How your left brain is ruining your performances

OK this is going to be really uncomfortable for you highly intelligent control-freaks out there with aspirations in the performing world.  The nuances of performance are too complex, even for you.  If you try to control your performance, you will fail.

How do I know?  Well, lately I've been reading a lot on the topic, but long before that, I tried it myself!  In fact, growing up as a bit of a smarty-pants I assumed I could solve anything with my brain alone.

Now I starting singing for real when I was about sixteen years old, when I joined a male chorus.  And I knew next to nothing about music.  Then the trouble began - I learned enough to be dangerous.  First came tuning.  And since we in the chorus practiced "just intonation", I started singing thirds and fifths higher, and sevenths a bit lower.  I invented a notation scheme for chord parts, went through my music and marked it up - circles on the roots, little up-arrows on the thirds and fifths, etc.  So far so good.

Next it was balance.  Sing the roots and fifths a bit louder, and the thirds and sevenths a bit softer, to balance out the chords.  This was close harmony, so you can't just sing any old volume you please!  More notation schemes and marking up of music.  So far so good.  But my music was starting to look like an Egyptian rune stone.

Learning more and more, I added layer after layer to the complexity, hoping to get it right some day.  I added crescendos and decrescendos in many gradation. Then vocal colors.  Then, remembering that people were going to watch me do this, I added facial expressions.

I wrote "emotion words" on my music near the end, as a kind of last-ditch effort to save my singing performances from resembling a speed chess match.  Think hard, do something fast, repeat.  Who would want to watch that after the first two minutes?  (No offense to speed chess players.  I assume very few think of it as a spectator sport.)

As you can see, this was destined for failure from the start.  You can't wrestle a performance to the ground with your brain, and if you try, you wind up strangling it to death.  This is where naturally intuitive people have a big advantage as performers - they never try to turn it into an intellectual exercise!

You'll find the same issue for actors, dancers and public speakers as well, whenever they try to fix a performance related issue with a technique out of the blue.  Which is their instinct, most of the time.

Coaches, too, fall into this trap constantly.  "Sing that phrase a bit softer" they will say.  "Put more weight on your back foot."  "Keep your hands inside the box of your body while you say this phrase."  I wish the people being coached would wake up and ask "WHY??"  What does this disconnected advice have to do with anything?  Am I really supposed to memorize a sequence of robot instructions?

Thankfully, no.

So who do we have to blame for this?  Should we beat ourselves on the head, aiming to punish the left brain for being so presumptuous?  Not at all.  Let's blame Rene Descartes for giving us "dualism" - the idea that the self is separate from the universe.  Remember "I think, therefore I am?"  That sentence gave birth to science, and soon afterwards infected Western minds with the idea that every problem was best solved by carving it up into little bits to see how it worked, and then, with the pride of our new knowledge, putting it back together again.

Unfortunately, a dissected performance can never be revived.

So what do we do?  What's the answer?

I'll get into that in some depth in later articles, but I will for starters refer you to a great book called "Free Play" by Stephen Nachmanovitch, subtitled "The Power of Improvisation in Life and the Arts."  Stephen essentially makes a living making up cello concerts in front of a live audience.  And in the process he has discovered a lot about the nature of performance, and why there is "something lacking" in most of them.

It turns out, great performance feels like surrender, not control.  Stay tuned for the details.