contest

There's something odd about competitive art.  You don't see competitive watercolor painting or competitive clay scupture weekends (as far as I know!) but often you see competitive singing - there are lots of festivals where choirs, choruses and ensembles are judged, and a winner is chosen.

In barbershop, for example, one of the central activities is the contest.  Many quartets and choruses go to incredible lengths, expending a huge percentage of their time and energy to put two songs onto the contest stage several times a year.  The barbershop organization does its part by supplying judging category descriptions, highly trained and selected judges, medals, plaques and trophies for the winners, etc.  It's a lot of work!

I can understand how one might assign a score to a performance based on its technical elements.  A judge can estimate how often a group is in tune, or how well the arrangement follows the barbershop rules.  Sweet Adeline judges in the Showmanship category probably find it pretty easy to determine if everyone was wearing a matching outfit.  Judges can even take a blind stab at the level of artistry and impact in a performance, although I feel they're getting on thin ice with that kind of thing.

But what strikes me is that all the truly human aspects of a performance, the authentic, personal truths underneath the music that infuse it with meaning, are completely beyond judgment.  How can we say that one person's joy warrants an 80 where another person's joy is only a 65?  What's the best way to measure real anguish?  How can we assign a meaningful number to excitement, or pain, or love?  It just doesn't make any sense.  We can't.

So when groups refuse to play the technical game, strange and wonderful things happen.  Emotional things happen.  In circumstances like that, judges tend to forget themselves just like any other audience member - they get carried away, and only remember after the fact, when the applause has died down, that they were supposed to reduce the performance to a number between 1 and 100.

And that, i believe, should be the goal.  Put enough real life up on stage that everyong forgets to monitor the technique for a while.  It will do them good.

Writing this series on winning a contest has been a fascinating experience for me.  The effort to cover everything important about some topic winds up creating a framework - a set of ideas that becomes a kind of checklist or breadcrumb path for others to follow.

So looking back on what I wrote, keeping in mind that nearly all of it was written without a master plan in mind ahead of time, here's the framework:

1. Get technically good enough at your craft so that technique is not an impediment to the story behind your art.  Avoid the pitfall of perfectionism.
2. Get well known before the contest, to the audience and the judges.  Your reputation is your biggest asset.
3. Dig deep into the music and make an amazing plan for each piece - understand the music better than anyone else, and know what it has to offer to the audience.
4. Arrange to be in peak form on the day of the contest, physically, vocally and mentally.
5. Make a great first impression when you walk on stage, and in the first eight bars.  Nail the tag.

That's all there is to it folks!  Of course each bullet point represents an awful lot of work.  For example, it's easy to say "get good enough at your craft" but it's not nearly to easy to do!  It takes a lot of hard work and open-mindedness and tenacity!  But at least if you follow this path, you may believe it's useful work instead of the trial-and-error, one step back and two steps forward kind.  Maybe you can get to the top of you game a lot faster this way.

So if you want to take it seriously, and see if this path leads to success for you, I believe you need to borrow some concepts quite alien to the performing arts.  You need to make lists, break things down, follow up on things - really it would help to be a project manager!  Or to have a coach who happens to possess those skills.  So here's my recipe for applying the lessons in this framework.  Create the following checklist and use it to focus your rehearsals:

1. Take a skills inventory for each member of your ensemble.  Get the necessary coaching.  Check off each issue as it is addressed.  For example, if the lead needs more graceful high notes, get him the coaching he needs until he can do it.  Check it off the list.
2. Brainstorm who you are as a quartet.  What's cool about you?  What do people like about you?  Once you've got it right, get it out there - make a web site, participate in the community, incorporate it into your stage show.  Get known!
3. For each contest piece, have a brainstorming session to identify what the song is about, and what it has to offer to an audience.  Write down a performance plan that includes the love, the conflict, and the character development that will keep you interested the whole time.  Find the most musical and insightful person you can find to help you with this stuff.
4. Write down what each person is going to do, to be in peak form on game day.  Call each other every day, to make sure it's going well.  If it isn't going well, support each other - it's time for an intervention!
5. Create your rehearse-like-a-pro plan, including when you will get a song ready, get it on video for review, get it in front of friends, and get it on a real stage.

