neurology

 Years ago I had a hot debate with a fellow performer.  We had both noticed that in some performances, the performers were able to create strong emotions in the audience.  Sometimes, under the right circumstances, the appearance of sadness in the performer would make the audience cry.  The performer's joy could make the audience joyful.  He was trying to convince me it was magic, as in "could not be explained by science."  That rubbed me the wrong way, so I argued that it had to be something to do with what the performer actually did, and what images and sounds made their way from the performer to the eyes and ears of the people watching.  But the actual mechanism remained a mystery.

Ran across this neat article about what yawning does for you, and how it might help a performer.  Thought it was cool because years ago I developed the habit of yawning before going on stage.  I knew it was some kind of coping mechanism, but I didn't really understand how it worked.  Enjoy!

http://www.upenn.edu/gazette/1109/expert.html

If you've been around the performing arts for a while (or just around performing artists for that matter), you have no doubt been exposed to the idea that visualization is good.  Visualizing a positive outcome on stage can help make it come true!  That might seem like magic, but it isn't.  And it works!

So why does it work?  Well your brain is complicated.  It has many pieces that evolved at different times, so some of the primitive parts in the middle, for example, we share with animals that don't converge with the human species unless you reach back hundreds of millions of years.  The "amygdala" for example, we share in common with lizards.  The cerebral coretex on the other hand is relatively new, and we humans have more of it than any other animal.

Ran across a fascinating article about how young brains work that really sheds light on the ideal performance state of mind.  It's not every day I read an article that pulls together and explains so many of my pet topics, like being in the moment, creativity, and flow! 

Here's the first quote:

One of the best chapters in Livingston Taylor's book Stage Performance cleverly entitled "All things in good time" and of course it's all about the importance of rhythm in a musical performance situation.

As a guy who sings a lot of a cappella music and hangs around with that crowd, I will say that I wish we gave rhythm even half as much attention as tuning and vowels.  I mean, an out of tune chord is not a nice thing to inflict upon the audience, but if we short-change our attention to rhythmical matters, I think we're missing out on a lot of opportunities.

"Liv" is of course an instrumental musician, and the folks who play instruments have got rhythm deeply embedded in their culture.  Singers have tuning jokes (e.g. "he couldn't find 'do' in a bakery") but musicians have drummer jokes: "How can you tell if a drummer is knocking in your door?  It speeds up."  And you can always tell what people care about by their jokes.

Rhythm has a special place in human psychology and neurology.  Beating on drums is perhaps the most ancient form of music, and maybe we got wired up to appreciate it because of all the rhythm in our daily lives: the rhythm of working, walking, heartbeats.  I could theorize all day but the fact is that rhythm has a hypnotic quality to us.  Three beats of even rhythm, and the brain tends to extrapolate it to infinity - the constancy is so comforting and pleasing to us.

On the other hand, to screw up rhythm is to put a whole audience on edge.  Remember, they are in your world, and giving themselves over to the created reality of your performance.  When you drop a beat, I bet some percentage of the listeners get arrhythmia.  It's very disconcerting.

Rushing is in some ways even worse.  When a group is rushing the beat, it feels like anxiety.  "I can't wait to finish this thing and get out of here!"  This problem comes up a lot with a cappella groups, who after all have no drummer to keep them honest.

And even though brains are wired up to detect the slightest deviation in external rhythm, it seems that brains are very poor at producing it.  If you are a singer, try singing a familiar rhythm song along with a metronome - you'll be amazed how that darned thing speeds up and slows down all the time!  Your brain's sense of rhythm seems very fluid.

The way to get around that is to allow physical involvement.  Your body has mass, so as it moves it tends to keep time.  Same principle as a pendulum.  I am a huge fan of Take Six, and I used to think they were just wired up differently from the rest of us because their "groove" is so amazing.  Then I saw them live and realized why - they move!  Then snap, they clap, they jive, they tap their thighs - whatever "moves them" and fits with the music.  No wonder they have such great rhythm!  Fortunately, it's something we can all copy if we care enough.  And I'm saying we should.

Another trick to keeping great time is to move your internal rhythm around a bit.  If your toe tapping fatigues your foot, move it to your hand.  If your hand tires out, start to step to the beat.  Credit Liv Taylor for this suggestion.

Another tip, also paraphrasing Liv Taylor, is to put your attention on the space between the beats, rather than the beats themselves.  There's a precise moment in time when the next beat should occur, and until then you can just rest!  The audience will rest with you, and it drives them wild.

Yet another in this smorgasbord of rhythm tips.  Understand the subdivision of the beat.  Is it divided in two, like a rock tune or a march, or is it divided into triplets like a swing tune?  Be aware of that subdivision, feel it in your body, and it will give the music a strong, solid feel, and it will also keep you honest on the beat.

Finally, pay special attention to counting on those dangerous long notes.  Most people stop counting 1-2-3-4 when they have a half note or a whole note.  Consequently I almost never hear a long note held for its full duration.

A cappella singers - I challenge you to spend just a quarter of your rehearsal time on rhythm for a while.  It will serve you well!

We just love to break things down, don't we?  Sometimes it's really useful too - you really can solve a big problem by first breaking it down into smaller problems, and tackling the smaller problems one at a time.  How do you eat an elephant?  One bite at a time!  Also we Western-educated types just love to dissect things in order to understand them.  We love to exercise our logical minds!

So it's perfectly natural that we try to do this as performers.  There's an awful lot of work that goes into creating a great performance, from creating the original work to understanding the audience to planning, preparation and ultimately execution of the performance itself.  It's one of those "big problems" that we love to break down.  And mostly, that's just fine.

However, there is at least one place where breaking the task down is dangerous, and that is in rehearsal.  Most of the groups I work with seem to believe that you have to perfect the technique first, and *then* start worrying about the emotion.  Where they got this idea, I'm not sure (although I'm always tempted to blame Descartes).  This technique-first approach ends in one of two ways, both of them bad: Either they fail to integrate the emotional reality with the technically rehearsed performance, or they never get to the emotions at all!

WARNING.  If you don't care at all about why this is the case neurologically, skip the following paragraph.

It's no wonder.  They are setting themselves up to fail, because the human brain just doesn't work that way.  The brain stores information as a network of neural connections, and there isn't one place for storing the technique and another for storing the emotion - it's all stored in the same place.  It's a holistic system, and the more connections the better.  That's the same reason that training yourself to have amazing memory always involves making more connections between the things you're trying to memorize, and a framework that can be predicted, like mnemonics that associate numbers, pictures and rhymes with a list of items to memorize.  The brain is incredibly context-sensitive, so it's important to rehearse in a setting that is as close as you can get to the real performance.

The readers who skipped over the neurology bit above can start reading again below.

What actually works should not be a surprise - rehearse what you want to perform.  Don't bother rehearsing what you don't want to perform, namely a purely technical approach.  Don't think about it - just do it!  If you want to analyze it later, video tape yourself.

Try to remember this next time you hear the phrase, "once more with feeling!"  All the times you did it without the feeling were pretty much a waste of your time.