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| Working the Room By Kristina Olsen In last month’s Wood Chops I covered different ways that you can get ready to perform. This time let’s move to the moment when you’re on stage and talk about ways to gain and keep the audience’s attention. There’s an old adage in the folk/acoustic world that if you are too slick or too polished you aren’t a real musician, that it somehow compromises the music you are playing. I agree to a point: slickness shouldn’t replace heart, and polish shouldn’t replace the love of playing an instrument. But let’s examine what the audience goes through physically and emotionally during a show and be careful to look out for their interests as much as we can. After all, they gave up their time for us. START STRONG The start of your show is so important. You want to let your audience know that you are a competent performer and that you are going to take care of them. Audiences are very nervous for us. Most of the audience can’t understand how a person could get up on a stage in front of a bunch of strangers without having a heart attack or a nervous breakdown. Start with two of your strongest pieces. Sometimes the inevitable thing happens: the mic isn’t on or you lose your pick or drop your guitar. Make a gentle joke about it and get on with the show. Generally it is best not to talk until after the second song, unless you are a comedian. It is best to take charge of the stage with what you do best, which we’ll assume is playing music. Then you can have the luxury of speaking. You must earn that luxury. When you are speaking to an audience, you are still taking their time, so your patter must enhance your show. It must either be funny or poignant or give the audience special information about a tune. Don’t be self-indulgent on stage. You must look at every second you take on that stage and ask if you are wasting your audience’s time or enhancing the show. Take notice of your surroundings. During the show you can make some comment about the concert venue or the city--something that tells the audience you know where you are. An audience’s sense of self is tied into the place they live, and nobody wants someone from out of town to come and crank out the exact same show they just did last week in Perth or bash the place they live in. You can gently tease the audience about something, but always include a positive comment. I was just playing in a small club in Australia, and I noticed that there were locks on the outside of the ladies’ toilets. I had fun teasing the audience about that, but I also made sure to mention the incredible natural beauty surrounding the town. MAKE ’EM BREATHE You are full of adrenaline on stage, and your brain is full of oxygen, especially if you are singing or playing a wind instrument. Meanwhile, your audience is slumped in chairs barely breathing at all. Oxygen is like a big dose of healthy uppers. You need to get your audience to breathe deeply. Unless you are playing in parts of California that are ripe with crystals and aura fresheners, your audience will not appreciate your telling them to breathe deeply. Your audience is made up of a bunch of healthy individualists who don’t like being told what to do, even if you are right and it is good for them. So you have to trick them. Two great ways to get your audience to breathe deeply is to get them to laugh or to get them to sing along. I was watching Jesse Winchester years ago in a small club. I love his stuff, but partway through the show I realized that I was getting tired and the chair was getting uncomfortable. I was just thinking that I might leave early when he did a wild dance that was very funny. I must have laughed really hard, because I suddenly felt full of energy, and, miraculously enough, the chair was no longer uncomfortable. Sing-alongs are tricky because most audiences hate the idea of them until they are actually singing (except audiences in New England and Old England, who will sing along on songs without choruses that they have never heard before). Even if you don’t have any singing in your act, you can get the audience to make some sound at a particular part of a tune. Getting audience members involved is like giving them a job. They may resent you for it for a moment, but by the end of the show they will get a boost in self-esteem from being a part of your show and doing the job well. All of the funny stories that have become nearly memorized bits in my show started out as me just telling my audience what happened to me that day, letting them know that I liked their town and that I wasn’t doing the exact same show I did in Antwerp. When I got a laugh, I started the very slow process of memorizing the laughs and distilling it all down. Now those stories are as requested as my songs. There are stories about Alaska, Seattle, Australia, and Scotland. They aren’t memorized, but I have memorized where the laughs are. I call the laughs my fence posts. I just tell the audience very conversationally what I was doing that day. The words and phrases vary, but when I get to the fence posts, they are always the same; they have been worked over meticulously for timing and phrasing. Never introduce a funny story or joke with, "This is very funny" or "I have something very funny to tell you." That audience full of mavericks will show that they are individuals by refusing to laugh. And don’t laugh at your own punch lines or jokes. You can laugh naturally before you start, as if you were remembering something funny, but punch lines work best