Realtime

If you want to experiment a bit with performance energy, here's something to try.  (Please note: I'm a scientist, and I realize there may be no such thing as performance energy in the same way as there is kinetic energy or electromagnetic energy.  Think of it as spiritual energy if you're comfortable with that, or think of it as a metaphor.  Whatever you like.)

1. Walk on stage
2. Stop and face the audience
3. Be still

You don't have to freeze like a statue - just find a comfortable place on the stage and stop moving around.  But the stillness will give you some time to play.  Be open to the energy that the audience is sending you, and feel the effect of that energy on your body as you absorb it.  Do what comes naturally to you at this point - thank them for the energy!  Reflect it back to them.

Try feeling which parts of the audience are sending more energy than others.  Is there a strong, steady stream from the front rows, and only a trickle from the balcony?  Try reflecting more energy into the areas that need a bit of encouragement.

The stillness has more than one purpose.  Another thing it does is let the audience soak up your appearance and all your non-verbal communication, and get comfortable with who you are.  They can't release themselves to your singing or your music until they are comfortable.  They will also mirror what they perceive to be your inner state, and your stillness makes you seem confident and full of focused energy.  If you do stillness right, it asserts your right to be on stage in a way that is hard to deny.

As Livingston Taylor put it in Stage Performance,

"More than anything else, stillness is essential to establishing control.  Stillness is the straight line, the horizon from which all the angles and curves of a performance flow."

Once you're aware of the audience's energy, start paying attention to your own.  As a performer on stage, you're like the filament in a lighthouse bulb - everything you're doing is focused and magnified as it gets witnessed by the hundreds or thousands of people who are giving you their attention.  It's amazing how much energy you have to throw around.

I recall one time when Realtime was singing at the civic auditorium in Dortmund, Germany.  It's an amazing space, and it seats about 2,500 people in a small space by packing them vertically into four levels - one orchestra level and three balconies (if I remember correctly).  So the whole audience is much closer to the stage than in a typical theater.  On this occasion it was packed with some youthful and enthusiastic singing fans, and the energy was pretty amazing.  The applause would feed on itself, and go on for what seemed like forever!

On the spur of the moment, I decided to move some energy around.  I shifted my attention to one side of the venue, and they cheered louder.  Then the other side.  It turned into a bit of a competition, and an unforgettable stage experience for me.  That's one example what performance energy can be like.

Perhaps more important though is witnessing and learning to control the ebb and flow of performance energy during a piece, instead of between pieces.  That's where the real meat of a performance exists, at least if your material is any good!  And because during the piece the audience will give themselves over to that reality, they are also giving up control to you.  Treat them well!  You have more power than you may realize.

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!

If you want to have a great performance, you need to understand your material and you need a performance plan - not just technical elements like dynamic markings, but something truthful, passionate and emotional; something vivid enough to keep you and your audience engaged the whole time.

So how do you create such a plan?  Can you write it all ahead of time?

In method acting, they acknowledge that the development of the emotional foundations of a stage play is an iterative process - you take a good look at the script, do your research, make a "first draft" plan, and start developing it from there in rehearsal based on how it feels to the actors and the director, how it hangs together artistically, and so forth.  Then you get it in front of people and iterate it all again based on their direct or implicit feedback.

So why should a song be different?  You're accomplishing the same thing - creating a vivid emotional story that supports the song and keeps the performer completely and appropriately engaged.  Applying method acting principles to choral singing is exactly what Tom Carter will tell you he's doing in his book Choral Charisma.

Anyway I've touched on all these concepts many times in the past few months, so let's do an example.  Realtime is working on a beautiful ballad called "Little Boy Lost" for our upcoming third album.  We heard it sung by the Voices In Harmony, and it was arranged by our good friend Greg Lyne.  Here are the lyrics:

Little boy lost in search of little boy found
You go a wandering, wandering
Stumbling, tumbling 'round

When will you find what's on the tip of your mind
Why are you blind to all you ever were, never were
Really are nearly are

Little boy false in search of little boy true
Will you be ever done travelling
Always unravelling you

Running away could lead you further astray
And as for fishing in streams for pieces of dreams
Those pieces will never fit
What is the sense of it?

Little boy blue, don't let your little sheep roam
It's time come blow your horn, meet the morn
Look and see can you be far from home

The song is from the musical "Pieces of Dreams" so that's where we started.  The plot of that musical is that an American journalist is stationed in Paris during World War II.  He falls in love with a French woman there, but when the Nazis invade he is sent to the front.  While he is there, he hears that she has been killed.  Later on, he hears that she had his child before she died, and he starts to look for the child.  He comes across an orphanage, and the nun there tells him she has his son.  He takes the boy and they begin to live together as father and son.  Later he finds out that the nun lied - the boy was not his son, but she had promised to find every child a family.  His quandry - what should he do with this boy whom I love, who has become my son?  And should he keep looking for his real son?

