Preparation

If you've been around the performing arts for a while (or just around performing artists for that matter), you have no doubt been exposed to the idea that visualization is good.  Visualizing a positive outcome on stage can help make it come true!  That might seem like magic, but it isn't.  And it works!

So why does it work?  Well your brain is complicated.  It has many pieces that evolved at different times, so some of the primitive parts in the middle, for example, we share with animals that don't converge with the human species unless you reach back hundreds of millions of years.  The "amygdala" for example, we share in common with lizards.  The cerebral coretex on the other hand is relatively new, and we humans have more of it than any other animal.

Deadly Sin #6 - Failed to be in peak form on the day / prepare the instrument

Consider this nightmare scenario.  You've invested years in your skills and your reputation as a performer.  You have great material that you understand thoroughly, you have a high-impact, authentic story, you have a well-crafted and effective plan, and you've rehearsed your performance to professional standards.  You are ready for the stage!  Then, on the day of your debut, you forget to warm up your voice, and you BOMB.  Ouch!

Now you can't protect yourself from freak blizzards or meteors that strike your venue, but there's still an awful lot you can do to increase the odds that you'll be able to put your very best performance on stage when it counts.  Some are long-term, and some are short.  Read on.

Let's start with the long-term, continuous projects.  You need to keep in good general health, good physical fitness, and good vocal shape.  Nothing will get in the way of your expression more easily than a painful stiff back or a crick in your neck, or a lack of energy.  As a stage performer your body is your instrument, and you would never catch a bassoon player treating their instrument like most people treat their bodies!  A big part of training for the stage is keeping the body strong and flexible.  This means protecting time in your day for exercise and stretching, and eating well.  You should do this stuff anyway, and you know it!  But as a performer you really have no choice.  To fall apart physically is to kill your career, amateur or professional.

Once the overall fitness it taken care of, you will have some specifics that depend on your chosen craft.  If you're a singer, speaker or actor, your voice needs to stay in shape.  That means basically two things: don't get dehydrated, and use your voice properly every day.  It's just a matter of discipline.  If you play an instrument, you can relax a bit about your voice, but you will need to be concerned about the various useful muscles and callouses that adapt you to your chosen instrument.  Play every day.

That's the hard stuff.  Just accept that excelling at your chosen craft is going to dictate your lifestyle to some extent - that's a fact, so don't fight it.  Anyway you aren't getting anything useful out of watching TV or playing video games - ditch the useless time in your routine and use it to further your valuable performance goals instead.  You will be happy you did.

Now the short-term stuff.  Leading up to a particular performance, you'll need to focus on a few more things to give yourself the best possible chance of being 100% on the big day.

I know it's obvious but try not to get sick!  You should be healthy overall, but that doesn't mean you're immune to nasty bugs.  Avoid sick people like... well like the plague!  They shouldn't be out infecting people in the first place, but surely they will understand if you decline to shake their snotty, germy hand.  Your most vulnerable point is your eyes - far and away the most common route for infection is from your environment to your hands to your eyes.  So wash your hands regularly and break that chain.  Especially if you have a burning need to rub your eyes!

There's also a lot you can do to keep your immune system in fighting trim.  Eat well, like you should be anyway - lots of vegetables and fruits, a good multi-vitamin.  Get enough sleep.  If anyone complains about your suddenly taking on healthy habits, tell them you're got an important performance in a few days - that will probably keep their derision at bay.  (Geez you might even spread healthy habits to your family and friends!  A pleasant side-effect...)

Finally you need to be in the right frame of mind when your strong, flexible and healthy body hits the stage.  If you have issues about stage fright and anxiety, deal with them!  Develop a pre-stage routine that calms your mind and removes distractions, so you can focus your attention on your high-impact story while you run your plan.  I already wrote a pretty good series on preparing for the stage, which you might want to study.

After that, you will have done everything you can do.  If a meteor lands on your house it's still going to disrupt your performance, but at least it won't be your fault.

One of the most valued traits in a performer is expressiveness, defined in the dictionary as the ability to effectively convey a thought or a feeling.  So why do some people seem to be more expressive than others?  Why is it that some people can "own the stage" and engage an audience right away, while others leave you daydreaming about your drive home.