if you sound like you’re just trying to tell the story. The audience will laugh, but you keep on telling the story, like you have an urgent need to get it off your chest. If you pause for the audience to laugh, they will know this is a staged bit and will go into maverick mode again. In the same vein, don’t tell the audience what they are about to experience. I’ve seen so many songwriters introduce a song by telling the audience exactly what is going to happen in it. By the time they hear the song, the audience is bored. Your introductions must be entertaining on their own, or they must be intriguing so the audience listens harder to the song. When you perform, you create a persona that ultimately should be as true to who you really are as possible. If you are fake, the audience will sense that and not be nearly as engaged in your show as they could be. In the same vein, when you are performing, be in the song or piece; don’t be thinking about the next song. That’s how you forget lyrics and put on a flat show. STAGE FRIGHT I know few performers who haven’t experienced crippling stage fright at one time or another. Ironically, the best cure for stage fright is to perform often. I think your body eventually gets tired of going into hyper fight-or-flight adrenaline mode and starts to calm down. If you are going to do a big show and you really suffer from stage fright, do a bunch of little shows or open mics before the big date to get your body acclimated. Other than that, be really well prepared for your show. You need a strong foundation to hold you up there. And breathe deeply! Breathing gives you the oxygen you need to deliver a peek performance, and taking deep regular breaths will calm you down. THANKS BUT NO APOLOGIES Always give songwriters credit when you perform their songs. Acknowledge band members, sound and light people, promoters, the musicians who are on the bill with you, and the audience. People love to be mentioned. You can break this up so you don’t have a long list of thanks; scatter them throughout the show. Don’t apologize. If you are collected and prepared for your show, you shouldn’t have anything to apologize for. If things go wrong, once again, deal with it with grace and humor and let the audience know through your poise that you are fine. They didn’t give up their time and money to hear you apologize. BE TACTFUL WITH TALKERS Never blame an audience for anything. If they are talking through your set, either you are not interesting enough for them or you booked the wrong gig. I have seen performers tell audiences to be quiet. Oof, the audience hates that. That will throw your show right off. When people are talking and making noise, the first thing I do is use dynamics. The natural instinct is to get louder to cover up the talking, but that usually just encourages the talkers to start yelling. I’ll play a loud song and then bring it way down suddenly. All you can hear is the person talking for a second before they get self-conscious and start whispering. I do this a few times until they get tired of trying to talk over the roller coaster and shut up. I make sure that the loud and soft parts of my piece are appropriate to the song I’m playing. The 95 percent of the audience that is listening doesn’t need to have the show ruined because of the 5 percent that isn’t listening. It’s hard to remember when some people are making noise that there are a whole lot of people really listening. Don’t punish them by trying to punish the noisy ones or by doing a half-assed show. The audience is still giving you its time, and you owe them the best show you can give. Usually an audience that pays an admission price will want to get its money’s worth by listening. If you are playing a bar or a university lunchroom where no one paid to get in, the audience will assume that you have no worth and usually won’t listen. Many of them went there specifically to talk to someone. Still, these venues can be lab gigs where you try out your performances. If you get a nonpaying audience to listen, you have really done something. On the other hand, if you are in an audience listening to a performer and some bozo is talking, go over and ask them to be quiet. Audience members get to do that. The performer that you are listening to will silently say a thousand thanks, as will the rest of the audience. By the same token, if you’ve just finished your set and the next act is on, you must be absolutely quiet. If you have a bunch of fans who want to talk to you, either suggest to them that you leave the room to talk or wait until the next intermission. I can’t tell you how often I’ve been at a gig and the only noise was from the performer who just got off stage. Always earn your encores. I’ve seen performers tell an audience to give them an encore. Either the listeners refuse or they comply but resent the performer for asking. This is also true when it comes to standing ovations. Even if you word your request humorously, the audience still ends up resenting you. Believe it or not, sometimes the best gift we have is having small, uninterested audiences in the beginning of our careers. We get to test our wings with people who are only half paying attention to our awkward flappings and crash landings. When we do something so unique and spectacular that the disinterested stop their conversations and turn and listen to us, we know that we have something that will be useful when we are playing to 2,000 people.
Additional reading: Getting Ready to Perform by Kristina Olson and Stage Presence Workshop by Janyce Boynton |