If that doesn't get you great results, consider voodoo.

Finally, I confess that I have no way to discover what is missing from my own framework except asking you!  Did I leave any huge questions unanswered?  Was my coverage of any topic too shallow?  Please wander over to the forum and add your comments to the "winning a contest" thread.  If we work together, we can make this a great resource for all competitors, and I for one would like to have more fun watching contests.  Better contests, for me, would make for a better world.

OK, if you've been following along with this series, you've already developed all the singing skills you'll need.  You have put yourself in the judge's shoes.  You understand the music in terms of its notes and words, story, scene, objective and development.  You have exercised all your creativity and intelligence to make a truly a great plan.  You're already miles ahead of 99% of the groups in terms of your preparation.  Unfortunately, if you fail to execute during that six minutes when you're doing it for real, some would say that all your hard work was for naught.

(I'm not one of those people - I believe the journey is more important than the destination, but I suppose it's easy to say that when you've already got a gold medal!  LOL.)

I believe that if you can come to the stage well prepared, your voice is in peak form, and you're in the right state of mind, you will knock it out of the park.  Let's treat each piece separately.

Come well prepared

Yes you have a fantastic plan.  It's creative, it's insightful, it's engaging.  But making the plan is the beginning of the journey, not the end.  I'm sure you've heard it a thousand times, but amateurs rehearse until they get it right, but professionals rehearse until they can't get it wrong.  Your best insurance policy against something going wrong at exactly the wrong time is to rehearse to a professional level.  And that doesn't mean getting together with your group and banging through the tunes a hundred times - that isn't going to do it.  If someone tells you they have ten years' experience, do you ever wonder whether it was ten different years or the exact same year ten times?  Makes a big difference.

Professional rehearsals follow a pattern.  If you're staging a play, you start by memorizing your lines, understanding your character, your motivations, and objectives in each scene.  Then you read through it with your fellow actors.  Then you run through it many times on the real stage, under the guidance of the director.  Then generally you'll have a "preview" performance of some kind, with a well-chosen audience, usually friendly.  Then and only then is it opening night.

So let's steal what works, shall we?  Learn your stuff, make your plan, and then move through the professional rehearsal pattern.  Start with just the foursome and a video camera.  Then invite a few friends to come watch and give you feedback.  (Keep an open mind.  They are right - you are wrong.)  Then take the contest tunes onto the stage for a real audience, like on a chapter show or some other public performance.  Video tape that, and review the tape together with your trusted advisors.  At each level you will learn a lot - bake those lessons into your performance at the next level.

The key is that you'll be rehearsing what you're actually planning to do, in an environment that is closer and closer to the one that counts.

Get your voice and body in peak condition

All that professional level rehearsing was a lot of work, so let's not blow it in the last four hours before going on stage.

One of the most important things is making sure your voice is 100% when you hit the stage.  Stay healthy, be well rested, stay hydrated, take your allergy pills - whatever it takes to feel right.  You don't need distractions like a tickle in your throat.

Being at the peak of your potential vocally means warming up the right way for your voice.  With all that pro-level rehearsing you might be in what we call "perma-warm" which is an awesome place to be - do enough singing every day and you'll be ready to sing without much work at all, and your stamina will be fantastic too.  If you can arrange it, sing every day for a few weeks before the big day.

Another pitfall many groups fall into is banging the tunes a dozen times in the warm up room.  I think they do this because at some level they know they are underprepared, or they just don't know what else to do when they're together.  Of course you'll be rehearsed to a level where you can't do it wrong, so you have the luxury of not worrying about it on game day.  Hit the intro of each song a few times.  Sing other stuff that isn't strenuous.  Play with your iPhone - whatever.  Metropolis used to play hackey-sack!  Whatever you need to do, to stay relaxed and focused.

Head games on game day

A lot of this is covered nicely in my previous series on stage fright, but that's not the whole picture.  You get to choose what kind of dialog goes on in your head, and in the last two hours before you go on stage it's even more important that the self-talk is heading in the right direction.