The first thing to realize is that "expressive" is a label, and labels are dangerous.  You can't be expressive in the same way you can be short or tall or black or white - it's not a physical trait.  If you believe you're not expressive, it's most likely because you got that impression from some previous life experience - on the stage or off - and you turned that one-time evaluation into a label that you attached to yourself.  That's the danger of labels!  They make solid reality out of ephemeral things.  So if you think you're not expressive, the good news is you're wrong.  The bad news is, you may have wasted a lot of time not doing things you would love to do, like getting on the stage if that is your dream.

Still hanging on to the label?  Believe me, you can be expressive under the right circumstances.  How expressive are you when someone cuts you off in traffic so that you fear for your life?  I bet you don't have any trouble "effectively conveying a feeling" while you're telling that careless driver exactly what you think of him and his cell phone!

It's a recurring pattern - we lose our usual human skills as soon as we get into a performance situation.  So the question is, how can you make sure you bring every bit of human expressive capability that you have to the stage, and use it when you need it most?

Obstacle number one may be stage fright.  It's hard to get into a performance when you're in the vicious circle of performance anxiety.  Perhaps a previous, terrified stage experience is where you got your "not expressive" label in the first place!  Fortunately, there are lots of ways to get over your nerves - you can start here.

Obstacle number two is that you need to know what you're trying to express, and to know that, you have to understand your music, scene, presentation or what have you.  If you're just up there reciting empty words or notes, it will be apparent to the audience immediately.  And you can't just dress up empty notes or words with the hollow characteristics of other people's expressiveness - following the composers dynamic markings, for example, doesn't fool anyone into thinking you're being authentic.  Neither do the "tricks" of powerpoint-type presentations self-assemble into an effective sales presentation.  And of course, the actor's job does not end when they have memorized their lines - far from it.  You need to understand the humanity beneath the words, and the interplay between the players.  Then your own humanity will direct your expression well.

Obstacle number three, once you know what you're trying to express, is that you need to be able to put yourself into that scene so completely that you start reacting emotionally to what is happening.  That means learning how to focus your attention on things in the scene, rather the elements of your reality that will try to distract you - the audience, the lights, your sore leg.  The track of your visualization through the piece or the scene needs to be vivid enough to hold your interest.

That's not the end of the story, but it's a good start!

Step number one, and you can take this to the bank - you are an expressive person!

In the past two articles in this series we've talked about how to free the voice and the body to prepare yourself for the stage.  The final step is to focus your mind.

First of all, because everything is connected, the process of freeing the voice and the body will already have decluttered your mind somewhat.  Nagging thoughts of the stressful drive to the venue (or whatever else happened to you that day) must have faded away, or you wouldn't have been able to relax your tension spots.  In fact, if your physical preparation was successful and you are relaxed, calm and free of tension, all that remains is to turn on your creative mind, and get into what Stanislavski calls the "inner creative mood."

One critical skill for the stage is the ability to control the focus of your attention.  So pick an object, and focus on it to the exclusion of all other things in the room.  Consider its characteristics and facets - what is its color, texture, size, shading.  If you let yourself get distracted, notice that and start again until you can maintain the focus.  Now pick a far away object, and repeat the exercise.  Repeat it again with something very near.  With the attention part of your brain engaged, you will be able to shift your focus on stage easily and fluidly between objects, real and imagined - this will keep you from wandering.

If you're an actor, many of the objects will be other actors in the scene, physical objects in the set, or imagined objects that arise from the scenario.  On the other hand if you are a singer, most of the time you will be focusing on someone in the audience, or on an imagined object that forms part of your scenario for the piece.  In this sense, the singer's job can be both harder and easier than the actor's - easier when you're simply singing to a real person and telling a story, and harder when you must imagine a sequence of vivid images from your scenario out of thin air.  It certainly helps to have strong and practiced visualization muscles in this case!

Once you have flexed and stretched your organs of attention, the next step towards your inner creative mood is to rev up your imagination.  Stanislavski suggests that you choose a simple physical objective, then build a motivation around it.  I think of this as "theater sports" games.  For example, you might choose the objective of taking off your shoe, and putting it back on.  Why would you do this?  Perhaps something in your shoe is irritating you and making you limp.  You become frustrated, sit down, take off your shoe and look inside.  What do you find?  Perhaps it's a coin.  Perhaps it's a rare and valuable coin, and you are shocked to see it!  How did it get there?  Are there others?  And so on...

Spend a few minutes improvising a simple scene like that, and acting it out so that it's truthful.  This will reacquaint you with that sense of creative play that energizes great performances, where everything is happening afresh (even if you've done it a thousand times before), and you are engaged and passionate about your part in the scene.

