Into the gazebo - keeping it fresh

If you perform a lot, you will understand that keeping your performances fresh can be a challenge. Especially if you are performing the same play or the same concert many times. After a few weeks, the energy of newness starts to fade, perhaps along with any performance anxiety you might have had.  (A topic for another day.)  Another few weeks and you catch your mind wandering in the middle of a performance that has become routine. Those standing ovations are coming less and less frequently, and you're thinking ahead to the next gig.

But the "next gig" might be months away.  How can you get the energy back?

"Working harder" doesn't seem to be the answer, because as soon as you are focused on working harder, you're no longer focused on the scene and your objective in the scene.

Recently I sang at an outdoor performance in an amphitheater in a beautiful park. Because the month was August, nobody expected rain, but rain is what we got - buckets of it. You have to hand it to the audience because they were stalwart. Many of them had umbrellas, but even the unprotected sat in their seats and enjoyed the music, as they got wetter and wetter. There were several a cappella groups singing in the concert, and depending on how much rain was falling at that moment, they sang on the concrete space in front of the audience, or in the gazebo a few meters further back. In the gazebo, they were further away from the audience, but at least they were staying dry!

We were last to perform, and by then the skies had opened up and there was too much rain even for the most dedicated audience members. The decision was made to move them all into the gazebo!

So there we were, singing just four feet away from a few hundred wet people, who surrounded us on three sides. What everyone noticed was that the mood was completely transformed. Bright, smiling faces everywhere. The people had gone from enduring the performance to living it, as we all crowded into the gazebo together to defy the miserable weather.

Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could move every performance "into the gazebo" and relish in the newness of it? I think performer and audience alike would be happier if the performers could find something new and interesting in every performance. Certainly the performer's job satisfaction would be up!

One big obstacle to that, in my opinion, is the need to "get it right." Certainly it's important to rehearse a performance to a certain level of correctness - the right words, the right notes, the right dance steps - but many of us never get past this mode. Once they have it "right", it is finished. Static.

Fortunately I have become aware of a level above "right" and that is the level of play. Never be satisfied with mere correctness. Every audience is different and every performance is different, created in that unique moment, and if you can learn to stay engaged with the people around you, you can turn every performance into a kind of improvisation on a theme. That will keep it real for you, and for the people who paid to see you.