Passionate Presentations

I saw a performance Friday night by “Authoring Action.” About 30 teenagers reciting, singing, dancing the words they had authored. 

I saw tears running down the cheeks of a teenage boy rapping a poem he’d written. And I was reminded, again, of the importance of passion in our presentations.   

I hope we’re in the post-post-modern era of the arts. I hated the post-modern period, probably because I didn’t fit into it well. I didn’t enjoy self-referential, cynical, let’s-have-a-laugh-at-the-past, emotionless performances. I wanted passionate performances.

Passion isn’t fully back in fashion yet, but it may be on its way. I’ve blogged about the clues I’ve been finding in, of all places, the business world. A CEO said in an interview that he’s fortunate that he loves the business he’s in, that he’s passionate about it. The author of an essay about business journalism advised writers to tell a story, rather than trying to explain the facts. She recognizes that readers will probably not remember or understand the facts, but they will remember the story that captures the meaning of the facts.  

We can’t tell a story in our presentations unless we go deeper than the words, unless we find the story we want to tell. We can’t tell a story well unless we are drawing upon our senses–our sight, our hearing, our senses of touch, smell, and taste. Our senses produce both emotion and action, not only in us, the storytellers, but in our audiences.

Here’s one of the definitions of passion in the Oxford Universal Dictionary: “In psychology or art, any mode in which the mind is affected or acted upon . . .” 

If we are presenting our ideas from our senses, our audiences can respond from, and their minds will be affected by their senses. 

 We don’t get good at giving presentations unless we are passionate about the story we’re telling. If we are passionate about our presentations, we will get good at giving them.            

Why present any idea if we are not intending to affect the minds of our audiences? Why present without passion?

Going Too Far is Almost Enough

“That was a great exercise. Why didn’t we start with that one?”

This was a comment at the end of a workshop on “Presenting Yourself.” Made after an exercise in which I’d asked the participants to exaggerate all the presentation techniques they’d learned in the last 6 weeks. “Go too far,” I’d said, knowing after 35 years of teaching that they wouldn’t.

At some point in the process of becoming members of a functioning society, each of us has been warned “to quiet down,” “to be seen and not heard,” “don’t draw attention to yourself,” and the like. Those are the demands of the schoolroom, sometimes the family dinner table, and enforced when we’re part of many audiences. But not when we’re on stage.

There the opposite is true. No audience will be comfortable unless their leader, the performer, is larger than the audience. Unless the performer’s energy is larger, gestures wider, voice more authoritative.

Fortunately, all the workshop participants understood, after the exercise, that “going too far” was only the beginning of a good performance.        

Ourselves as Product

I wrote my column for Community Arts Cafe this month on “Choosing Your Audience.” I mentioned that we ought to start by viewing ourselves and our performances as a product. How do we know who are audiences are if we don’t assess what we’re offering them?

How do we do that? By listening to our audiences–what they say; what they applaud.

A former client told me this week that what I do is “teach people to be a strong presence.” I had thought I was teaching people not to be afraid of their stage fright or their audiences. But, of course, the result of losing those fears would be a stronger presence.

The title of the new book, Speak Up (available now from Press 53 and Amazon and . . .), turns out to be a perfect fit, too.

That one phrase has changed the audiences I’m looking for.