Get what past the footlights?

I've often heard coaches and directors tell performers to "get it past the footlights."  At the time, I felt that I understood the comment, but now I'm not so sure.  And I'm willing to bet that most of the time, cajoling someone to "get it past the footlights" is either a knee-jerk reaction to a lack of performance energy, or it's said purely out of habit.

People often confuse metaphor for fact, so let's start with a reality check.  (I'm going to have to "go all physics on you" a bit here, revealing my scientific past.)  Nothing is "going past the footlights" except light bouncing off you, and sound waves coming out of you.  You can't do anything to change that unless you have a magic wand, or you are willing to throw something.  It doesn't matter how much "intensity" you are bringing to the job.  "Energy" does not move from you to the audience, regardless of what you may have been told, except as noted above.  You're stuck on the stage.

The hardest thing to wrap your mind around is that most of the energy in a performance is created *by the audience*, not by the performers!  To answer the age-old question, if a tree falls in the forest, it doesn't make a sound.  The real action is in the minds of the people watching, as the images and sounds resonate with their life experience, dredge up their real memories, ricochet off of their real life concerns and troubles.

I remember a performance of Sondheim's wonderful play "Assassins".  In one scene a character sings "When you've got a gun, everyone pays attention" and in the middle of that line the music stops and he pans the gun across the audience at the audience.  Everyone reacted by pulling back into their seat - it was *very* effective.  But not because he shot us, because of what our *minds* were doing, after years of conditioning, staring at the barrel of a pistol.

At best, "get it past the footlights" is a reaction to a lack of expression, which means one of the following:

The person doesn't have the skills

I don't believe that charisma is genetic, but it does take practice to learn how to be expressive.  Some people have grown up naturally expressive, and they have an easier time learning to perform.  Some just need to "calibrate" their expressions to the stage - the subtleties that work over coffee might not be picked up by people 200 feet away, in the back row. But this is the least likely problem in my opinion, because people who can't express well just don't gravitate to the performer role.

There is an impediment

This is when the person can express under normal circumstances, but they are failing now.  Stage fright is a great example (see my earlier series for remedies).  Sickness is another - it's hard to perform with a nasty cold or a fever.  (Not impossible, in my experience, but certainly no fun either.)  No brainer - remove the impediment.

There's nothing to express!

In the vast majority of cases, I believe that the problem is that the performer doesn't know what they're supposed to be expressing.  They are going through the motions at a "technical" level, because there's nothing behind it.  This is more common with musicians, dancers and singers, because most actors just assume that they have to act, and get really uncomfortable if they don't know what they are acting about.  So just like actors need an objective, and a "rudimentary understanding of the play" as Mamet says, so do all performers if they are expected to be expressive.

I long for the day when the normal reaction to a demand for more commitment is "more commitment to what?"

So the big problem isn't getting it across the footlights.  The big problem is understanding what it is in the first place!