There is a strange disconnect between the brain and the body of a performer that can, and frequently does, take place onstage. Against all evidence, one can force one’s self to believe that, at any given moment, one may become invisible in the midst of performance. Maybe it’s at the moment when the brain says “Whew! I’m done with my solo. Now I can be invisible.” Or maybe the singer’s brain says, “Hey, I’m in the back row. Nobody can see me back here” or “Everyone’s looking at so-and-so; nobody’s looking at me.” Wrong. There is no time during a performance when you aren’t important, no matter what part you play, where you stand, or what you’re doing – even if what you are doing is a putative “nothing”.
To grok this, you must first wrap your head around the metaphysics of performance. In my little cosmology, a performer is an energy channel. He or she takes a large amount of disorganized energy coming from an audience, organizes it, amps it up through the medium of their performance, and sends it back. Like a sort of energetic volleyball game, this happens over and over again during the course of a successful performance. By successful, I mean an event during which both the performer(s) and the audience bounce the amplified energy of the experience back and forth, and everyone walks away with a nice legal buzz. Both those onstage and those in the house must commit to this exchange in order for it to occur. Everything you do onstage either helps or hurts that exchange.
People are sometimes said to have “big” personalities, or “big” stage presence. I think that this is a subjective impression of one’s ability to be an energy conduit and transformer. When you see someone who lights up a stage like a Roman candle, you are, on some level, experiencing their ability to process large amounts of intense energy. Some performers have this naturally, but others must work at it. Whichever category you belong to, an awareness of this phenomenon at work can only help you to enhance your personal stage presentation, whether you work as a soloist or a group member.
You are always being scrutinized when you are on stage. The human eye is drawn to movement, an instinct honed by millennia as hunter-gatherers. It’s deeply ingrained in our survival mechanism. So your movements on stage are never invisible. If you fidget, play with your hair or jewelry, pick at your clothes or your nose, shuffle around, or do just about anything, I guarantee you that someone will notice, and some of the energy that should be focused on performing will be lost. If your outfit is busier or louder or wildly different from your colleagues, you will be noticed but it won’t help the music.
A note to beatboxers: Often, you are the busiest person on the stage, what with your imaginary drumset and all. You can successfully suck all the focus from your group if you play your air drums with enough Tommy Lee flair. Please remember that you are not playing the drums. You are spitting. You don’t need to mime playing a drum set any more than anyone in your group needs to play air guitar, and your constant flurry of make-believe activity can be an energy drain on your group. If you’re a solo artist and air drumming is part of your thing, that’s another story.
Your gaze is under scrutiny as well. Your audience will focus on where you are focused. It’s another deeply ingrained human trait. Have you ever passed someone on the street that is gazing intently at something, and you stop and look in the same direction as that person? You want to see what it is they are looking at. Is it pleasant? Is it dangerous? You want to know. It’s another of our visual survival cues. So even if you are standing in the back row and humming whole notes, your focus should be on your soloist. You are, in a sense, completing an energy “circuit” with your eyes. If your gaze is wandering, just sorta checking things out, your energy isn’t flowing into your performance. It’s draining energy from it.
These little things – where you focus your eyes, how and when and why you move – affect the quality of your performance, and they are within your scope of consciousness and control. Putting a little polish on these aspects of presentation can noticeably boost your ensemble’s quality and impact. Just remember that on stage you are never invisible.
PS:
I just read the foregoing. What a pedantic slog that was. Hey, there are always times when you are looking at your audience instead of your soloist or each other and it’s fine. That’s a sharing with your audience, too - just a different vibe. There’re plenty of times when a voc perc can be flailing around and it’s cool because everybody else is jumping around and it’s exciting. I’m not saying that in a group you can’t be apparently independent of each other in lots of ways yet be locked in musically. My idea, which I failed to get after reading what I wrote, was to underscore the fact that everything you do onstage is important. Everything. Add as favorites (67) | Quote this article on your site | Views: 3351
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