Stage Presence

The manager of an events venue told me this week that he'd decided that the difference between a hobbyist and a professional was stage presence. That he liked to encourage performers who were just starting out, but had begun to realize that they were never going to move up to his main floor venue if they didn't know how to communicate with their audiences. And that he saw the same problem with fine artists when he staged an art show. "They don't know how to talk to potential buyers," he said. "It's all about presence."

Technique vs. Communication

I watched a classical guitar player a few weeks ago. I say "watched" rather than heard because no matter how often I tried to force myself to listen to the music, I found myself watching his hands instead. Marvelous technique. How does he manage to do that? Wow, look at those hands move. I can still mentally see the performance, but I can't hear it at all. How great it would have been if he had included the audience in the music.

The Critics

Richard I. Garber commented here about voluntary/involuntary audiences. Yes, indeed, I refer often in "Speak Up" to the differences between the two and how they need to be treated. But how do we treat the 1 or 2 members of a voluntary audience who are there to critique or distract or who knows what? What do you do when you can see your competition in the audience and know that they're there to criticize? I didn't have an answer until a few days later when I attended an orchestra concert at which a group of conservatory students in front of me wanted to make sure that everyone knew that they, too, were brilliant musicians. No matter how loud their comments, they only affected 6 people at most. The rest of the audience–probably 800 people–remained attentive to the stage. Although one would ordinarily treat the show-offs as an involuntary audience, their effect was so minimal that they weren't worth consideration. At a presentation I did a few days ago, one man arrived early, took a seat at the back of the room, and began to read a newspaper. He read his paper for the next hour and a half. I have no idea why he was there. But his disinterested energy was far outweighed by the enthusiastic energy of the larger audience and, therefore, didn't deserve special treatment.

BEING WHO YOU WANT TO BE

We all know that public speaking terrifies more people than snakes, spiders, or airplane trips. Those who are the most terrified of public speaking itself, are terrified of taking a class to learning how to speak in public without being terrified. I led a workshop on "Writing after 50" this weekend at the Blue Ridge Bookfest, and one woman told me she had been afraid to write because of what she might find out. But it had occurred to her that if she wrote about her fear she could write a different ending. Yes, I said, and you could create a character that isn't you to live through whatever frightens you. So why not create a different persona to speak in public? We create different personas all the time in our daily lives. Hopefully, we present a different persona at work than we present to a child, a different persona to a lover than to a father. I have a chapter about creating a performing persona in Speak Up: The Public Speaking Primer. One of the exercises asks the reader to choose characteristics they want their performing persona to have–confidence, to be respected, etc.–and then to use body memories of a time when they were confident, and a time when they were respected. Sometimes workshop participants will realize that they don't really need one characteristic that they thought they were missing in their everyday personality; always do they realize that they really can create who they want to be.

Don't Tell Me What to Think

The last issue of Zoetrope: All Story has one of the best short stories I’ve read in years–”Rothko Eggs,” by Keith Ridgway. The narrator, a teenage girl, liked art that’s “empty.” “Really good artists” left a lot out so that “she could take her own things into the painting.” She didn’t like an artist who didn’t leave much room and was just “trying to look like he had amazing ideas.”

I went to a performance recently that didn’t let me take anything into it. I was told what to think about the theme; the emotions expected of me were obvious. I was being presented to, preached to; there was no room for me in what was happening on stage. I predictably responded by refusing to think or feel as instructed, and left the performance angry.

I also saw recently a production of Sondheim’s Assassins. To my mind, it’s theme is that presidential assignation attempts are the logical extension of the American dream, the way to become “somebody.” That’s a crazy statement, and yet I walked out of the theatre accepting it as rational. Because I was allowed to laugh at the idea, to bring my own experiences to bear on it, to think about it.

Communication vs. Content

“We’re communicating on a human level: The content isn’t important anymore.”

That’s a quote from an interview with Nick Kendall, a violinist with Time for Three, in the Indianapolis Star. Nick is wrong about the content not being an important part of the success of Time for Three. I’m a huge fan, and it’s just plain fun to watch these classical virtuosi, technically some of the best in the country, break into Irish fiddling, reach over and play each other’s instruments, and act like serious clowns. He's exactly right, however, when he says that the content becomes less important than the communication. I’ve written in Speak Up: The Public Speaking Primer about a high-school-age actress who was given an unfortunate set of lines: “In 1865, . . .”; “Then in 1890, . . .” and about a dozen more. She played those lines so engagingly that I didn’t notice until afterward what terrible writing she’d been given. “Commune” in all its forms is a variation of the word “common,” something that is shared. We communicate when we talk together, when there is a mental or spiritual exchange. We can also participate in a mental or spiritual exchange when the medium is not words, but music or dance or even silence. Communication at the human level is what all performances should be about. If we’re not communicating when we perform, we ought not to be on a stage.

Audience Feedback

Another argument for not “projecting” to an audience:

I wrote in my last Community Arts Cafe column that when we involve the audience in a presentation, rather than projecting at them, we can pick up valuable information. I used, as an example, a reading that I gave from When Last on the Mountain, an anthology that I co-edited. I had thought that the eponymous piece would be a great ender. Very inspiring, I thought. Wrong. I could feel from the audience that it had not been inspiring, but a big downer. So I looked at my watch, noted with “delighted surprise” that we had time for one more, flipped through the book and landed on a piece that left them laughing.

I had a similar experience a few weeks later. I was reading the first 5 minutes of a new short story at an open mic. I’d had 7 other writers critique it, had revised it many times, and had thought it wasn’t the greatest story ever, but good enough to send out.

The first page went well–laughter in the appropriate places–but during the second page, I heard a voice in my head saying, “This is so banal.” A voice, not one of my own thoughts.

So I took the story to my best critic and, without telling him why, asked him to read the first 3 pages. He immediately told me what was wrong with it. So now I have to rewrite the whole story, and I’m embarrassed that I ever sent it out.

Audience feedback is a marvelous thing.