How to Perform

In rehearsal, there are no mistakes and nothing can be seen as ‘failure’ – we try things out, and some don’t work as well as others.

The bad news is that, in performance, we can fail. We can mess up. We’ve done our creative rehearsal, generated a hundred new ideas, chosen the ones that have the most potential and discarded the rest. Now we move on the second phase of rehearsal, which involves doing things over and over until the performance is ‘second nature’ to us all… though the ensemble may introduce new variations even at this stage (as indeed they may in performance).

Now, finally, we hit the boards. Now we perform before our audience. And at this point, things can go wrong.

I can fail to deliver the performance that we agreed on in rehearsal. I can let down my fellow ensemble players, failing to feed them what they need to deliver their own performance. I can lose my ‘connection’ with them, focusing so hard on my own performance because of stage fright that I stop really seeing their performance; I stop being there for them, responding in the moment.

I can also just plain foul up, leaving the rest of the ensemble floundering and trying to recover.

Welcome to the joy of performance!

There are several things we can do to help us be ready for performance.

The first is obvious: be prepared. Practise and rehearse. Put in the hours needed to master your craft as best you can, and then rehearse with your fellow ensemble members until you can perform without thinking about it. This frees your mind to focus on the subtleties of your performance and leaves you enough bandwidth to stay present and connected to your fellow performers.

The actor Heath Ledger was famously ‘prepared’ for his Oscar- winning role as The Joker in Christopher Nolan’s Batman film, The Dark Knight. He spent a month devising his character and building up a ‘diary’ of ideas and images that influenced him, taking the book with him to the film set to help him get into character.

“I sat around in a hotel room in London for about a month, locked myself away, formed a little diary and experimented with voices,” Ledger told Empire magazine. Ledger thought himself into the character of “a cold-blooded, mass-murdering clown […] Nothing intimidates him, and everything is a big joke.”⁵³

Ledger took inspiration from fellow actor Malcolm McDowell’s performance as the violent sociopath Alex in Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 film, A Clockwork Orange.

On the film set, Ledger would turn up for rehearsal in full make-up and costume but would go into character only when a scene began. When he did, the effects were startling.

Michael Caine, playing Bruce Wayne/Batman’s butler Alfred, had never met Ledger before their first rehearsal, in a scene where The Joker crashes a party at Bruce Wayne’s apartment. “So on the first rehearsal, I’ve never seen him,” Caine said in an interview with Empire. “When the bloody door opened on that lift, he came tearing out. I forgot every line. Terrifying.”⁵⁴

Ledger’s performance won him an Oscar, which, tragically, was awarded posthumously: the actor died of an overdose of prescription drugs before The Dark Knight was released.

Another key factor that helps us perform is controlling our environment: ‘setting the stage’.

In theatrical performances, this is second nature. We have had several thousand years to get this right.

Stonehenge and similar ancient structures are thought to be ritual arenas. They seem not to have been lived in or to have a defensive purpose, and there is not much point in shaping and controlling a space unless you want to fill it with people and have them experience something. Ancient Greek and Roman amphitheatres, with their tiers of seating, similarly brought audiences to a special place, but in a more intimate setting – close to the action, with astonishingly good acoustics. The modern theatre house, where the audience face a stage surrounded by a proscenium arch, frames that action and gives the audiences a unified view.

We do this, as we have done for millennia, to enhance the environment in which the audience experience our performance. This ‘staging’ offers new chances to surprise and delight audiences with visual and audio effects.

If you are giving an important performance of any kind, remember the importance of setting the stage. If you can’t be seen or heard properly, and you are framed by an uninspiring backdrop, it will be hard to deliver a brilliant performance. Do everything in your power to make sure that there are no unexpected glitches – seeing the staging fall over is, regrettably, more amusing than the most riveting performance and will be what the performance is remembered for.

In business, we often forget to control every aspect of our performance space.

There are obvious spaces where we encounter our audience, and we put a lot of effort into setting these stages: our stores, our showrooms, our advertising, our websites.

It’s annoyingly easy to forget to manage every aspect of our audience encounters. We may have a shiny new airport, but if passengers are left at the boarding gate waiting for a long time to be allowed onto their plane, in a room with no chairs and no water, we have spoiled the performance.

We may have a state-of-the-art call handling system, but if the options that we ask our customers to ‘listen carefully to’ do not include the one issue they’ve called about, then we are losing the audience before our performance even begins.

In business, we encounter our audience on many different stages; it’s important to control them all as best we can, or our performance suffers.

In his dancing career, Mark Powell won over 50 Latin American ballroom dancing titles, including four English, two British and two World Championships.

He recalls failing to get past the first stage of one championship competition at the Empress Ballroom in Blackpool’s Winter Gardens, where the world’s most famous ballroom dancing competitions have been held since 1920.

In the early stages of these competitions, many dancers take the floor at the same time. Something in their performance has to impress the judges enough for them to be selected to go through to the next stage of the competition.

Powell recounts:

Before the competition, it’s very important to think about the layout of the dance floor and where you place yourself so your routine has the best chance of being seen. In the early stages of a competition, you’re dancing with maybe 30 other couples with a number on your back, and you may be dancing absolutely brilliantly, but if the judges

don’t notice you, it’s a waste of time.

In the initial heats for one competition, we just started off in the wrong area of the dance floor. We got boxed into a relatively small part of the floor, so the judges only saw a tiny part of our routine. And all they could judge us on was the brief moment when we were actually visible to them; they didn’t even get to see most of our routine. So that year, we didn’t even get through to the second round. The

following year we won the British championship.

Taking control of the space so that your performance has the best chance of impressing the audience is a key part of any performance. If you get the space wrong in any way, you put your performance at a

huge disadvantage before you even begin.

If you are not a performing artist, there are several techniques and mindsets that have been perfected over the years by performers of all kinds that can help lift your own personal performance.