attention

The seventh and last Deadly Sin in this series happens right where the rubber meets the road - on stage.  After everything else has gone right, losing focus can still snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

Great performance depends on the audience to participate - they must be present in the moment, they must focus their attention on what's happening on the stage, and they must suspend disbelief, that is, allow themselves to be caught up in the reality being portrayed, ignore all the limitations of the medium, and fill in all the other gaps that might otherwise distract them. When you watch TV, you let yourself believe that the action is real rather than staged, and you restrict your attention to the bounds of the television screen, blocking out the rest of your visual input.  The audience's great gift to you as a performer is their willingness to do that for you!

But audience attention and suspension of disbelief can be pretty fragile.  If I'm watching a play and someone's cell phone rings, suddenly I am back in the theater, no longer immersed in the reality on the screen.  Even worse would be to have my attention drawn to something on screen that doesn't fit with the reality, like recognizing scenery from Hope, BC while watching First Blood, which was supposed to take place in the US.  Another pet peeve of mine is when someone asks me about the actor instead of the character while I'm watching a movie.  "Hey wasn't she in that other movie we saw?"

In a live performance environment, what distracts me is when the performer has a lapse of attention, when their eyes glaze over for a moment and they cease to be in the story, or lavishing the audience with their communication and attention.  Generally this happens when the performer gets distracted by something in their own mind, like worry about a difficult passage, or recognition of a mistake they just made.

I believe that the audience will think about whatever is on the mind of the performer.  There are a million reasons why this is true, beyond the scope of this article (hey, another article idea!), but it seems to hold true.  If the artist is thinking technically, the audience will evaluate them on a technical level.  If the artist is really in the moment and immersed in the authentic expression of their story, as long as their skills are adequate to the task, there is really nothing to evaluate at a technical level, and that's when really great performance can take place, the kind that can really move the participants and keep them coming back for more.

If you want to be able to keep focus throughout your performance, half the battle is in the preparation.  If your story is clear and decorated with vivid images and movies that evoke the proper emotions in you, it has a great chance of holding your attention while you perform.  If you rehearse enough to remove technical distractions from your own attention, you're setting yourself up for success.

The other half of the battle is akin to meditation, and learning the discipline of controlling your own thoughts.  When you first learn to meditate, of course it's extremely frustrating, because no matter how hard to try to empty your mind, stray thoughts keep popping in!  And if you let yourself get frustrated and angry about that, a state of inner peace is not in  your immediate future.  Better to acknowlege the stray thought, and allow it to go.  It's the same on stage - if you sense a distraction, don't beat yourself up.  Just let it go, and find the images in your story again.  With practice, you will find that your mind will interrupt you less and less, until eventually you will be able to maintain a state of absolute presence in the moment and in the performance story from beginning to end.  Then you will wonder where the time went!  And you will probably be mobbed by fans telling you how much they loved it.

This concludes the Seven Deadly Sins series!  There are more sins, of course, I've never heard of the Eight Deadly Sins or the Eleven Deadly Sins, so we'll move on.

So after finishing the rather deep and dense Stanislavski book (aren't you glad I read that so you don't have to?), I decided to take a breather from my constant reading of performance-related books, and read the immensely popular "The Power Of Now" by Eckhart Tolle. It's one of those books you pretty much have to read, at least if you live in my house. ;)

However, my brain has had the "performance filter" installed 24/7 for the past three months.  Every scrap of input that makes its way to one of my five senses gets evaluated for relevance to making performance better, or understanding it more deeply.  So I find that stuff wherever I look, and preditably the Tolle book is no different.  And I've only read chapter one.

Here's a quick and inexpert summary.  Mr. Tolle had a very mystical experience.  After feeling quite horrible and suicidal, he said to himself, "I can't live with myself any more."  Then he stopped, wondering if that meant there were two of him, the one who was feeling horrible, and the other one who couldn't live with that one any more.  At that moment, the horrible feeling self shriveled up and died, leaving him in a state of complete bliss.  He spent the next two years disengaged from the world, living on park benches, just being in a more or less constant state of inner joy.

Tolle describes this emotional pain and suffering as a result of identifying with your mind, instead of your being.  Your mind thinks, views the present with the filter of the past, and tries to ensure its survival in the future.  But you are not your mind!  Your constant thinking and negative mental chatter (remember the series on stage fright?) do not constitute your real, complete self.  And you can experience a state of inner peace and joy by turning off that mental chatter.

Now to the point - that is one reason that people love to be entertained, to observe and mentally participate in a performance.  It allows them to stop the mental chatter, and live in another world for a while.  They give over control of their emotional lives and their attention to the performance, and they get a break from the negative self-chatter, and the emotional anxiety of their lives.

And of course its even more powerful for a performer who gives him or her self over completely and successfully to the scene/song, and stays in it.  As I've often read and said, the performer will benefit even more from the performance than the audience.

I'm quite lucky - I have discovered that I have an easy time focusing on the now, and getting to a state of inner peace.  And it's not because I've ever trained myself in meditation.  I believe it's because I've had twenty years practice on stage, shifting myself into a new state of mind in order to perform truthfully.

So if you needed one more reason to learn how to perform better, there it is!  Inner peace and joy.  That's better than a poke in the eye.

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.