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When you step up to the plate—literally or metaphorically—who are you? You are probably not your usual, everyday, or private self. Although my metaphor comes from baseball, the performing arts may most easily provide examples of this many-layered challenge.
For our book You're On! Consulting for Peak Performance, co-author Dr. Charlie Brown (really!) and I interviewed performers (performing artists, business leaders, and professionals in high-risk occupations-we were comparing their information with that of athletes). We wanted to understand the key mental and psychological aspects of performance. A broadcaster, Grace, talked about "the dilemma of authentic connection...yet maintaining full engagement in one's performance self." How do you balance the sometimes competing sense of being truly yourself and truly performing? Grace spoke with feeling about conversations she has had with her husband:
"One of the things I hate to hear [from him] is, ‘What do you mean, you're tired? You didn't sound tired on the radio.'...I have had to tell my husband: ‘Listen, when I go to work I am at work, I am going to do my job. The day I sound tired on the radio, I am eating cat food and living under a bridge.'"
Recently, I saw a multi-media theatrical piece, I Send You This Cadmium Red in which two actors portray a dialogue between artists discussing color in its purest form. Accompanied by live musical performance, patterned images of the colors they mention are projected onto screens behind them.
Intrigued by the actors' experience, I wondered whether not only speaking the artists' words but also seeing those visual images had an impact on how the actors were seeing the world. For myself, I'm aware that for the first few hours after I've spent time in a museum, I see...differently. I am more conscious of colors, shapes, contrasts, compositional elements.
As it happened, the actors responded to just such a question in a post-performance "talk-back."
One of them admitted to being color blind-in itself interesting. But I was particularly struck by the comment made by the other actor. Initially, he said, when he saw those projections he was quite taken with them and absorbed by them. As an actor, though, he was playing the part of an artist in conversation, not a person standing in front of oversized and changing hues and patterns of light. And so, ironically, the absorbing element of color, so central a focus for the audience, actually became irrelevant, for him, to what he was doing.
Now, that's a fairly abstruse example of the separation between everyday self and performing self. Let me bring it closer to home....
I've just finished an intense period of rehearsal and then performance with a chorus I sing with. The intensity was not only a matter of time and musical notes; it was very much tied to the libretto's theme: the Holocaust. Each choir member reacted in our own particular way, based in part on our own lives and the ways in which the Holocaust and the Second World War affected us, our families, and our communities.
During a break in one of the dress rehearsals, I got into conversation with one of the soloists-the young man who plays the part of a high-ranking S.S. official of the Reich, as well as speaking some of Hitler's words directly. This young man is himself Austrian. There was a moment, he said, just as he straightened up into ramrod posture, hands behind his back, when he would be seized by a sense of guilt...and then make himself shift into character. Did that "guilt" (one can only put it in quotes-he's at least one, if not two, generations removed from the actual perpetrators) in some way then fuel the intensity of reactive "certainty" with which he declaimed and sang?
He also commented that part of what made it more tolerable for him to enact this role was that he was speaking and singing in his second language, English, rather than his native German. Or at least he was for the most part.
And what was this experience like for members of the chorus? During most of the rehearsal period (we'd been in weekly rehearsals for a month and a half), we didn't discuss it. But after we had a visit from a Holocaust survivor, some of our associations and reflections emerged in small casual clusters of conversation.
The evening of the performance, we were more aware. Different moments in the piece were emotionally gripping for various choristers. One person was most moved by the description of someone's death, as it reminded that person of a recent spousal loss. Another was caught by the (block lettered) cry we sang, "Remember me!"
Many of us were caught in this dilemma: How am I—this real person with very specific associations and deep resonant reaction-going to handle this moment when I need to be not-myself, but a portrayer of emotion and experience?
I had found the rehearsal period challenging: The lyrics are very strong; it was easy for me to shift into my own familial losses from the Holocaust. But rehearsal also meant that there was time to get used to the material, to figure out who one was going to be, how to enact rather than experience in the moment. The ultimate aim of performance is, after all, for the audience to experience the feelings that are conveyed by those on stage.
The real challenge, the "moment" that got to me, was one that we had not spent time rehearsing-because it's spoken by the soloist-the perpetrator. And it's the one moment he speaks in German: He exhorts "Töten sie alle!" [Kill them all!]. Immediately following these terrifying words comes a sweet moment of almost absurd contrast: The women of the chorus, portraying naïve and hopeful mothers, comfort their children, assuring them that everything will be all right. The vicious words, the vulnerability of the victims, and our knowledge of what really happened pulled me out of character. I shifted back into my self rather than my singer/performer self.
How to handle it? A fellow chorister suggested distracting myself by focusing on the conductor's beat, almost tuning out the words. Another gave me "permission" to stop singing for that moment-which, paradoxically of course, allows one to shift back into performance mode.
I had made a "pact" with one of the choristers. In a long and deep conversation, we had each spoken of the moment that would be most challenging. Although we were positioned nowhere near each other during the actual performance, we knew that we would feel less alone, and that we would be mentally available to "hold" the pain-filled moment for each other.
I got through that moment. The concert was, as an audience member later commented, an extraordinary event. And the audience, deeply moved, collectively leapt to their feet at the conclusion of the orchestra's final crashing chord.
You can reach me directly through my website, http://www.theperformingedge.com
