Winning a contest - beyond knowing your stuff

It probably goes without saying, but all the other concepts and techniques in this series depend on your skill with the basics of your chosen craft.

If you're a singer, for example, you need to have control of your voice - excellent hearing and breathing skills, adequate range, a broad palate of vocal color options, and all the rest.  Ensembles will need to layer upon that the concepts of synchronization, balance, and fine tuning of pitch.  You can't really get around that.  If your thing is public speaking, you can easily grab a book about how to organize your speech or your powerpoint for maximum impact.  You can likewise read or find examples of raw presentation techniques: how to stand, how to use gestures, how to use your voice.  The same is true of actors, dancers, and all performers, but with different techniques.

But I figure everyone reading this blog is already keenly aware of the technical aspects of their craft, because hey we live in the Western World, and we're mostly scientists and reductionists at heart.  Most of the raw techniques can be easily put into written form, or even described as mathematical concepts.  It's very well trodden ground.

But I think we're all aware that there is a limit to how far technique can take you on its own.  The rest of this series is intended to answer the question, "what next?"  Or maybe, "what else?" since these are concepts and exercises that should take place in parallel with technical work, reinforcing it and adding new elements on top of it.  Many performs behave as if the right thing to do is finish technique and then move on to everything else.  I'll save you some time here - that just doesn't work.  It's like trying to run a marathon by moving only one foot.

The remaining articles in this series will fall into two broad categories: the holistic, emotional, intuitive and "surrender rather than control" elements, and the pragmatic choices we can make to improve how we are perceived by audiences and judges.

On the holistic, emotional, "self-2", intuitive and surrender side, we'll start with a familiar topic on this blog, namely creating an impactful scene and objective, and making sure you're not distracted from that scene when you're doing your thing.

On the pragmatic side, we will talk about how judges do what they do, and what obvious and non-obvious factors go into their judgments.  To do this, we will try to create a deep understanding of their point of view.  Some no doubt would call this cheating, but I don't think you need to be guilty about it.  It's just understanding the real game, and all its written and unwritten rules, and using them to your best advantage.  It's strategy.  It's like a losing hockey team realizing at some point in the season that the worse you do, the better draft picks you will get.  It's not really part of the rules, and it's counter-intuitive to try and lose on purpose, but it's a pretty common strategy.

The point of this series, and to some degree the point of Owning The Stage, is that if you understand the game better than everyone else, you have an advantage.  You can use that advantage to sell more tickets, get more standing ovations, build your performance resume, or just to have more fun!  Personally, I love to play the game.