Once more, with feeling!

We just love to break things down, don't we?  Sometimes it's really useful too - you really can solve a big problem by first breaking it down into smaller problems, and tackling the smaller problems one at a time.  How do you eat an elephant?  One bite at a time!  Also we Western-educated types just love to dissect things in order to understand them.  We love to exercise our logical minds!

So it's perfectly natural that we try to do this as performers.  There's an awful lot of work that goes into creating a great performance, from creating the original work to understanding the audience to planning, preparation and ultimately execution of the performance itself.  It's one of those "big problems" that we love to break down.  And mostly, that's just fine.

However, there is at least one place where breaking the task down is dangerous, and that is in rehearsal.  Most of the groups I work with seem to believe that you have to perfect the technique first, and *then* start worrying about the emotion.  Where they got this idea, I'm not sure (although I'm always tempted to blame Descartes).  This technique-first approach ends in one of two ways, both of them bad: Either they fail to integrate the emotional reality with the technically rehearsed performance, or they never get to the emotions at all!

WARNING.  If you don't care at all about why this is the case neurologically, skip the following paragraph.

It's no wonder.  They are setting themselves up to fail, because the human brain just doesn't work that way.  The brain stores information as a network of neural connections, and there isn't one place for storing the technique and another for storing the emotion - it's all stored in the same place.  It's a holistic system, and the more connections the better.  That's the same reason that training yourself to have amazing memory always involves making more connections between the things you're trying to memorize, and a framework that can be predicted, like mnemonics that associate numbers, pictures and rhymes with a list of items to memorize.  The brain is incredibly context-sensitive, so it's important to rehearse in a setting that is as close as you can get to the real performance.

The readers who skipped over the neurology bit above can start reading again below.

What actually works should not be a surprise - rehearse what you want to perform.  Don't bother rehearsing what you don't want to perform, namely a purely technical approach.  Don't think about it - just do it!  If you want to analyze it later, video tape yourself.

Try to remember this next time you hear the phrase, "once more with feeling!"  All the times you did it without the feeling were pretty much a waste of your time.