise. Dean sang and Jerry came out dressed as a busboy, dropping plates and making a shambles of both Martin's performance and the club's sense of decorum. They did slapstick, reeled off old vaudeville jokes, and did whatever else popped into their heads at the moment. This time, the audience doubled over in laughter. This success led to a series of well-paying engagements on the Eastern seaboard, culminating in a triumphant run at New York's Copacabana. Patrons were convulsed by the act, which consisted primarily of Lewis interrupting and heckling Martin while he was trying to sing, and ultimately the two of them chasing each other around the stage and having as much fun as possible. The secret, both said, is that they essentially ignored the audience and played to one another.

It's great to have a window into the past, to see how two iconic performers pulled success out of the jaws of failure by changing their plan!  The article doesn't say what their original, uninspiring act was like, but it's easy to see why the new plan would be so entertaining.  It paints a picture of a very playful and un-self-conscious duo, creating an atmosphere that violated the usual assumptions and boundaries of stage performance at a club like the 500 club.  It was new and different, and it woke people up!

One of the most interesting things to me is that they "essentially ignored the audience."  As Stanislavski would say, they set their focus of attention on each other.  It can be very powerful to paint a scene for the audience to observe, instead of engaging in a direct conversation with them.  In today's world, TV has trained people to be very adept passive observers.  Sometimes they can even be uncomfortable if you look at them too long from the stage!  That's a sad comment about our times (in my humble opinion) but you may as well accept the fact, and make use of it.

The new and improved Martin and Lewis act also had the hallmarks of improvisation and play.  They relied on their instincts and basically did whatever they thought of in the moment!  That kind of plan really lets you listen to the audience and engage in a back-and-forth conversation.  So in spite of what I said earlier, the "passive observers" are providing half of the conversation just by their reactions and their energy.  Can you imagine Martin and Lewis trying to pre-record their new act without an audience?  Impossible.

In the past two articles in this series we've talked about how to free the voice and the body to prepare yourself for the stage.  The final step is to focus your mind.

First of all, because everything is connected, the process of freeing the voice and the body will already have decluttered your mind somewhat.  Nagging thoughts of the stressful drive to the venue (or whatever else happened to you that day) must have faded away, or you wouldn't have been able to relax your tension spots.  In fact, if your physical preparation was successful and you are relaxed, calm and free of tension, all that remains is to turn on your creative mind, and get into what Stanislavski calls the "inner creative mood."

One critical skill for the stage is the ability to control the focus of your attention.  So pick an object, and focus on it to the exclusion of all other things in the room.  Consider its characteristics and facets - what is its color, texture, size, shading.  If you let yourself get distracted, notice that and start again until you can maintain the focus.  Now pick a far away object, and repeat the exercise.  Repeat it again with something very near.  With the attention part of your brain engaged, you will be able to shift your focus on stage easily and fluidly between objects, real and imagined - this will keep you from wandering.

If you're an actor, many of the objects will be other actors in the scene, physical objects in the set, or imagined objects that arise from the scenario.  On the other hand if you are a singer, most of the time you will be focusing on someone in the audience, or on an imagined object that forms part of your scenario for the piece.  In this sense, the singer's job can be both harder and easier than the actor's - easier when you're simply singing to a real person and telling a story, and harder when you must imagine a sequence of vivid images from your scenario out of thin air.  It certainly helps to have strong and practiced visualization muscles in this case!

Once you have flexed and stretched your organs of attention, the next step towards your inner creative mood is to rev up your imagination.  Stanislavski suggests that you choose a simple physical objective, then build a motivation around it.  I think of this as "theater sports" games.  For example, you might choose the objective of taking off your shoe, and putting it back on.  Why would you do this?  Perhaps something in your shoe is irritating you and making you limp.  You become frustrated, sit down, take off your shoe and look inside.  What do you find?  Perhaps it's a coin.  Perhaps it's a rare and valuable coin, and you are shocked to see it!  How did it get there?  Are there others?  And so on...

Spend a few minutes improvising a simple scene like that, and acting it out so that it's truthful.  This will reacquaint you with that sense of creative play that energizes great performances, where everything is happening afresh (even if you've done it a thousand times before), and you are engaged and passionate about your part in the scene.

Now that you are attentive and your creative self is awake, you need to run through the major subdivisions of the real part you are about to play, and refresh all the important images and emotions.  Don't just run through it like a static movie, but infuse each piece with something new, out of your creative sense of play.  This kind of visualization is like an extra rehearsal in your brain, and over time if you do it right it will build more and more depth and reality into your scenario that otherwise would fade over time.

If you do this properly, one side benefit is that you won't have any attention left for worrying about stage fright or other anxiety issues.  Your attention will be focused where it needs to be - on the objectives in your scene.

Congratulations!  That's the end of our mini-series on preparing for the stage!

What can you add, for the benefit of the rest of the Owning The Stage community?  What works for you?  What's your backstage ritual?  Head over to the forums, or comment below.

If you perform a lot, you will understand that keeping your performances fresh can be a challenge. Especially if you are performing the same play or the same concert many times. After a few weeks, the energy of newness starts to fade, perhaps along with any performance anxiety you might have had.  (A topic for another day.)  Another few weeks and you catch your mind wandering in the middle of a performance that has become routine. Those standing ovations are coming less and less frequently, and you're thinking ahead to the next gig.