Now that you are attentive and your creative self is awake, you need to run through the major subdivisions of the real part you are about to play, and refresh all the important images and emotions.  Don't just run through it like a static movie, but infuse each piece with something new, out of your creative sense of play.  This kind of visualization is like an extra rehearsal in your brain, and over time if you do it right it will build more and more depth and reality into your scenario that otherwise would fade over time.

If you do this properly, one side benefit is that you won't have any attention left for worrying about stage fright or other anxiety issues.  Your attention will be focused where it needs to be - on the objectives in your scene.

Congratulations!  That's the end of our mini-series on preparing for the stage!

What can you add, for the benefit of the rest of the Owning The Stage community?  What works for you?  What's your backstage ritual?  Head over to the forums, or comment below.

In the previous article I presented an exercise for reconnecting with the natural, tension-free voice.  Of course the voice and the body can not be separated from each other – tension in the body will always cause tension in the voice.  So freeing the voice is like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic unless you also free the body.

Imagine you've got a painful muscle spasm in your right shoulder.  Can you feel how that would affect your voice, for singing or speaking?  How about a crick in your neck?  Perhaps you've been there - you just can't sing or speak with a free and resonant tone if your body is full of tension.

[caption id="attachment_558" align="alignright" width="201" caption="Even if you don't have to do this..."][/caption]

But even if you're a mime (perhaps especially if you're a mime!) tension in your body will have a negative impact on your performance, because you just can't be expressive if your body is not relaxed and supple.  If you're one of those people who just can't be expressive, check yourself - I bet you're literally "up tight."  You would have a lot to gain by loosening up a bit!

I mean, imagine you're an actor playing a "hero" or something, and you walk on stage trying to hide a backache, or a twinge in your sciatic nerve.  There's no way you can be convincing.  And no matter what you're trying to play, discomfort in the body will take up precious mind share, distracting you from your internal story and your lines.

So let's fix it, shall we?  I believe the solution has two parts: long-term and short-term.

Long Term Fitness for Performers

I'm not going to harp on this, because this series of articles is really about what to do in the last 30 minutes before you hit the stage, but in the long term you simply need to stay healthy.  If you were a carpenter, you would keep your saw blades sharp.  As a performer, your tool kit is your body, and you need to keep it in good shape - strong, flexible and supple.  And this means (and I apologize here to the dedicated couch potatoes) physical exercise.

As it happens I've been doing p90x lately (turn your sound off if you click on that link).  It's got all the major exercise types in it, including various cardio and strength modules, and I've realized that if I only got to do one thing to keep myself in good performance shape, it would be yoga.  Yoga is not for sissies, at least not the yoga I'm doing.  It's the most demanding module in the whole course!  And it works on all the most important stuff for performers: breathing, strength and (obviously) flexibility.

If you can't do Yoga or you don't want to for some reason, substitute the activities of your choice as long as they leave you in the right physical shape.  I bet swimming is a good choice, coupled with a stretching routine.

Ditching tension in the last 30 minutes

Living life, for most people, is a bit stressful.  Very few stage performers spend their days getting massages and sipping cool water on an idyllic tropical beach.  There are bills to pay.  There are disagreements with your loved ones.  There is trouble in your day job.  If you live in a city, even getting to the venue will probably involve a bit of road rage, so preparation for stage is all about shedding the tension that has accumulated in your body over the past while, so that you're as relaxed and ready as you can be when you hit the boards.  (And the healthier you are in general, the easier it will be to get rid of the tension of the day - see above.)

I like to start with general relaxation.  Lie down on your back if you can.  Perhaps on a couch in the green room, or on a carpeted floor.  Kick obnoxious people out of the space if possible.  Close your eyes and breathe deeply a few times, noticing the tension drain from your major muscles.  Tense and relax all your muscles as you breathe, starting with your toes and feet, and working your way up through the whole body all the way up to your neck, your face, and even your scalp.  This is a pretty standard relaxation routine, and it's pretty quick - about 5 minutes.

Next stretch out your spine a bit.  Stand up, take a deep breath and exhale as you do a slow "swan dive," bending until you are hanging your head down, your hands hanging loose down by your feet (or even on the floor if you're flexible).  Breathe deeply a few times.  Feel your spine lengthen.  Now bend your knees and start to roll up slowly like a rag doll, letting each vertebra in your back straighten up separately, from your sacrum right up to your neck.  Stand tall.  You should feel very aligned.

