objectives

I laughed out loud when I ran across this short article on The Onion - America's Finest News Source.

Basically it talks about how a woman was moved to the core of her being by lyrics that the artist put no thought into.  It's meant to be funny (it is The Onion, not the New York Times), but it reminds me of an important truth about stage performance and audiences that I think people overlook often, which is that it's not about you!  Your audience doesn't have a mind-reading device, so they can't specifically tell what you're thinking about, and moreover they just don't care.  At the end of the day they care about the emotional effect you're having on them, and nothing else is even in the equation.

I bet it happens a million times a day that someone is moved by lyrics that meant nothing to the composer, or more likely meant something completely different to the composer than what the listener took away.  After all between the singer and the listener, there's no direct link - just light waves, and vibrations in the air.  That's the nature of what we call communication.  The sound and light don't mean anything until they get through the audience's eyes and ears, and into their brains where they stimulate memories, and ultimately emotional responses.  Sometimes the listener won't even know why the emotions are happening!

I get that sometimes.  Certain female voices just hit me, and I choke up for "no reason."  I love it, but I have no idea why it happens.  Maybe I was dropped on my head as a child.  But anyway I don't know what was going through those female singers' heads when they sang the notes that get to my soul, and ultimately I don't care.  I just keep hitting rewind and going for another hit.

On the other hand, this doesn't mean you can cruise along and think about your laundry while you're on stage.  What's going on in your mind is going to have an impact on your performance.  Humans are wired up with incredible circuitry for guessing the emotional state of the people around them.  In a split second they will take in your body language, facial expression, tone of voice and words as well as the whole context, and make a snap judgment about what you're feeling.  Because you know, back in the day it was important to know whether Ug was going to give you some of the mastodon meat or club you senseless.  I imagine there were lots of people in prehistory who were bad at this game, but they all got killed.  We are the survivors.  And we can all spot a fake a mile away.

So your specific objective in the scene (a.k.a. "song", or "story"), the degree to which you are authentically pursuing that objective and reacting emotionally to it are going to affect everything about the way you come across.  The people watching you perform are going to pick up on that.  Just don't mistake your emotions for theirs.

Recently I've been having a great email exchange with Tom Carter, author of a book that I am re-reading called "Choral Charisma."  His book is aimed mostly at choral directors who want their choirs to sing with expression, but would be great for coaches and singers as well.  If you haven't read it already, I highly recommend you buy it!

Tom often describes his philosophy as "method acting for singers" and we've been having this discussion about Mamet's statements on the topic, which I have quoted in a previous article.  It's a bit of a mess, so let me try to sort it out for you.

The issue boils down to this - is it necessary for a performer to generate the emotions in himself in order to act them out believably.  Simple enough question, with huge implications for performers.

Mamet suggests in his book, "True or False", that a performer needs to simply follow the script, and act each scene with an appropriate objective in order to be believable and convincing.  The performer may feel emotions as a result of acting the scene (much like the audience), but it is a result of the acting, not a precondition to it.  Therefore he suggests that Stanislavski's "method" (a.k.a. method acting) is completely backward, self-aggrandizing, causes insecurities and other issues, and simply does not work.

However, Stanislavski says this in his classic book "An Actor Prepares" (thanks, Tom Carter, for the quote):

You can understand a part, sympathize with the person portrayed, and put yourself in his place, so that you will act as he would. That will arouse feelings in the actor that are analogous to those required for the part. But those feelings will belong, not to the persona created by the author of the play, but to the actor himself.

It seem quite clear that Mamet and Stanislavski are saying the same thing!  So why the conflict?

It turns out that Mamet's words are a backlash against the various Method Acting schools that misunderstood Stanislavski's intent, and produced a whole generation (or at least a lot) of actors who believe that you have to feel it first, in order to generate a believable performance.  Indeed many actors in Hollywood have taken this idea to ridiculous extremes, at great risk to their own health and well being.  Christian Slater decided he needed to take drugs in order to play a drug addict, and got himself famously addicted to drugs.  Dustin Hoffman ran around New York City for hours in order to play someone who was exhausted, famously prompting Sir Lawrence Olivier to say, "Just act man!"

So where does this leave us?  I'm inclined to agree with Mamet and Stanislavski.  Use your personal history and humanity, your "emotional memory", in order to understand the situation in the scene (remember this can be a scene in a play, or it can be a musical piece, or any other sort of performance), and act that scene passionately with the objective of the character in mind.  If you surrender to the scene, you will experience feelings that come out of that scene.  Not the other way around.

This all makes sense, because suspension of disbelief works just as well for the actors as it does for the audience.  Perhaps more so, because their immersion is more complete - they are in the scene, while the audience merely observes it.

This might all be a bit academic, but in a nutshell, don't worry about it.  Figure out what the purpose and objectives are for your performance, and dive in!  Emotions will come.

I've often heard coaches and directors tell performers to "get it past the footlights."  At the time, I felt that I understood the comment, but now I'm not so sure.  And I'm willing to bet that most of the time, cajoling someone to "get it past the footlights" is either a knee-jerk reaction to a lack of performance energy, or it's said purely out of habit.