Which of the following phrases would you like to have running through your head, as you prepare for the big day?

• Everyone is going to pick us apart out there.
• They are going to love us - they won't know what hit 'em!
• What if I trip as I go on stage?  What if I wet myself?  What if the theater burns down??
• Everything is going to be fine.
• If anything unexpected happens, I can handle it.
• Gosh my butterflies are getting worse!
• I can feel the adrenaline pumping, ready to back me up.
• I know our baritone will be flat on that note, and everyone will notice.
• Little imperfections are glossed over when the story is strong.
• We never duetted the last two phrases!!
• We are the most prepared group they will see today, and our plan is awesome.

Take your pick - what you hear as you go on stage is all up to you!  One tip - if you're one of the people who like to tell yourself negative things in order to motivate yourself, game day is TOO LATE for that marginal strategy to do ANY good.  Ditch it.

It's also important that you stay on the same page with your fellow singers at a time like this.  Try reminding them about the best phrases in the above list if it seems like they need it.  In extreme cases, you can also take them by the shoulders and say, "we're never going to make it.  This is going to suck."  That usually breaks the ice.

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.

If you are involved with an organization that dabbles in competitive art, I guarantee there is a powerful mythology built up around judges.  They are special.  They are not like you and me.  They can watch a whole performance, compare each moment to an ideal model, calculate the differences with unflagging precision, add them up and distill it into a number.  They are never wrong.  Like the oddly mutated ship captains in Dune, they do what they do by a kind of magic that we cannot hope to understand.

OK, wake up – you’re dreaming!

First of all, although the judges talk about an ideal model, there is no such beast.  The ideal model is an abstract concept.  How could there be an ideal model when every performance is unique?  No judge can know ahead of time what your performance would look like if it were perfect – that’s nonsense.  There is no ideal quartet sound, because every voice is unique.  There is no ideal musical approach – that is the realm of creativity.  So before we do anything else, let’s take the judges off their mysterious pedestal.  They are human.  They have been trained to watch an ensemble and give out the “right score” meaning a score that is as close as possible to all the other judges’ scores in their category.  But they arrive at this number more through a holistic, intuitive sense (read the judging manual and look for the phrase “your lifetime of musical experience”) than some scientific, repeatable and accurate process.  We’re attempting to measure the impact of art here, not calculate pi, so it can only be subjective.

And since the poor judges are human and therefore inherently intuitive, emotional creatures, they know what you’re supposed to score, more or less, before you even start singing.  They are not wired up differently from you and me, and the universal human tendency is to make a snap judgment, and then collect evidence to rationalize that judgment.  So if the judge sees a quartet that looks and acts like a group that scores in the A level, they are expecting an A level performance, and they will gather evidence to support that foregone conclusion.  People hate to be wrong.  Opinions have inertia.  They may adjust their score based on what you actually do, but usually no more than five points in either direction.

Don't believe me?  Imagine you're a judge.  There you are in the pit, in a darkened theater, holding a pencil, and facing a blank scoresheet.  The master of ceremonies comes to the podium and announces the next quartet.  “Can I have the doors closed please.  Ladies and gentlemen, representing the Seneca Land district, please welcome The Allentown Four!”  The audience applauds a bit tentatively as four men between 70 and 85 years of age walk slowly in from the wings, dressed in black pants and white shirts, with red sequin bow ties.  Their shoes and belts are mismatched. One is dragging an oxygen tank.  What do you expect is their maximum score?

Now imagine another quartet.  The master of ceremonies comes to the podium and announces them, “Can I have the doors closed please.  Ladies and gentlemen, representing the Mid Atlantic District, please welcome Crossfire!”  (Disclaimer: This might be the name of a real quartet - I don't know, I just like the name.)  The audience started clapping and chanting “Cross Fire! Cross Fire!” in rhythm, five minutes before they came on stage.  Now the audience leaps to their feet and screams and whoops and applauds with enthusiasm.  The quartet walks energetically and confidently on stage.  They are all between 30 and 35 years of age, slim and attractive, wearing casual black suits.  They radiate confidence and humility as they accept the audience’s heartfelt applause.  After gesturing for the applause to die down, they gather at the microphone…”  What do you think they will score?