By now you will be aware of any pockets of tension that remain.  Stretch them out.  Typical places that might need extra work are the hips, the belly, the shoulders and the neck.  This is not meant to be a book on stretching, so if you want some specific stretches to use, go ahead and ask me and I'll find you some.

Cheating

Sometimes you won't have an hour or even 15 minutes before you go on stage.  But you will still want to get as relaxed as you can in the few minutes that you have.  Besides just staying fit and eliminating stress from your life (wouldn't that be nice?), I believe there's potential for accelerating the process of getting into your ideal performance state by using "anchors."  A good example of an anchor is the sound of a bell, if you're one of Pavlov's dogs - with our without food, it put them into a physical and mental state called "I want to eat now!"  Of course that was a conditioned response, and Pavlov did it be associating the sound of the bell with food.

You can do the same thing for yourself - get into your ideal performance state the "long way", and then introduce your "bell" whatever it will be.  We're delving into NLP here, and this post is already too long, so I'll make this the subject of a future article.

So we've dealt with the voice and the body.  Next in the series - getting into the right state of mind.

You’ve got a great piece to perform.  You’ve made a great plan.  You have rehearsed it to a professional standard.  Then you get on stage, and it just doesn’t come off because your voice wasn’t in good shape, or your body was full of tension, or you were in the wrong state of mind.  What a waste!  And the tragedy is that it would have been easy to prevent.  You need a reliable routine to get your voice, your body and your mind into the right space for a peak performance.  That's what we're going to learn in this mini-series on how to prepare for the stage.

Let's start with the voice.  A clear and responsive voice is critical not only to singers, but to actors and speakers as well.  The human perceptions are very adept at detecting "issues" in other people by the way that they sound.  The sound of your voice is a "deep measure" of your health, and it's easy to prove this to yourself.  Just a few seconds of listening to someone vocalize and you can tell whether they are sick, how much energy they have, and even a lot about their mood, psychology and physiology.  That may be why we developed the capacity to sing, as a species - singing lets us demonstrate our fitness to a lot of potential mates all at once.  (I'm thinking here of prehistoric rituals, not groupies... uh, let's move on.)

Cutting to the chase, a clear and responsive voice is a voice that is free of tension.  Tension in your voice degrades everything about it - your range, your quality, your vocal agility, your dynamic range, everthing.  So finding a tension-free way of using your voice is critical to your success as a performer.

If you notice that your breaths are noisy or forced, those breaths are introducing tension into your voice.  A silent, effortless breath will have the opposite effect, relaxing the voice and resetting it for another phrase of speech or music.  Often times as performers we try to make the breath as short as possible, fearing that it is interrupting the music or the speech.  That fear, together with the fear of not having enough breath for the next phrase, leads us to force the inhalation, and as a result we accumulate more and more tension in the voice as the performance goes on.  Quality degrades, and stamina becomes an issue.  Also this infuses the performance with a sense of panic (which probably isn’t appropriate for every scene.)  Don’t fear the breath – think of each one as a part of the phrase, not an interruption.  Take the necessary time to breathe well.

Now here’s the exercise that I learned from my multi-talented sister Donya, which is very simple and quick.  I am told that it comes from the popular Linklater method of vocal instruction.  I’ll confirm this for you when I read the Linklater book, “freeing the natural voice.”

Exercise to reconnect with your natural voice

In order to reconnect with your natural voice, you can follow these steps in your backstage routine:

1. Lie on the floor and make yourself relaxed and comfortable
2. Exhale completely, and then simply wait for your body to inhale, which it must do.  Do not inhale on purpose, but allow it to happen.  Do this three times to become comfortable with the ease of it.  All of your inhalations in this exercise should be as effortless as this.
3. Take a deep and effortless breath, and exhale without effort, but catch the breath at the lips with a light “ffff” sound.  Notice the effect of this secondary resistance.  Repeat three times.
4. Take a deep and effortless breath, and exhale this time through a “vvvv” sound.  Notice how the vibrations resonate in the spaces of your head, mouth, throat and chest.  Repeat three times.
5. Continuing the “vvvv” exercise, open up the “vvvv” into an “ah” vowel, and notice how the freedom of this tone gives it clarity.

You can use this exercise to “reset” and reconnect with your natural voice at any time.  Many singers perform this exercise at the beginning of every vocal session, to make sure that they are also rehearsing with their most tension-free instrument.

In the next article we’ll deal with freeing and relaxing the body.