you've got me feeling emotions

I have been thinking recently about how to become a better performer. Generally, in life, and also specifically, a more mobile and expressive music performer, because the Corvairs’ first show was last Saturday, and although I felt triumphant about the quality of our amateur musicianship and with bantering with the audience, which was composed mostly of kind friends who guffawed generously no matter what was said, a trusted adviser on musical performance offered this criticism as soon as I asked for it: “You might want to work on lower body movement.” I had thought I was doing a fine job emoting with body language, but a later viewing of footage shot at the show confirmed that what I had thought was emoting involved subtle movements of the eyebrows that did not register to anyone else besides me, and that the four of us moved almost nothing except our wrists while standing on stage.



Performing emotion has long been difficult for me. My improv instructor announced at the start of last Thursday’s class that the evening would be devoted to “emotional work.” This struck a tritone-filled chord of sustained terror in my heart. I can pretend to stuff a nonexistent owl. I do great with exquisite corpse word games. I can describe invisible mise en scène like a champ. But tell me to convey the feeling of being wildly in love with someone who will not return your affection to a roomful of people simply through movements and nonverbal sounds, and I will excuse myself and stay in the bathroom until it is time to go home. I guess this is why I am taking improv, to get over this desire to flee from emotional performance.

The first exercise was simple. The class stood in a circle and pretended to pass an invisible ball. Each time you got the ball, you were supposed to respond with an emotion; any kind of emotion was fine, as long as it was exaggerated. One boy did a fine job of this, crying on the ground until a long, viscous string of saliva descended from his mouth and touched the carpet. Most people, on the other hand, failed spectacularly at this task. The anger was unenthusiastic, the ecstasy was obviously mimed, the grief was undermined by nervous, self-conscious smiling. When it was my turn, I choose disgust, because the emotion invites satire – even genuine expressions of disgust are often laughable in a way that genuine expressions of sadness or anger aren’t – yet even so I could not commit to more than a modest “Eeeeew!” and some tensing of the upper body.

It’s hard to communicate in words why it’s so hard to communicate without words. I find that I am turning to statements like “It makes you feel vulnerable to open yourself up” and “You really have to let go,” which, like all clichés, fail utterly at describing something to someone who has not experienced exactly what you are trying to describe. So look at it this way. Imagine someone who irritates you. Say, a person who talks incessantly, about herself, and talks much more than she listens. You suspect that she doesn't just exaggerate her stories but flat out lies from time to time, usually to make herself seem stronger or more heroic or more charming or more modest than she actually is. Now imagine this irritating person telling you about a new puppy she has just rescued. And it’s so cute. And it makes her coo. “It’s so fwuffy!” she says, in a dolphinesque whine. And she leans her head against the imaginary puppy and an expression of post-coital bliss crosses her features (which, by the way, are all compacted in the center of her face). And all you can do to keep yourself from vomiting is imagine a cold giant octopus coiled around her head, its expressionless goat eyes watching yours, its eight tentacles gripping different percussion instruments, as she says these things to you.

Now you see what I fear about emotional expression. There’s a chance that your emotions will be so obviously insincere that you will make people revile you as a fraud. I think this is what “it makes you feel vulnerable to open yourself up” actually means. Of course, the better you can express emotions, the more interesting your stories and music and presentations will be. But if you don’t succeed in conveying that emotion, your audience takes pleasure at the image of an octopus occupying the space where your head should be. Expression is high risk but high reward, and expressionlessness is no risk; your reward is the steady state, which is often not so bad. It’s much easier not to express at all.

I don’t think it’s my destiny to be a timid Asian woman. My trusted musical performance adviser performed a lion dance in the living room as an example of demonstrative body movement, and I learned a lot from it. I intend to lay down a rubber snake on the stage and leap back from it with leonine surprise at the next Corvairs show. I have also done some Googling today along the lines of “how to be a better performer” and “how to move your lower body when playing music.” It was interesting to think about things I'd never thought about before. This is what I have learned.

Five Steps to Becoming a Better Performer of Poetry.

STAND with your feet slightly apart, ground yourself. If you stand, it is easier to draw the poem, and your breath, from your whole body and not merely from your mouth. Later you will perform from a wheelchair, or from somewhere in the air.

