Performing at Every Level

Performing artists see the concept of performance at various ‘levels’ of engagement with their fellow performers.

First comes their individual performance. This is the one thing you alone are responsible for. You owe it to yourself and to your fellow artists to turn up prepared, know your lines (or your steps or the score) and be ready to do your best.

Next comes the immediate ‘team’ – the people you interact most with. If you are an actor, your role will have its direct interaction with certain other roles. These are your ‘big scenes’, which you work on a lot with the other actors involved.

If you are a violinist in an orchestra, you are part of a string section that will work together until they are performing as a unit – an ensemble – before the orchestra as a whole comes together to rehearse.

If you are a dancer, you may have a key duet or a larger group piece.

Every performer knows that there is a core group of people that they have to ‘gel’ with for the performance as a whole to succeed.

Once our various ensembles are fully functioning, next comes the big picture: the full rehearsal with the entire cast, the whole dance troupe, the complete orchestra – the full ‘company’.

For the first time, you may realize that something that the other actors, dancers or musicians are doing – or even what the ‘extras’, scene shifters or lighting technicians are doing – requires something different from you. You have to adapt your individual and team performance to work perfectly with the full ensemble.

Great directors and conductors will have anticipated some of this, and the work is fully formed in their minds. With any luck, they will have nudged the performers in the right direction as they move toward full rehearsal.

But no one can be fully prepared for the experience of bringing new ensembles together en masse for the first time. Things that seemed successful earlier, in rehearsal, suddenly don’t work. A tiny detail may have an unexpected effect on the whole. Things that worked in isolation may not quite work when you bring them together.

The unique chemistry that exists between members of any company is the raw material that gives energy to our performance and allows us to deliver a sparkling performance that stands out from the rest.

Businesses – like theatre companies, dance troupes and orchestras – have fluid membership. People come and go. But a particular generation of any business (and any theatre company, dance troupe or orchestra) will have a unique flavour, a unique look and sound. There is enough continuity to create a culture, an overall approach that is picked up by newcomers to the ensemble and can persist for many years. The organization’s ‘purpose’ and its ‘story’ persist down the years. It is possible to ask any member of the company or business about something and get a recognizably similar response; everybody knows the ‘story’ and it is reflected in everything they do.

This unique chemistry is what sets successful businesses apart from the rest. It is key to their ability to deliver a compelling performance.

Overly rigid organizations with tight command and control systems prevent ensemble interaction. If colleagues can’t interact creatively together, there can be no special chemistry – they are unable to create their own version of the story and deliver a compelling performance of their own.

The actors Benedict Cumberbatch and John Freeman played the characters of Sherlock Holmes and John Watson, respectively, in the BBC TV series Sherlock, created by Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss, which ran from 2010 to 2017. At the heart of the success of the series was the relationship between Cumberbatch’s Holmes and Freeman’s Watson.

A journalist for The Sunday Times explored the chemistry between the two actors:

A believable friendship, of course, depends most of all on casting. “Benedict was the only person we offered Sherlock to,” Gatiss says. “Casting John [Watson] was much harder. Then, when we got them in the same room together, Steve [Moffat] just said to me, ‘Look, there’s the series.’ And it was absolutely true. It’s an instant chemistry, and they have it in real life as well as on screen.”

I rounded them both up at Battersea power station to see what that meant. Freeman and Cumberbatch are an odd couple. They are as different in real life as Sherlock and John. They describe themselves as good friends, but you suspect they wouldn’t be were it

not for the work. […]

Freeman says he knew they had something as a pair from the first audition. “Ben’s been generous about how, when he first met me, he thought, ‘This is going to work.’ He was very pro my doing it, and I felt the same. For whatever reason, it kind of worked immediately between us. Whatever we bring that complements each other,

whatever differences and similarities we have, they do work.”⁵⁵

There is one final participant in any performance – the most important participant of all.

The audience. Things that seemed to go well in rehearsal leave the audience cold. Something that seemed almost routine in rehearsal moves the audience deeply. Some audiences are ‘unprepared’ for what you have to offer. Other audiences are deeply appreciative.

You never quite know how a performance will go down until it meets the audience – and the audience, after all, is the whole point of the performance. A performance that doesn’t move the audience is not a good performance, no matter how technically brilliant it might be.

Performers need to respond to the audience. If the audience starts off cold, they need warming up; if they are stiff, they need relaxing; if they’re alarmed, they need reassurance.

Top performers can do this by subtle adjustments: by staying supremely calm and confident and waiting for the audience to ‘settle in’; by ratcheting up the comedy aspect of a performance; by turning up the intensity; by addressing the audience directly with a subtle gesture – a metaphorical wink that says, ‘I know what you’re thinking. Don’t worry.’

What no performer can afford to do is ignore the audience. You’re in this together now.

Sarah Frankcom, artistic director of Manchester’s Royal Exchange Theatre, talked to the audience at a special ‘sleepover’ event there that featured performances and discussion about ways in which the theatre can collaborate better with its audience.

Here were some of Frankcom’s observations:

Theatre can’t happen without an audience. It comes to life in the moment. It is experienced by those who haven’t been involved in its creation. A piece of work can seem full of exciting ideas and potential when it’s being planned or is at the dress rehearsal, but it can die when it finally meets its audience. It can also burst into life and make something happen that is mysterious and special and

entirely unexpected […]

I am hungry for a more grown-up dialogue, a space where I can understand more about what you think theatre is about and what this building in the heart of Manchester is for. Collaboration is at the heart of making theatre and I think we need to see you, our

audience, as collaborators, people whose response, ownership and

critique of what we do is vital to the development of our art form.

We need to think out loud with you and make the space to listen to you and be challenged by you. We need to share a conversation with you about what we do and why, and find new ways to work with you. We need to find some of the starting points and catalysts for our work with you, and even from you.

We need to begin a relationship with you that reflects the magic that you make happen in here. You are an integral part of the work that we make. We wouldn’t be here without you.

How do we begin?⁵⁶

Sarah Frankcom, ‘Theatres must see audiences as collaborators’

All performances are organic things; they grow and develop over time.

Members of the ensemble will introduce some subtle variation – perhaps intentionally, perhaps by accident – and the audience reaction will tell them that this variation is better; it gets a bigger laugh or moves the audience more profoundly. This variation will stick. Then new variations will arrive.

The performance will not drift off track, because everyone understands the shape of the narrative and the detail of the story. A variation that jars with that story is a failure; a variation that enhances it is a success.

Business performance needs to be the same. If we truly understand our purpose and our narrative, small variations in the delivery of our performance that delight our audience can be adopted and persist.

All performances have to move with the times.

There comes a point when any performance reaches the end of its life. Too many people have seen it; they are no longer delighted. Times have moved on and our performance seems dated.

New thinking is needed to tell our story in some radical new way that will delight audiences afresh.

The same happens in business. There may be nothing obviously wrong with our performance – it just dates or becomes tired. The audience is not delighted any more.

No matter how brilliant a business performance may be, we need to revisit it to ensure that it is still fresh and relevant. We need, in our process of creative rehearsal, to think of new and better ways of delivering our performance.

We need to reinvent our performance.