It's a wonderful and complex story, but it only got us so far.  As is so often the case, taking a song out of its context changes things a lot.  We could used a set-up in performance to bring back some of the context, but in this case it's quite a complicated story so we decided it wasn't really feasible.  I remember the late Larry Ajer telling me that he didn't like broadway tunes done in barbershop, because they don't make sense without the rest of the musical.  (This, just two minutes before I sang "Old Man River" while he was in the audience... sheesh!)

Then the feedback.  Performing this song with the "real" scenario in mind just didn't work.  Without the context, we couldn't follow the plot.  Based on the audience response, I'd say we left them confused as well!

So starting with some of the ideas from the scene of the musical, we went back to the lyrics. For us they evoke strong images of father-and-son scenes.  Sometimes the "little boy lost" seems to be the son, and sometimes it seems to be the father!  Sometimes, such as in the first few lines, we choose to be the father speaking to the son.  But when we get to "and as for fishing in steams", we choose to be sharing wisdom with the audience directly.  That focus swich is something that actors can't usually do because their context is fixed, but as a singing group we have that kind of flexibility.  We continue with that "direct communication" mode through the lines "little boy blue, don't let your little sheep roam" which is all about taking care of your loved ones.

Once you understand what's happening in each "unit" of the piece, who you're singing to, what your objective is, it's relatively quick and easy to construct the technical plan because it all falls into place naturally.  It seems to grow organically from the shared understanding of the emotional foundations of the piece.  No more arguments about whether to be mezzo-piano or mezzo-forte in bar 29.

This kind of work is what I enjoy most, when coaching performers.  It's like magic, watching their performance come together once they have a clear and vivid emotional foundation for their scene or their music.

Context is critical for people, because that's how we are wired up.  Psychologists and neuroscientists will tell you this.  Whole strategies for memorization are built around this fact, because the brain can access information most effectively if it's in the same state as it was in when the information was stored.  This has ramifications for the way we learn music and memorize lines, but that's a whole different article - this one is about the audience, and how to prepare them for the greatest impact.

A quick story.  Years ago I was participating in a "top gun" school, where the best a cappella quartets in my area were all being coached by experts that were flown in.  Part of the weekend was a show, and the coaches were all in the audience.  Earlier that day, a legendary coach named Larry Ajer told me that he didn't like hearing broadway tunes done in a show set, because they just didn't work outside of the context of the musical.  Then I got up and sang "Old Man River" and saw Larry in the front row, giving me a knowing look, and realizing that it was a broadway tune.

And he was right - Old Man River just doesn't make as much sense without the events and the setting of Showboat, the musical.  We can see in the lyrics a shadow of the meaning, but a lot is left to the listener, and not every listener is going to take up the challenge.  So we will get unpredictable results.

To get around this, if you can't actually mount the whole musical, you need to do something to put the audience into the right starting frame of mind, so they can take the journey that is the song and wind up where they are supposed to wind up, emotionally.  And that is the purpose of a set up.

One of the most requested songs that Realtime sings is the Scottish folk song Loch Lomond.  It's a beautiful arrangement (by fellow Vancouver musician Jonathan Quick), and Mark sings it very well, but I think the biggest reason for the amazing response it gets is that we do the following set up to put the audience into the correct context, and to create powerful images in their mind's eye.  In fact this set up is written right on the stock sheet music that we bought:

"1745, after the failed uprising at Carlysle, two of Bonnie Prince Charlie's men have been captured.  One is to be executed, the other set free.  According the Celtic tradition, the spirit of the condemned man will return home via the "low road."  He will reach his homeland before his comrade, but he will never see his true love again."

Then the song begins: "By yon bonnie banks, and by yon bonnie braes..."

By the time we get to the chorus and sing "Ye'll take the high road and I'll take the low road..." the audience is dead silent, except for the occasional sob, as the meaning of the lyrics sinks in.  After we sing this in a show, more often than not we will have people of Scots descent come up to us and say that their father or grandfather used to sing that song, but they never really understood what it meant before.  It affects them deeply.

What do you think - would it be so effective, without the setup?

Now ask yourself, which of your songs come out of nowhere from the audience's perspective?  Maybe you can make them work better, with the right set up.