interference

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.

Have you ever left it in the green room?  Most performers have felt that way - that they could have done better, and that what they actually brought to the stage was not up to their own standards.  Here's how one reader put it to me recently:

The obstacle that currently vexes me is the "level drop" that occurs between a quartet performance in a rehearsal or informal setting versus the one that happens in front of a large audience.

When we rehearse or sing out in an informal or relaxed setting (e.g. after chorus rehearsal, or to our chorus-mates at retreat, or on a street-corner after a fun evening out ~ the product astounds us. We are so proud of it, and it matches our expectations. We have fun producing the sound, and are truly performers.

When we get in front of a formal live audience, I feel a significant level drop. Chords we always sing in tune are suddenly faltering. The strong resonant sound we always produce is intermittent. The product lacks the "pride" and the performance doesn't feel "fun" like it does in the informal setting. Video and audio recordings reveal some evidence of nerves, but nothing unexpected.

I am left feeling disappointed after a public performance, thinking that it "could have been so much better". My initial solution to this is to just keep doing it. The more audiences, the more exposure to this, the better we can learn and adjust to keep the level up.

And so, my question to you: what is your advice on how to help the level of rehearsal translate to performance?

Everyone situation is different, so face-to-face I would always ask more questions and dig a little deeper before offering advice.  But going by what this reader has written, here's what I would say.

First, it's quite possible that there isn't a problem!  Because it's not about how you feel when you perform, it's about how other people perceive it, and what it does for them.  I bet that a group like this leaves behind a lot of happy audience members, even if they feel like they didn't do their absolute best.  Find some people that you trust for their perception and their honesty, and get them to watch your performance.  Then ask them for their opinion, which is 100% more objective than yours!  You might be surprised.

There was a big study done about this perception gap, and I read about it in Psychology for Performing Artists, an excellent book that is listed here on my resources page.  After viewing a sequence of five performances, the audience often disagreed with the performers about how good each one was.  Sometimes when the performers thought they were exhibiting nerves, the audience perceived more passion!

However, assuming that there are some real things "going wrong" then we're looking for interference, as in the Inner Game concept P=p-i (Performance = potential - interference).  So what's getting in the way?

The reader does talk about nerves, and that's a biggie, even if they aren't any worse than expected.  And there are some great methods of dealing with them head-on.  I've tried to give a summary of those methods in my series on stage fright, which might be worth a read in this case.

Ultimately, I feel that the reader's intuitions are correct - performing more will probably lead to closing the gap between the mastery of technique in rehearsal vs. performance.  That's kind of how it works!  There's no better way to get better at something than to just do it!  Do it, notice what happened, and do it again.

There's an important point buried in there - you want to "notice" what goes wrong, and not to try and correct it in real time.  That, however, is a topic for another day.