Excellence

There’s a Jonathan Coe novel in which a character says something like, ‘I shall enjoy looking forward to that’.* The main protagonist is struck by the multiple layers of anticipation built into the statement - taking pleasure in anticipating the pleasure of anticipating something. This quote came to mind as I was noting the various types of future-orientation discussed at Karen O’Connor’s Performing On Your Mind workshop back in November.

The first was the envisioning process entailed in the general coaching strategy, asking performers to describe the kind of performance they would like to give. I have already discussed how this serves to focus attention on solutions rather than problems, but it’s interesting to note that it thereby gets the performer to construct an imagined future self who is fulfilling their present ambitions.

Magenta's primary triggerOne of the techniques from sports psychology that Karen O’Connor shared in her Performing On Your Mind workshop was the use of triggers, or cues. For me, this was one of those lovely moments when a concept crystallised out aspects of my own praxis. By naming the tool, it became possible to analyse it - and also to see ways in which I can apply it more tactically.

(Which is, if you think about it, what a coach is doing a lot of the time anyway: making things that a performers is experiencing perceptually available, and thus also conceptually available. Actually, that’s the function of music analysis too - I hadn’t spotted that parallel until I started this paragraph.)

This is another of those posts bringing together bits and bobs from coaching reports about an idea (such as here and here) into one place so I can point to it and say: there, that's where I explain what this is.

The 'thought point' is a concept I have been playing with for a number of years, ever since I first came across David McNeill's concept of 'growth point' - the moment when a thought starts to occur to us. In real-life conversation, you have an inkling first, a motivation, a sense of instability that demands expression. If someone interrupts you before you get to express the idea, you may find it disappears entirely - it is not yet a fully-fledged thought, only the potential for one.

One of the models that Karen O’Connor shared at her Performing On Your Mind workshop last month was a way of conceptualising different functions of the brain developed by sports psychologist Steve Peters. He divides the brain into three main areas, the frontal region, which operates the logical functions, the limbic region, seat of the emotions, and the parietal region, which acts as storage.

As Karen’s slide (which she has kindly let me share with you) shows, he then characterises these as your ‘human’ brain, your ‘chimp’ brain and your ‘computer’. This is clearly a simplified model of the brain, but its usefulness lies in its very simplicity - and it does at least bear a somewhat more direct relationship with the underlying complexities than the old stereotype of left and right hemispheres. (Which itself has some similarly valuable uses as a reflective tool - it’s just taken rather too literally rather too often.)

The only picture I've found from the show itself: a bit grainy, but gives an impression...

One of the highlights for me at October's ladies' barbershop convention in Llandudno was the premiere of two arrangements commissioned by the Cottontown Chorus for the Saturday night show. The Meatloaf ballad 'Two Out of Three Ain't Bad' and a medley of a ridiculous number of other Meatloaf songs (35 minutes of original music crunched down to about 8 mins of a cappella!) were at the heart of their set, and provided the theme around which they built the rest.

This was a highlight for all the obvious reasons. Not just that it's exciting to hear one's creation come to life for the first time (a treat I also had over the weekend from Silver Lining), but that it's exciting to hear extended musical structures sung so well. And they had really gone to town on the staging, even building a mock Harley Davison out of an old chopper bike and bits of motorcycle.

October by the sea: why they invented the phrase 'bright and breezy'The weekend saw the Ladies Association of British Barbershop Singers head to North Wales for their annual Convention. One of the things it is easy to take for granted when it works, but which should not go unremarked, is the efficiency and competence of the event's organisation.

Saturday was dominated by a mammoth chorus contest, with the first singers on stage at 10 am and the last scheduled for 6.25 pm, so it is more than a little impressive that the whole thing only lost three minutes over the course of the day. The Convention Team and stage crew need to feel very pleased with themselves about this, as it makes the experience so much better for competitors (who can therefore pace their preparation accurately) and audience (who can therefore be sure they get to see the groups they are particularly interested in).

Everybody in the creative and/or performing worlds (and I suppose many other areas too) needs feedback. We have our own sense of how well we are managing with our tasks, and to what extent we are achieving what we were aiming for, but we need the reality check of other people to calibrate our self-awareness. Does it come over to others as we perceive it ourselves? Do they notice things that we don't? Are the things that are important to us as we work also important to others?

Without feedback, we can't grow.

But receiving feedback can be an emotionally wearing experience. People who may have only a brief or casual relationship with our work can make throw-away remarks that make us question everything we've done. Conversely, people who already love what we do can validate things that really should be questioned. Confidence and self-knowledge are both at risk when we hear commentary on what we do.

My last post on this subject explored the idea of motivating people to achieve more and better things in rehearsal by raising the stakes. It found a distinction between bullying (which will do this effectively in the short term, but at the cost of making everyone miserable) and game-structures that increased the importance of the desired behaviours without putting personal pressure on people.

This post aims to analyse the various aspects of successful stakes-raising tactics to see how we can generate them in rehearsal. There are four main elements I have identified, and some activities involve more than one of them.