Recently I've been hearing it in reference to my on-stage persona.
"Just stop thinking and relax."
This strikes me as some of the most trite, useless, counter-productive advice ever given.
I can't.
"Just stop thinking."
Harumph!
My little noggin approaches life as a series of puzzles and riddles. I love figuring things out, knowing why things are the way they are and what makes stuff and people tick. I always have.
The book was translated from the original volume, Wie funktioniert das? (How Does It Work?). As you might expect from it's German origins, it has a marvelous precision and clarity. It take science to the level of art.
If I could "just stop thinking" I might be a more relaxed person, but I wouldn't be Dale Sorenson. I don't know who I would be.
I cannot be other than that which I am.
But that's not to say I can't relax. I can and often do.
And I've realized something liberating about myself.
I will never be a person who can just stop thinking and relax. (Witness the exhaustive navel gazing that is this blog.) But there is something I can do.
I can finish thinking and relax.
Once I've started thinking about something, the only way for me to stop thinking is to come back out the other side. When I reach a conclusion, realization or insight, when I solve the riddle or choose a course of action, then and only then can my brain relax and I can get on with my life.
I finally reached this point with my performance. I'm in a period of explosive growth. It's exhilarating and a tad overwhelming. But I feel I've finally figured out a thing or two and I've been able to relax.
This weekend I decided to be my usual, loud, boisterous, opinionated, larger than life, self. The moment that happened, I had two great shows. And then I remembered something, comedy is fun.
I had a nice career milestone this weekend. For the first time ever, I had shows both Friday and Saturday nights. What fun! And it was very interesting to be able to compare two shows so close together.
Friday night I did Poole Party. Saturday Night I was at Monkeys In The Atrium Stand-Up at Joe Franklin Comedy.
In his book, Zen and the Art of Stand-Up Comedy, Jay Sankey advises the comic to adopt a gently detached attitude toward the ups and downs of different shows and different audiences.
I did this and voila! I relaxed. And I had fun.
Now that's not to say I didn't care. I do ... very much. But I stopped seeing the audiences' response as validations or rejections of me personally. And I started seeing it as, "this material connects to them, this material doesn't."
Fuck whether they like me or not. I like myself quite enough for everyone in the room.
This attitude allowed me to keep my cool, to remain myself, and to truly see what was happening while I was on stage and adapt.
For the first half of the show the audience at Poole Party was so sedate I wondered if they'd just dropped by Don't Tell Mamas because they thought it would be a great place for a nap. It was another in my recent series of joke-to-joke audiences.
They were also distinctly prudish, which is unusual for this venue. So I lowered my expectations, reluctantly omitted my beloved ass fucking jokes and mostly stuck to my greatest hits. Two short new jokes got nothin'. Which was not surprising. But I still got good laughs and had a good time.
The run of low energy audiences ended Saturday night. It was a full house and they were hot. Hot! The energy was up. Everyone was having a good time. As I waited for my turn I got more and more excited. "This gonna be awesome." And it was.
I went up without a strict set list. I knew what I was going to use to open and close. But I didn't have how much of which topics I was gonna do cast in stone. I just started doing my thing. When they liked it, I did more of my thing. When they didn't. I moved on.
My loose structure allowed me to play with them. I was chatty. I improvised a line or two. I tried a couple new ideas, which I hadn't written down. (The horror!) They worked. Two of them worked so well I'm going to edit them in as permanent parts of current bits.
I had a blast. They had a blast. And significantly, I felt like the same person waiting to go on, being on stage and coming off stage after.
I believe it was Jay Leno who once said, "You do stand-up, and you do stand-up, and you do stand-up, and you do stand-up, and you do stand-up and then one day you wake up and realize that the person you are off stage and the person you are on stage are the same person."
For me, that day was Saturday.
3 comments:
I think your insight about finishing thinking about something is good, but it seems kindof inappropriate for the context. You can probably finish thinking about something, but you can't always control when you're going to stop thinking about it, especially when it's something like going up on stage. Maybe instead you should look at it from a different point of view, think about some other aspect of what you are doing, change your way of thinking and you'll get completely different results. Instead of thinking about what you are going to say or how the audience is going to relax, just think about telling a funny story to your friends, or imagine just telling your jokes to a friend to entertain them (yes, I know you hate that, but you might want to try it). It seems to me like you will almost never finish thinking about your comedy, you just put it off for a while every so often, and that never includes when you are about to go onstage.
-Ron
OOH! and I love The Way Things Work, but my copy is a lot more colorful, and has elephants.
-Ron
Trying not to think is like squeezing your eyelids shut really hard and trying to go to sleep... or like "not trying to think of an elephant". Before long your thinking about the act of trying not to think.
Of course, it sounds like you got it figured out: it's more about catching when your thinking about something other than the audience that's sitting in front of you.
One of the great technical acting tools (which sounds easy, but takes a huge amount of practice) is developing the ability to detect when you're holding your breath. When your mind is doing that awful "spinning like crazy" thing, without exception your mouth is closed and you're not breathing. (Or in moments between words that's what you're doing.) If you ever notice that you're short of breath or just holding your breath a lot, you know something needs to be corrected.
The ironic thing is that the act of taking a simple breath pulls your brain out of the vortex long enough to re-focus on the audience. As I said, it's a cool trick (and completely reliable) but it takes a while do develop "breath awareness".
Just a little acting tip that might apply...
Post a Comment