emotions

Recently I was asked to comment on an email from a coach to a musical group, and add my two cents.  Here is part of the letter (with all the names omitted):

Last time we spoke, I was talking about deliberately using technical 'things' (colours, textures, volume, etc) to get an emotional response from the audience?  [other coach] said that [big name performer] talks about the same thing... and that's what she does, too.  And yet, they appear to the audience to be completely in the moment.  She says they are totally monitoring [technical things] throughout the performance!

Are they 'feeling' the emotion of the song and singing/performing with artistry...YES!!!  Are they thinking about technical things, self monitoring, monitoring the rest of the quartet...YES!!!

My understanding of an A level performance (performance being all three categories)  is this:

• Flawless individual/ensemble singing, using vocal 'techniques' and 'skills' to convey the artistry in the song and evoke emotion in the audience.  This takes constant self/ensemble listening/monitoring/adjusting!
• Consistent/genuine/appropriate presentation...totally believeable to the audience...evokes the desired emotional response from the audience...by simultaneously using vocal/visual/musical elements to take the listeners/watchers on a journey.
• Transforming the music on the page into a work of art...using the musical elements in the score to the very maximum effect.

When a singer (typically the lead but also the others) 'loses' themselves in the emotion of the song...the ensemble sound and performance always suffers.  The most firmly engrained habits are the ones that come out.  I always told my [trainees], "In the heat of the moment, you don't rise to the occasion, you sink to the most practiced level of your training".   This applies to any performance related activity.I don't know why the myth of having to be 'totally into the song otherwise it's technical' is so pervasive in barbershop...especially in our district.  Likewise, "your performance was too careful because you were thinking of the technical stuff"...nope...you weren't doing your job of performing WHILE ensuring that the tech stuff was good!  Even Jack Lyon talks about 'not buying your own bullshit', etc when you are performing.  If you are so focused on yourself, and your own emotions, it makes it really hard to present an ensemble performance... but it makes it extremely hard for the audience to connect with you.

Do you feel the emotions?  Sure, you can.  Communicate those emotions to the audience by deliberately choosing textures, colours, volumes, pronunciations, intensity of ring, and depth of resonance.  Support your singing message by deliberately choosing facial expressions, postures, gestures and movement.

I love this email, because it reminds me that the concepts of this blog are relevant to people that I'm not actually coaching!  I do have a few things to add, and I disagree with a few of the points above.  Here we go.

First of all, we agree about this idea of "work on technique and then let go."  Who ever said that would be a good plan? Sounds like a recipe for disaster to me. You have got to rehearse what you intend to perform. In fact, to put it the other way around, you will perform what you rehearsed so be sure it's what you want to put on stage!  If your rehearsals are purely technical, guess what you'll be getting when it's for real?  At best, a technical effort.

What should be going through your mind as you perform, the emotions or the technique? Really the question is the same one I have addressed here many times. Here's what you get when you make the various choices:

Worrying about the technique

Here's what will happen if you choose to monitor the technique.  You will look glazed over, as if in your private little world. How could it be otherwise?  Ever have a conversation with a person whose mind was elsewhere? Was it hard to tell? Did it make you feel respected?  It's kind of irrelevant that [big name performer] says he does it this way.  I've seen him perform - he isn't connecting most of the time.  On the numbers where he does succeed in connecting, I bet he's not in a technical head space.  If this is your plan, the best you can hope for is that nobody will notice.

Further, if there is any validity at all to the Inner Game concepts, and I think there is, monitoring the technique has a very good chance of screwing up the technique. Thinking about technique will rarely make it better. All that Paul Mayo exercises work specifically by preventing you from obsessing about the technique, because no matter how smart you think you are, you don't have the bandwidth or the conscious control to make it all work in real time. It's got to be solidly ingrained. And once it is ingrained there is no point in monitoring it.  So I disagree quite strongly with the whole paragraph above on "deliberately choosing textures, volumes" etc.  What volume means happy?  What hand position means angry?  It might be possible in theory to assemble a great performance from technical building blocks, but it's a bit like eating breakfast cereal with your spoon in your toes - probably possible, but why make it so hard??  We're all stuffed full of hard-wiring for expressing ourselves, so just trust yourself and do it.  You certainly can't do any better by trying to reinvent it.

Finally monitoring the technique will prevent you from reacting to the part of the music that the audience cares about, which is what they get out of it, which is all in the emotional level. And I hate to be an armchair psychoanalyst, but maybe that's the reason some people avoid the emotional aspect of the performance - they are not comfortable with it. The detachment is comforting.  I mean, maybe you could fool people into thinking you were "really in the moment" but wouldn't it be easier to just *be* in the moment?

Worrying about technical elements of the performance while performing is just a security blanket.  You're not really going to improve things - you're more likely to make them worse.  If you feel the need to worry, you're not sufficiently rehearsed.  It should be like driving your car, without having to think "OK, light pressure on the brake foot... good... OK flip up the turn signal... good... We're turning, we're turning... gosh I hope I don't understeer... going a little fast... uncomfortable... phew, made it!  Now let's straighten out..."

Learn to drive, dude!