Step Five (bell)

TALK to the audience, not at them. Before you start look at them, and without a word tell them, with your body and your eyes: thank you and fuck you. Read the poem for yourself as well as for them, conscious of every word. Weigh the words as you read, perform to discover your words as if anew, find new false notes not visible otherwise. Use performance to defend and stand behind your words, and to defend yourself against your own private self-enchantment.

(end with three bells one after the other, played clearly but much softer than above, with a one second pause between each bell; the last bell should be played to linger and echo slightly.)

Your Speaking Skills Can Make You a Better Performer.

Speech writers know that you have to grab the audience's attention in 30 seconds. That's where you make your biggest impact. If you ever see a musician get up on stage and fumble a "Hi. Um. We're the Barnyard Owls," you know what I mean.

As musicians, we can grab the audience's attention with a song. But it helps to think about other ways to captivate your audience too.

Wasn't it KISS who used to shout, "Are you ready to rock!" The phrase might sound cliche now, but it serves the point. KISS knew you had to draw your audience in fast to make an impact and put on a great show.

Or perhaps you prefer non-verbal hooks. You can use a light show. Or imagine band members quitely meditating next to their instruments before they jump up and rock the house.

This has nothing to do with how to become a better performer, but a lot to do with the Futurist Movement and performance studies. Performance: A Critical Introduction.

Despite a strong interest in the physical body in such manifestos as these, futurist productions very often emphasized the mechanical, surrounding (and even hiding) the actor’s body in the trappings of modern technology, for which futurism had an inexhaustible passion. Turning bodies into machines or replacing bodies by machines certainly can be found in modern performance, but the tendency of futurism to move toward theaters of puppets, machinery, even colored clouds of gas, on the whole ran counter to later more determinedly body-oriented performance. Most futurist performances also followed a variety format, with a sequence (or a simultaneous presentation) of bits of short performance material – skits; acrobatics, mechanical, lightning, and sound effects; rapid display of movements or objects. This dazzling and quickly moving variety was essential the futurist aesthetic of speed, surprise, and novelty, but it resulted in a presentation format that on the whole looked backward to the performances of cabaret, the vaudeville, the circus, and the variety stage rather than forward to the performance art of more recent times, which has been largely devoted to the display of individual acts, even if these are of very short duration.

Fundamentals of Stage Movement.

The actor must develop grace in movement...opening and closing doors, answering the telephone, picking up objects, rising, sitting. While these are daily activities in home, school,etc...they are also common business for the stage, television, and films. The actor must use the upstage hand or foot for the aforementioned, because it is more graceful to watch, BUT there will be exceptions.

These methods have been found to be the most graceful ways of accomplishing simple actions, and so they have been called BASIC TECHNIQUES. They are simply techniques because they accompish the movement with the least amount of action and commotion.

And, of course, one learns from Freddie Mercury. Riot At the Opera: Queen Triumphant.

Freddie is not pretty in the conventional sense of the word; like Mick Jagger of '64, he is his own convention. Also like the Jagger of that time, his stage persona and action is unlike anything else. Although it borrows - like most of the group's plagiarisms - slightly from Zeppelin, in tandem with Freddie's supreme assurance and belief in himself - he always refers to himself as a star - it explodes into something that is a constant delight to watch.

He reacts to his audience almost like an over-emotional actress - Gloria Swanson, say, or perhaps Holly Woodlawn playing Bette Davis. At the climax of the second night in Bristol he paused at the top of the drum stand, looked back over the crowd and with complete, heartfelt emotion placed his delicate fingers to lips and blew a kiss. Any person who can consume themselves so completely in such a clichéd showbiz contrivance deserves to be called a star.

Freddie's real talent, though, is with his mike stand. No Rod Stewart mike stand callisthenics here, just a shortee stick that doubles as a cock, machine gun, ambiguous phallic symbol, and for a fleeting moment an imaginary guitar. He has a neat trick of standing quite still in particularly frantic moments and holding the stand vertically from his crotch up, draw a fragile finger along its length, ever closer to the taunting eyes that survey his audience.

It is wonderful to be alive! You can learn a new way to embarrass yourself every day.