On-purpose-ness

One of the most important and liberating things to realize about audiences is that they don't have magical powers.  This is good news for performers who worry about making "mistakes" because it means the audience won't necessarily be able to tell!  You'll know, because you know your plan, but they haven't a clue what you planned.  They're seeing everything with fresh eyes.

But you've been around the block a few times - you have seen performers make mistakes.  And chances are you don't have magical powers either, so how did you know?  Well either the mistake was so huge and egregious that nobody could miss it (like the dancer fell into the pit, or the ensemble got confused and stopped singing), or they told you!  Yes, even though it seems like a bad idea, they told you.  They told you with their body language as they cringed or gave an uncomfortable glance to one of their stage-mates.

Audiences get most of their emotional reaction cues from the people on stage.  When you are up on stage, they are watching you intently, and as you know, we humans are wired up with some very sophisticated and effective senses for detecting emotions.  They're very good at noticing if something doesn't seem to be "on purpose."

Livingston Taylor in his book "Stage Performance" talks about how audiences love it when the performer makes a mistake and then accepts it with humor.  Handled in that way, it's just another thing that develops rapport between the audience and you.  Perfection sets up a boundary around you.  Humanness and humor invites them into your world, and makes them comfortable.

Most likely, you've seen lots of performers make "mistakes" that you never noticed, because they declined to let you know.  They didn't freak out when it happened, but rather accepted it.  They gave everything "on-purpose-ness."

I remember attending a Q&A session with the amazing a cappella group The Real Group when I was in Scandinavia a few years ago.  Someone asked them, "how is it that you never make mistakes?"  Their response was that they do make lots of mistakes, and that in fact the various "mistakes" are what gives each performance its unique texture.  That's a fantastic way to frame it - just notice what happens and accept it, without getting emotionally involved.

Steve Armstrong, the director of another wonderful vocal ensemble, The Northern Lights from Toronto, Canada, used to help his singers get over their perfectionism by insisting that each person make one mistake in every performance!  That reframed it for them, very quickly.  Somehow when you're trying to make a mistake, it's not so easy to do!  There's a lesson in there about how much of a psychological game it all is - a topic for another day.

People who do improvisational performance don't worry about mistakes.  It doesn't make sense to worry about mistakes when there's no plan to compare it to!

But remember, the audience doesn't know your plan.  Why not give everything you do the spirit of improvisation and play?  Would that not be extremely liberating?  Instead of worrying about being right, why not focus on being in the moment?  Striving for correctness is like shooting for mediocre - you'll get there every time.  That is, even if you succeed at your goal, you'll be leaving the audience flat because your focus is on something they don't care about, namely whether your performance matched the plan they've never seen.