Worrying about the emotions

Now, what if you monitor the emotions?  What result can you expect?  Well as Mamet says, you will spend the whole time worrying about whether you have produced the correct emotions! Further, you have no direct control over your emotions anyway. That is the nature of emotions - they happen in response to your environment.  For audience and performer alike, the emotions arise from the performance.  The performer doesn't have to feel them ahead of time to make it work, they just have to *perform*.

Also, it's not about you! Nobody in the audience cares what you are feeling. They care about what they feel. Nobody wants to watch you stand up there and feel this and feel that. Get a room.

Perform the thing and stop worrying

So what should be going through your mind?  The scene. The objective.  The truth and the passion.  Anything else is a distraction, and it's not helping.  Within that framework are a million creative decisions, but if you don't understand the basics of putting together a performance that will touch people deeper than their intellect, it hardly matters what you do.

Finally for a touch of realism, you will probably not be able to keep all distracting thoughts out of your head while performing.  If you've ever tried to meditate, you know how hard it is to empty the mind and keep thoughts from popping in unbidden.  In meditation, you learn to acknowledge the unwelcome thought and dismiss it without getting emotionally attached.  The same trick works in performance.  "Here comes that tough interval I always miss... oops, there I missed it again... ah, that was not part of the scene... no matter, back to the song now."  With time, this process will streamline too, so you're able to spend nearly all your time on communicating, and almost none on irrelevant thoughts.

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.

I've never slammed my hand in a door, but I know I wouldn't like it.  How do I know this?  Because I have an imagination!  It's really quite easy for me to imagine slamming my hand in a door, and how it would feel, and how I would yell obscenities right afterwards.  I can even imagine how I would double over in pain, hold the damaged hand with the other hand, and look at it, inspecting it for skin breaks, broken bones and the like.  I can imagine going to coffee with a friend later that day, and telling them exactly what happened.

Why am I telling you this?

Because so many people believe that they require a direct personal experience in order to "get into" a performance.  Like the fellow in the Owning The Stage Forum who said his quartet-mate wouldn't sing "Old Fashioned Locket And A Curl" because he had never had a close relative die.  This is such a terrible excuse!  I mean honestly, how difficult is it to imagine how you would feel if a family member died??  I'd say for most people, it would take about a half-second to answer that question, straight from the gut.

More likely, the guy didn't want to sing that song because he didn't *want* to access those feelings.  Feelings like that can be kind of scary.  It's understandable.  But it's also not going to kill you.  You might get choked up the first few times, but don't worry, the extreme reaction will pass as you habituate to it.  And you might feel a bit more alive from having gone through that journey.  Like the guru who was asked "what do you do when you experience a negative emotion?" and answered "stay there as long as I can."

You're a performer, so let's do a little experiment.  What song/speech/scene are you working on right now?  Do you understand what's happening in the scene?  If so, what emotions might you expect in a person in that situation?  Now make up a scenario where you might experience that same emotion.

Go ahead and do it.  I'll wait.

Wasn't that easy??  You my friend are an amazing emotional machine.  You have all the tools you need to play a scene where you are going off to war, falling in love with an illicit stranger, or dying from a spear wound.  Even if you have never done those things.  (And I hope you haven't, at least not that last one.)

OK, I've got two little boys, and I've seen "Finding Nemo" a bajillion times.  ["The drop off?  Why don't we fry 'em up now and serve 'em with chips??"]  I've also seen Toy Story, Cars and A Bug's Life a lot.  If you don't have kids let me explain - these are animated movies, like the old Disney classics, but every scene is generated frame by frame by a computer.  The visual result is extremely realistic and compelling.  And they're really good flicks!  Their box office records speak for themselves.  I haven't seen Wall-E yet, but I hear it's the best one yet, and may be nominated for Best Picture!

Stick with me here.  We're going somewhere.

I also must confess that I have science in my background, and at the risk of sounding like a typical Western reductionist, I appreciate the value of the scientific method.  Basically that means you do an experiment twice with almost the same conditions, but just change one thing and see how it affects the outcome.  You know, like Galileo dropping two different sized weights off the leaning tower of Pisa, to prove that gravity doesn't make heavy things drop faster.

Now getting to the point, wouldn't it be interesting to prove something about performance by doing a scientific experiment?  Yes!  And even cooler if the work has already been done for you!  That's where Pixar comes in.

So let's put a question on the table.  Do the actors in a play, and stage performers in general, have to feel the real emotions first, in order to create an emotional response in the audience?  Is there any magical mind-reading going on, or does the audience infer the emotional content of the scene from observing the players?

For the answer, look no further than Buzz Lightyear (pictured above).  All of his facial expressions are created by a computer program.  The computer doesn't feel anything, any more than the canvas under the Mona Lisa has feelings.  But when we watch the characters in a Pixar film interact, it's very real, and we feel very real emotions.  The first few hundred times I saw Marlin (Nemo's Dad) agonizing over the loss of his son, I choked up.  It doesn't matter that there isn't and never was a real Marlin, and the images I'm seeing were generated from ones and zeros in a server farm somewhere.  The impact is real.

All this supports a point I've made many times already on this blog.  As a performer, don't worry about feeling the emotions first.  Be clear about the scene and your objective, step on stage and perform!  You may (or may not) experience the emotions as a reaction to the scene, just like the audience.  But don't waste any time worrying about whether you're feeling the right things.  It's not about you anyway.