Deadly Sin #1 - Biting Off Too Much

Ever see a dancer lose her balance, trying a very difficult move?  How about an actor who loses her way in a long and complicated soliloquy, or a singer who can't quite reach the high notes?  Was it fun for you, other than a kind of car-wreck fascination, or would you prefer they had picked an easier piece?

Performance is not like olympic diving.  There are no points for difficulty.  Imagine if it were otherwise:

Next up is Jenny Jones, the promising young performer from Oklahoma City.  She's been training very hard this past year, and as you can see she's in very good shape, perhaps one of the strongest performers in this year's festival.  Today she will be attempting an a cappella rendition of Igor Stravinsky's "Rite Of Spring", and she'll be doing so without a starting pitch, and with four ritz crackers stuffed under her tongue.  This certainly increases the risk of a disastrous performance, but but it earns her a difficulty multiplier of 1.35 if she can pull it off.  That might be just enough to pull ahead of the French competitor who did so well yesterday in the semi-final round with the underwater violin routine.

As you can see, it's nonsense to consider the difficulty level of the piece.  The "audience" (perhaps we should say "spectators") at a sporting event are interested in the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat.  Their emotional experience is going to be in a rather narrow range.  Half the thrill of watching some sports is the chance, however remote, that the competitor will fall and break a leg.  I won't even start a comparison between stage performance and Nascar racing, which should be obvious by now

There's a good reason that the degree of difficulty doesn't matter - audiences don't care about your experience, they care about their own!  I mean honestly, would you rather watch a singing group tackle something above their heads and be awful, or something easier that lets you (and them) relax, enjoy the music, and have your soul benefit from the authentic human message?  I mean, I love to get a thrill from a great performance, but not the thrill of wondering if they're going to make it all the way through without self-destructing.  It's the same for your audiences when you're on stage.  We can learn a lot by considering the audience point of view.

To compound the problem, if you know what you're attempting is too difficult, you're going to telegraph that to the audience with your own body language.  They'll get the cue even before you start.  Once everyone is in that state of mind, it will not be easy to recover.

On our sort of stage, you need to match the difficulty level of your material to your current skill level.  Here's a rule of thumb - if it doesn't work in rehearsal, it's certainly not going to work in a high-pressure scenario either.  In fact, sometimes it will be too difficult for performance even if it works every time in rehearsal!  If you want to test a piece, try rehearsing the performance, making it as realistic as possible, and just notice what goes through your mind.  Do you run a constant monologue of technical worries?  Then try putting something simpler in front of the people.

Trying harder doesn't work - it will get in your way.  Your left brain, the analytical part, can't handle all the many bits of control and feedback that would be required to make a great performance.  And if you are wasting all your brain power on handling technical challenges, you have less left over for the important stuff, like being in the scene, and/or being in communion with the audience.  I say "an/or" because actors are 99% concerned with their objective towards the other actors, and musicians should probably be focused 50-90% on the audience communication side.  Either way, you can't do it well if you're distracted by a performance piece that's too difficult for you.

Learn to accept your current level of skill, whatever it is.  Nobody needs you to be a virtuoso right away.  And once you've accepted it, make wise choices!