If you follow this blog, you know that I went through this very exercise not long ago.  It's remarkable how accurate this method is.

So as just one example of their humanity, let's agree that the judges can’t avoid having an impression of your score before you even start singing.  In the barbershop world, this reality is captured in the judges training.  They are trained to make an initial mark on the scoresheet to represent their initial impression, and they won’t move the mark very far from that original point.  If you think I'm making it up, ask a judge!  It goes without saying that you want that impression to be higher than your “real skill level” if possible, not lower.  And that is the topic of our next article.

It probably goes without saying, but all the other concepts and techniques in this series depend on your skill with the basics of your chosen craft.

If you're a singer, for example, you need to have control of your voice - excellent hearing and breathing skills, adequate range, a broad palate of vocal color options, and all the rest.  Ensembles will need to layer upon that the concepts of synchronization, balance, and fine tuning of pitch.  You can't really get around that.  If your thing is public speaking, you can easily grab a book about how to organize your speech or your powerpoint for maximum impact.  You can likewise read or find examples of raw presentation techniques: how to stand, how to use gestures, how to use your voice.  The same is true of actors, dancers, and all performers, but with different techniques.

But I figure everyone reading this blog is already keenly aware of the technical aspects of their craft, because hey we live in the Western World, and we're mostly scientists and reductionists at heart.  Most of the raw techniques can be easily put into written form, or even described as mathematical concepts.  It's very well trodden ground.

But I think we're all aware that there is a limit to how far technique can take you on its own.  The rest of this series is intended to answer the question, "what next?"  Or maybe, "what else?" since these are concepts and exercises that should take place in parallel with technical work, reinforcing it and adding new elements on top of it.  Many performs behave as if the right thing to do is finish technique and then move on to everything else.  I'll save you some time here - that just doesn't work.  It's like trying to run a marathon by moving only one foot.

The remaining articles in this series will fall into two broad categories: the holistic, emotional, intuitive and "surrender rather than control" elements, and the pragmatic choices we can make to improve how we are perceived by audiences and judges.

On the holistic, emotional, "self-2", intuitive and surrender side, we'll start with a familiar topic on this blog, namely creating an impactful scene and objective, and making sure you're not distracted from that scene when you're doing your thing.

On the pragmatic side, we will talk about how judges do what they do, and what obvious and non-obvious factors go into their judgments.  To do this, we will try to create a deep understanding of their point of view.  Some no doubt would call this cheating, but I don't think you need to be guilty about it.  It's just understanding the real game, and all its written and unwritten rules, and using them to your best advantage.  It's strategy.  It's like a losing hockey team realizing at some point in the season that the worse you do, the better draft picks you will get.  It's not really part of the rules, and it's counter-intuitive to try and lose on purpose, but it's a pretty common strategy.

The point of this series, and to some degree the point of Owning The Stage, is that if you understand the game better than everyone else, you have an advantage.  You can use that advantage to sell more tickets, get more standing ovations, build your performance resume, or just to have more fun!  Personally, I love to play the game.

A good friend of mine used to say that he loved military metaphors, because war focuses the mind.  When the situation is life or death, the calculations are urgent and crisp, because there's no time to worry about grey area.  And in performance, the closest thing to war is the contest - a microcosm of the whole artistic world, reduced to its essence.  Studying the contest will teach you a lot about audiences, about perception, about preparation, about state of mind, and about truth and passion.  And in the process, I think competitors who follow along and participate can bet on a dramatic improvement in the odds that they will improve their standing, and that they will come out on top!

The contest scenario I'm most familiar with is the barbershop quartet/chorus contest, but experts from other fields will notice a lot of crossover to acting auditions, American Idol, and even the Olympics.

In this series I plan to cover the following topics, more or less:

• Knowing your stuff
• Understanding the judges
• Barbershop judging categories
• Choosing the right scenario
• Shock and Awe
• The two sides of identity
• The power of visualization
• Serving only one master
• Recency and primacy

Look for this series regularly on Owning The Stage!

Tom