Getting your best on stage

Have you ever left it in the green room?  Most performers have felt that way - that they could have done better, and that what they actually brought to the stage was not up to their own standards.  Here's how one reader put it to me recently:

The obstacle that currently vexes me is the "level drop" that occurs between a quartet performance in a rehearsal or informal setting versus the one that happens in front of a large audience.

When we rehearse or sing out in an informal or relaxed setting (e.g. after chorus rehearsal, or to our chorus-mates at retreat, or on a street-corner after a fun evening out ~ the product astounds us. We are so proud of it, and it matches our expectations. We have fun producing the sound, and are truly performers.

When we get in front of a formal live audience, I feel a significant level drop. Chords we always sing in tune are suddenly faltering. The strong resonant sound we always produce is intermittent. The product lacks the "pride" and the performance doesn't feel "fun" like it does in the informal setting. Video and audio recordings reveal some evidence of nerves, but nothing unexpected.

I am left feeling disappointed after a public performance, thinking that it "could have been so much better". My initial solution to this is to just keep doing it. The more audiences, the more exposure to this, the better we can learn and adjust to keep the level up.

And so, my question to you: what is your advice on how to help the level of rehearsal translate to performance?

Everyone situation is different, so face-to-face I would always ask more questions and dig a little deeper before offering advice.  But going by what this reader has written, here's what I would say.

First, it's quite possible that there isn't a problem!  Because it's not about how you feel when you perform, it's about how other people perceive it, and what it does for them.  I bet that a group like this leaves behind a lot of happy audience members, even if they feel like they didn't do their absolute best.  Find some people that you trust for their perception and their honesty, and get them to watch your performance.  Then ask them for their opinion, which is 100% more objective than yours!  You might be surprised.

There was a big study done about this perception gap, and I read about it in Psychology for Performing Artists, an excellent book that is listed here on my resources page.  After viewing a sequence of five performances, the audience often disagreed with the performers about how good each one was.  Sometimes when the performers thought they were exhibiting nerves, the audience perceived more passion!

However, assuming that there are some real things "going wrong" then we're looking for interference, as in the Inner Game concept P=p-i (Performance = potential - interference).  So what's getting in the way?

The reader does talk about nerves, and that's a biggie, even if they aren't any worse than expected.  And there are some great methods of dealing with them head-on.  I've tried to give a summary of those methods in my series on stage fright, which might be worth a read in this case.

Ultimately, I feel that the reader's intuitions are correct - performing more will probably lead to closing the gap between the mastery of technique in rehearsal vs. performance.  That's kind of how it works!  There's no better way to get better at something than to just do it!  Do it, notice what happened, and do it again.

There's an important point buried in there - you want to "notice" what goes wrong, and not to try and correct it in real time.  That, however, is a topic for another day.