focus

What's the difference between an actor and a musician?  Most people who can play an instrument beautifully refuse to call themselves musicians, and most people who call themselves actors don't act!  Fascinating!

Besides that tongue-in-cheek comparison, I have realized a few more differences.  Perhaps they are common sense, and I'm just easily amused... you be the judge.

Actors are doing a good job when their focus of attention is on the scene, and not the audience.  The audience at a play fully expects to be ignored, unless there is a Shakespearean "aside," and that doesn't happen very often.  For an actor to play to the audience is a disaster - the art is destroyed for the sake of exhibition.

Musicians on the other hand are usually better off to pay attention to the audience.  People like it when they are played-to, or sung-to.  A concert is something "real" - nobody is asking you to pretend you're not sitting in a theater.  There is probably no elaborate set, to suggest an alternate location.  To stand on stage and sing and ignore the audience is an invitation for people to get up and leave, physically or mentally.  So it's a completely different game.

However, rules are made to be broken!  I love to experiment with musical performance that incorporates a bit of the theatrical mode, to introduce some variety.  Often Realtime will put up the "fourth wall" between ourselves and the audience, and focus our attention to the stage as we pretend to be a band, or even a singing group on a corner, singing for our own pleasure.  As long as the ignoring doesn't go on too long, people get it, and they can enjoy watching us interact with each other instead of communicating straight to them.  After all, this is the TV generation - we have a lot of practice being passive observers, voyeurs of entertainment.

Actors in musicals do something similar in musicals, when the "scene" is put on hold while the people on stage sing to the audience.  And audiences don't seem to have trouble with that.  When the song ends, the actors go back to focusing on and interacting with each other.

When Realtime is working on a piece and planning the performance, the ones that require the least work are the ones where we're being ourselves, singing about singing!  Tunes like "Come On Get Happy" don't need a lot of creative, out-of-the-box development!   You can see why:

Hello World hear the song that we're singing
Come on get happy
A whole lotta lovin' is what we'll be bringing
Come on get happy
We had a dream to go travlin' together
We spread a little love and then we keep movin' on
But somethin' always happens whenever we're together
We get a happy feelin' just a singin' a song

Not a lot of creativity required there.

Where it gets complicated is when we take on a new persona as part of the performance.  With "Birth Of The Blues" we start off as ourselves in the introduction ("I asked my Daddy but he said he didn't know..."), then we become nightclub singers at the chorus, in a "rat pack" kind of style ("They heard the breeze through the trees..."), and then when David Wright's arrangement really goes crazy, we turn into the band, only to return to being ourselves at the end, having come full-circle.

Playing with that focus of attention dynamic is a lot of fun.  You should try it!

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.

I recall a few years back that the "Inner Game" concepts ran like a wildfire through my circle of a cappella singers.  Every educational event featured a class in The Inner Game, and everyone was talking about it.  The book itself, by Barry Green, was written way back in 1985 as a follow-on to the hugely popular "Inner Game Of Tennis" by Timothy Gallwey.  Even today, many Inner Game concepts can be seen in the prevailing attitudes and beliefs in performance circles.

I am re-reading The Inner Game Of Music now, and testing all its concepts with what I have learned about performance from other sources, and now I find that I agree with a lot of the book, but I disagree with a lot of it as well.  I have just finished Chapter 3, which goes over the basic Inner Game concepts at a high level.

As a quick overview, the basic idea of the Inner Game is to remove the self-generated interference that is getting in the way of you being the best performer (or tennis player) that you can be.  The equation Performance = Potential - Interference ( P = p - i ) sums it up, no pun intended.  The interference in question is created by your judgmental self, which is your "Self 1".  Everything you do that works well comes from the other part of you, your "Self 2."  Some people have tried to map these concepts of Self 1 and Self 2 to "left brain" and "right brain" or even to "mind and body", but Gallwey specifically says that he's trying to say something much simpler: If it interferes with your potential, it's Self 1; If it expresses your potential, it's Self 2.

It's here that I start to have a problem with The Inner Game.  I see the performer as one thing, not two.  I believe it's more useful to view yourself holistically, rather than to honour the schitzophrenia of naming multiple selves.  As soon as you identify a "Self 1" that does things to you that you don't like, you're giving up control.  It may be a useful device, but it doesn't seem like the most useful one, nor does it seem entirely honest or accurate.