But the "next gig" might be months away.  How can you get the energy back?

"Working harder" doesn't seem to be the answer, because as soon as you are focused on working harder, you're no longer focused on the scene and your objective in the scene.

Recently I sang at an outdoor performance in an amphitheater in a beautiful park. Because the month was August, nobody expected rain, but rain is what we got - buckets of it. You have to hand it to the audience because they were stalwart. Many of them had umbrellas, but even the unprotected sat in their seats and enjoyed the music, as they got wetter and wetter. There were several a cappella groups singing in the concert, and depending on how much rain was falling at that moment, they sang on the concrete space in front of the audience, or in the gazebo a few meters further back. In the gazebo, they were further away from the audience, but at least they were staying dry!

We were last to perform, and by then the skies had opened up and there was too much rain even for the most dedicated audience members. The decision was made to move them all into the gazebo!

So there we were, singing just four feet away from a few hundred wet people, who surrounded us on three sides. What everyone noticed was that the mood was completely transformed. Bright, smiling faces everywhere. The people had gone from enduring the performance to living it, as we all crowded into the gazebo together to defy the miserable weather.

Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could move every performance "into the gazebo" and relish in the newness of it? I think performer and audience alike would be happier if the performers could find something new and interesting in every performance. Certainly the performer's job satisfaction would be up!

One big obstacle to that, in my opinion, is the need to "get it right." Certainly it's important to rehearse a performance to a certain level of correctness - the right words, the right notes, the right dance steps - but many of us never get past this mode. Once they have it "right", it is finished. Static.

Fortunately I have become aware of a level above "right" and that is the level of play. Never be satisfied with mere correctness. Every audience is different and every performance is different, created in that unique moment, and if you can learn to stay engaged with the people around you, you can turn every performance into a kind of improvisation on a theme. That will keep it real for you, and for the people who paid to see you.

OK this is going to be really uncomfortable for you highly intelligent control-freaks out there with aspirations in the performing world.  The nuances of performance are too complex, even for you.  If you try to control your performance, you will fail.

How do I know?  Well, lately I've been reading a lot on the topic, but long before that, I tried it myself!  In fact, growing up as a bit of a smarty-pants I assumed I could solve anything with my brain alone.

Now I starting singing for real when I was about sixteen years old, when I joined a male chorus.  And I knew next to nothing about music.  Then the trouble began - I learned enough to be dangerous.  First came tuning.  And since we in the chorus practiced "just intonation", I started singing thirds and fifths higher, and sevenths a bit lower.  I invented a notation scheme for chord parts, went through my music and marked it up - circles on the roots, little up-arrows on the thirds and fifths, etc.  So far so good.

Next it was balance.  Sing the roots and fifths a bit louder, and the thirds and sevenths a bit softer, to balance out the chords.  This was close harmony, so you can't just sing any old volume you please!  More notation schemes and marking up of music.  So far so good.  But my music was starting to look like an Egyptian rune stone.

Learning more and more, I added layer after layer to the complexity, hoping to get it right some day.  I added crescendos and decrescendos in many gradation. Then vocal colors.  Then, remembering that people were going to watch me do this, I added facial expressions.

I wrote "emotion words" on my music near the end, as a kind of last-ditch effort to save my singing performances from resembling a speed chess match.  Think hard, do something fast, repeat.  Who would want to watch that after the first two minutes?  (No offense to speed chess players.  I assume very few think of it as a spectator sport.)

As you can see, this was destined for failure from the start.  You can't wrestle a performance to the ground with your brain, and if you try, you wind up strangling it to death.  This is where naturally intuitive people have a big advantage as performers - they never try to turn it into an intellectual exercise!

You'll find the same issue for actors, dancers and public speakers as well, whenever they try to fix a performance related issue with a technique out of the blue.  Which is their instinct, most of the time.

Coaches, too, fall into this trap constantly.  "Sing that phrase a bit softer" they will say.  "Put more weight on your back foot."  "Keep your hands inside the box of your body while you say this phrase."  I wish the people being coached would wake up and ask "WHY??"  What does this disconnected advice have to do with anything?  Am I really supposed to memorize a sequence of robot instructions?

Thankfully, no.

So who do we have to blame for this?  Should we beat ourselves on the head, aiming to punish the left brain for being so presumptuous?  Not at all.  Let's blame Rene Descartes for giving us "dualism" - the idea that the self is separate from the universe.  Remember "I think, therefore I am?"  That sentence gave birth to science, and soon afterwards infected Western minds with the idea that every problem was best solved by carving it up into little bits to see how it worked, and then, with the pride of our new knowledge, putting it back together again.

Unfortunately, a dissected performance can never be revived.

So what do we do?  What's the answer?

I'll get into that in some depth in later articles, but I will for starters refer you to a great book called "Free Play" by Stephen Nachmanovitch, subtitled "The Power of Improvisation in Life and the Arts."  Stephen essentially makes a living making up cello concerts in front of a live audience.  And in the process he has discovered a lot about the nature of performance, and why there is "something lacking" in most of them.

It turns out, great performance feels like surrender, not control.  Stay tuned for the details.