Balance Beam

I was talking with a friend today about how seeing a performance that isn't marvelous is actually an incredible learning experience. For me, it makes me ponder why the show isn't working, what the pitfalls are, and how I can avoid them in my own work.

Last week, e. took me to see a rock concert. The performer has a terrific voice but wasn't great with stagecraft. She was a bit diva-ish, complaining to the lighting guy while she was onstage and struggling to get comfortable. I understand a little of this - finding your home onstage is really important to being able to perform well - but it did feel a little like some of these things should have been worked out in the sound/lighting check. It's vital to know what you need as a singer in order to prepare that space for yourself. Some people arrive at a theatre early in order to spend some time onstage, picturing the performance, and making sure everything "feels right". The reason doing it as part of a show can be troubling is because it places a halt in the action, breaks the flow, and pulls the audience out of the enchantment that is part of a great musical experience.

The other and bigger realization for me was that it is critical to maintain some of the invisible curtain between you and the audience. I always found it charming when an artist would cross the divide, reaching out to the audience and building a rapport. What I didn't know was that it's actually possible to eliminate too much of the divide. The artist we saw did exactly that. She conversed with the audience as if she was talking to friends and would stop the show to field comments from the audience. She maintained some control - "No, I'm not bringing the little girl up onstage," but because she responded to every call from the audience, the divide came down a little too much. Also accelerating its demise was the fact that she left the stage at one point with her digital camera to go take pictures of herself with the audience members. Finally, the very diva-ish behavior that made her seem so uncomfortable onstage gave her a bit of an "I don't really belong here" sense. None of these things individually would have obliterated the curtain, but all of them together created a pretty destructive confluence.

So why does it matter if the curtain crashes down? First, it does eliminate some of the magic. People like to be drawn in to a performance, and there's a certain hum, a certain energy that's lost when you don't have the ability to sit back and watch the artist in his or her own space. Second, it gives the audience license to take control of the performance. That's what happened here. By the end of the show, people felt emboldened to have their own individual conversations with the performer. This meant that she couldn't start her encore for at least 15 minutes. That made some of the audience members frustrated with the experience. And that's the last feeling you want people to have when they walk out the door.

Always a balancing act, I guess. How do you strike the sweet spot between accessibility and over-stepping?

~Hope