audition

I’ve been to a lot of contests over the years, and there have been a few performances that I will never forget. Watching Gas House Gang sing “Bright Was The Night” and “Shine” was one such moment. So much vocal artistry and commitment to the scene. I don’t know what kind scene they planned for the lines “Saw her standing there, moonbeams in her hair” but they reacted to that scene with tangible awe at the sight of this future bride.

Since then I have seen many quartets sing that same song. Of course few of them can match Gas House in terms of vocal skill, but what I really miss is that commitment. Most quartets, I find, haven’t tried to create a story behind their song at all. Some have done just a little bit of planning, but not enough to keep themselves interested for the duration. Maybe one quartet in ten has a clear scenario, and most of them shy away from choosing a scenario with much impact.

Plan a scenario for each number that will push you into taking emotional risks; that will force you to be passionate. A flawless performance of an uninteresting scene is still just an uninteresting scene!

[Before you go further here, it's going to be easier to read this article if you're familiar with the song "Midnight Rose" which I use as an example.  One of my all-time favorite quartets, the Bluegrass Student Union, sang this song, and I bet you can find it on iTunes if you don't have it already.]

Michael Shurtleff, in his classic book “Audition” captures this idea in one of his twelve rules.  And an audition is, of course, another kind of contest!  Rule number 1 is to consider the relationship between yourself and the other players, and the trick is to find the love. The relationship in the scene is always more dramatic if there is love involved, whether it’s a romantic scene or a fist fight. People don’t come out to see ordinary life: they expect something more, and it's not fun to watch two people interact if they feel nothing for each other, or nothing but hate. Going back to one of my favorite examples, sing “Midnight Rose” like the prostitute is your ill-fated favorite sister, rather than some unfortunate stranger.

Another important rule for every performer to give them conviction is conflict.  Shurtleff's rule #2.  What are you fighting for?  What do you want?  If you aren't fighting for anything, you are uninvolved in your own plan.  Nobody wants to see that.  In Midnight Rose, presumably you are trying, with all your best efforts, to win your favorite sister back to the safety of a more mainstream lifestyle.  So try, and try hard!  This is the stuff of passion on stage.

Another kind of conflict in every great plan, also from the Shurtleff book, is internal conflict - conflict within yourself, which he calls "opposites."  Try to maintain the principle emotion of each scene, and its opposite.  At some level you should feel conflicted about your actions and choices.  A character with absolute conviction is a boring character, because they are absolutely predictable. The “Midnight Rose” example works here too, because if the prostitute is your sister, you’re going to have a lot of conflicting emotions towards her – love, fear, disgust, anger. If she were a stranger, you would be stuck somewhere between pity and reproach, which is not nearly so interesting to watch.

Conflict is great for creating variety and change in the plan too, as your character flips between reactions. Back Midnight Rose for a moment: The difference in attitude between the phrases, “you suppose that your heart is glad” and “but tomorrow you may find it sad” can add a lot of interest to the performance, as you flip between gradations of love and fear.

You might be thinking that not all songs lend themselves to deep and interesting interpretations, and you’re right!  Not every song has an at-risk sister or a dying mother in it.  Not every song is a tear-jerker.  But you need to find the passion in the song, or why bother to sing it?  Why will anyone be interested in listening, except maybe in an elevator, or as background music while they sweep their kitchen floor.

Most importantly - be true to the song.  Don't try to build a gut-wrenching plan on top of a song that can't support it.  For example, some songs are all about fun.  Get passionate about the fun!  Be as expressive as you can be.  Just make sure that whatever you do, in a contest or an audition, has a sense of purpose and passion in it.

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.