People often confuse metaphor for fact, so let's start with a reality check.  (I'm going to have to "go all physics on you" a bit here, revealing my scientific past.)  Nothing is "going past the footlights" except light bouncing off you, and sound waves coming out of you.  You can't do anything to change that unless you have a magic wand, or you are willing to throw something.  It doesn't matter how much "intensity" you are bringing to the job.  "Energy" does not move from you to the audience, regardless of what you may have been told, except as noted above.  You're stuck on the stage.

The hardest thing to wrap your mind around is that most of the energy in a performance is created *by the audience*, not by the performers!  To answer the age-old question, if a tree falls in the forest, it doesn't make a sound.  The real action is in the minds of the people watching, as the images and sounds resonate with their life experience, dredge up their real memories, ricochet off of their real life concerns and troubles.

I remember a performance of Sondheim's wonderful play "Assassins".  In one scene a character sings "When you've got a gun, everyone pays attention" and in the middle of that line the music stops and he pans the gun across the audience at the audience.  Everyone reacted by pulling back into their seat - it was *very* effective.  But not because he shot us, because of what our *minds* were doing, after years of conditioning, staring at the barrel of a pistol.

At best, "get it past the footlights" is a reaction to a lack of expression, which means one of the following:

The person doesn't have the skills

I don't believe that charisma is genetic, but it does take practice to learn how to be expressive.  Some people have grown up naturally expressive, and they have an easier time learning to perform.  Some just need to "calibrate" their expressions to the stage - the subtleties that work over coffee might not be picked up by people 200 feet away, in the back row. But this is the least likely problem in my opinion, because people who can't express well just don't gravitate to the performer role.

There is an impediment

This is when the person can express under normal circumstances, but they are failing now.  Stage fright is a great example (see my earlier series for remedies).  Sickness is another - it's hard to perform with a nasty cold or a fever.  (Not impossible, in my experience, but certainly no fun either.)  No brainer - remove the impediment.

There's nothing to express!

In the vast majority of cases, I believe that the problem is that the performer doesn't know what they're supposed to be expressing.  They are going through the motions at a "technical" level, because there's nothing behind it.  This is more common with musicians, dancers and singers, because most actors just assume that they have to act, and get really uncomfortable if they don't know what they are acting about.  So just like actors need an objective, and a "rudimentary understanding of the play" as Mamet says, so do all performers if they are expected to be expressive.

I long for the day when the normal reaction to a demand for more commitment is "more commitment to what?"

So the big problem isn't getting it across the footlights.  The big problem is understanding what it is in the first place!

I have recently been reading "True and False, Heresy and Common Sense for the Actor" by David Mamet.  This is a book that contradicts a lot of what I believe about acting and performance.  I didn't know it, but I think like a "method actor" in many ways - perhaps "the method" is so pervasive in my circles, I learned its assumptions without even being able to define it.  So in order to understand the Mamet book and why it seems so outrageous at first, you might need to understand The Method.  Here's what Wikipedia says about it:

Method acting is an acting technique in which actors try to replicate real life emotional conditions under which the character operates, in an effort to create a life-like, realistic performance. This can be contrasted with the technique of the actor putting him/herself into a strong "imaginary" circumstance which then induces an emotional reaction parallel to the amount of mental immersion the actor puts him/herself into.

And that's exactly what I have believed for many years!  In order to be convincing, one must experience the emotions.  I've learned that.  I've taught that!  And yet in practice I have achieved it only rarely, and not achieving it hasn't dimmed the audience response in any noticeable way.  I won't ruin the whole book for you because you absolutely should read it yourself, but here's a good summary quote:

The Stanislavsky "Method," and the technique of the schools derived from it, is nonsense.  It is not a technique out of the practice of which one develops a skill - it is a cult.  The organic demands made on the actor are much more compelling, and the potential accomplishments of the actor are much more important - the life and work, if I may say so, so much more heroic - than anything prescribed or foreseen by this or any other "method" of acting.

At some level I can buy that it's not necessary to feel the emotions in order to create them in the audience.  After all, they can not read minds.  Mamet suggests that the emotional responses are essentially created by the author of the play, and that the actor needs only "a clear voice, a supple body, and a rudimentary understanding of the play" in order to do their job to perfection.  He would also suggest that trying to create an emotional response in the audience is inappropriate for an actor, in that it is manipulative.  Just act the play, and the audience will feel what they feel.

And the "rudimentary understanding" is so that the actor can figure out what their objective is in each scene, with regard to the other actors on the stage, and say the lines with that objective in mind.  That's it - anything else is a waste of time.

How fascinating!

And how liberating!  No more worrying about whether you are or are not in the correct emotional state.  No more guilt about failing to be in it.  Without that, there is only the skill of delivering the lines, and performing physical actions on stage that are consistent with your well-chosen objective.

Realtime had an interesting discussion in Doug's Cessna yesterday about what simple objective might be associated with each "scene" in each of our songs.  And it really is a simpler way to think about it.  It's so simple, we might even remember to do it!  :)

That's one of the things I like about having an a cappella ensemble as my main artistic outlet - we get to be actors as well as musicians, and we get to sing for live audiences constantly, and grow from the feedback they give us.  Mamet would be proud.