Moving along, once Gallwey identifies Self 1, we start to talk about strategies for reducing its power.  We hear Self 1 criticizing us, sowing fear, uncertainty and doubt in our minds while we perform, so we refuse to talk back to it.  We focus on something else in order to fool Self 1 into shutting up for a while.

Dude, it's not your Self 1, it's just *you* doing it.  So stop! ;)

Seriously, negative self-talk is a big problem for performers, and it can keep you from being in the ideal state of mind for performing.  It's a good idea to have strategies to manage it, many of which I addressed here, in my series on stage fright.

Shifting your focus to "the now" is a great idea.  And focusing on something that is happening in the moment is a good strategy.  My only issue is what Green suggests you focus on: look at your instrument, listen to the sound, focus on your feelings, focus on what you know.  The common theme is that you are turned inward instead of outward - navel gazing, while trying to perform.  In The Inner Game Of Tennis, Gallwey suggests that students look at the seams of the tennis ball as it comes toward them, and apparently that works really well.  But now we come to the crux of the problem - stage performance is not the same as tennis!  Sure "performance" is important in both games, but that's just because English is a stupid language sometimes.

If you're a tennis player, your job is to hit the little green ball over the net better than your competitor.  If you do this, you win.  The fans get excited (one hopes) but there's not a lot of emotional content there, other than the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat.  There is no suspension of disbelief - it's really two people hitting a ball over a net.

For a stage performer, on the other hand, there's an audience and they need to create a scene in their mind, based on what you are doing.  So what you do as a stage performer is much more difficult to understand and measure than a tennis game.  What you focus on in order to quiet your Self 1 negative self-talk is *critical* for a stage performer, and the only thing that makes sense as a focus is *the scene* - any mental cycles that you waste on your instrument, the sounds in the room, or your feelings, is a distraction from the scene, pure and simple.  The audience does not care at all about your feelings.  They only care about the scene they are creating in their heads, and the emotions being evoked.  They care about their own feelings.

In tennis, it makes a lot of sense to be in a state of relaxed concentration all the time.  In stage performance, relaxed concentration only makes sense if you're playing a scene where relaxed concentration is appropriate.  One wouldn't be in a state of "relaxed concentration" while singing a marching song, or playing a love scene.  Relaxed concentration is a sports performance thing, not a stage performance thing.

So here's how the book scores so far:

• Self 1 vs. Self 2.  Doesn't work for me.
• Focus on the now.  Check - I agree.
• What they suggest you focus on: instrument, your feelings, etc.  Nope, that's not gonna work.
• Relaxed concentration.  Nope.

Stay tuned!  The book has 12 more chapters.

At Realtime rehearsal this week, we were working on a jazz tune, and thinking about what kind of focus to use, that is, should we basically sing to the audience, sing to each other, or focus internally. Charlie, our coach that evening, asked "I wonder what Ella Fitzgerald would do?" So I whipped out my new iPhone and searched for "Ella" on YouTube, mostly just to impress everyone with my new gadget. Anyway this is the video that came up first:

Clearly she is at the top of her game vocally - such an amazing singer. But look at the focus she chooses - it's inward. Eyes closed, most of the time. Very interesting! I think a lot of performers are reluctant to use this kind of inward focus, for fear of making the audience feel excluded. But it really seems to work for Ella.

And doesn't it all depend on the situation? In a stage play, there is usually a "fourth wall" between the players and the audience - they don't normally acknowledge the audience. In a speech, taking an inward focus would make you look either socially clueless or extremely nervous, because you are expected to make eye contact and talk right at the audience. Dancers and singers on the other hand have some options, and that's when it gets interesting.

For a singing group, it all depends on the song. A song in the second person, where the lyrics talk about "you" a lot, should probably be sung to the audience. Singing "I Love You For Sentimental Reasons" with your eyes closed, focusing inwards, would look narcissistic.  Or just weird.  Singing it to the other group members would probably be interpreted as comedy.

But sometimes you can be really creative with your focus, to great effect, even changing it up mid-song! We start "Birth Of The Blues" singing to the audience, because the lyric is narrative. Later on the "fourth wall" goes up and we become the band, sometimes "punching through" the wall and hitting the audience with our focus, to emphasize an important word.

Lots of our jazz numbers have a soloist and three "backup" parts, playing the part of the band.  In this case the soloist will usually focus on the audience, and the other three just get into the music, and relate to each other or focus in.  Just like a rhythm section would probably do.  Nobody expects the drummer to keep his eyes on the audience!

So when you're planning your performance, here's some simple advice. Know what your options are, be creative, and pick the right focus to get the effect you're after.