Ep. 7: How do You Practice Like a Standup Comedian – if You’re a Classically-Trained Performer?

Transcript:

If you’re listening to the podcast as it comes out, welcome back after a two month hiatus. If you’re someone listening in the future – welcome. Either way, you are starting the second half of the season, which comes after six episodes of describing the rather dire situation of careers in the “classical” performing arts – though depending on how you look at it, the dire situation is actually an intriguing opportunity.

In these last three episodes, I’ll try to move out of the realm of describing the reality of being classically trained – that is, stating the problem – and move into the more experimental realm of ideas for how to face this reality. These three final episodes are going to be based on three important elements of success – the first is you, the second is who you collaborate with, and the third is where you work. So you might call it: you, who, and where.

We’ll start with you.

I mention standup comedy – that rather American art form – in the title of this episode because, to me, standup comedians are totally on the other end of the spectrum of the performance sphere from classically-trained performers. They don’t expect to learn (the good ones at least) by taking lessons and perfecting their craft in practice rooms; instead, they do most of their practice in front of an audience. I mean sure, they might rehearse a little in front of a mirror and they do prepare their jokes, or should in any case, but the bulk of the practice happens on stage, trying out material on an audience and testing what works. And this process is based on one magic ingredient: public failure, which among comedians is seen as inevitable – it’s called bombing and it’s assumed that everyone bombs most likely not just in the beginning but throughout their career.

Compare that to the stilted perfectionism of the classical performing arts and their long and often expensive training periods. I’m mentioning this idea of learning through failure and learning through actually being in front of a real audience (that’s there to be entertained and not out of a sense of obligation) because one of the many little tragedies of the classically-trained performer is that the beauty of failure is lost when you have a large amount of people competing for a small number of spots in an academically-protected, technique-dependent discipline. In this environment, failure is only meant to happen in practice rooms, hidden from view, which makes it harder for classically-trained performers who haven’t had professional careers (and many who have) to communicate effectively with an audience because they’ve never been forced to be truly vulnerable in front of a public.

But if there is one thing you’ll need out there, it’s ability to take risks and be vulnerable in public. So, one very specific question we might ask is: How can you find performing opportunities that would allow public failure to be part of the process rather than a hindrance?

I would say there are two main ways to go about it:

1) Expanding the range of spaces you can perform in by adapting to a broader audience

and/or

2) Creating new opportunities, usually by drawing on parallel skills or interests

I think the ideal is to take both approaches.

In this episode, I’ll have to draw a little more on speculation, personal observations and even mere hopes and intentions. But I really do believe that, if nothing else, allowing oneself to imagine very different scenarios, even if you don’t end up pursuing them, can be a valuable way of figuring out your next steps, whatever they may be. And given the critique about the pessimism of Classically (Un)Trained up until now, which I talked about in the last episode, I hope the wild optimism will shine through in this one.

I’ve heard performers referring to getting their bearings on stage as “finding their sea legs” – which is something a sailor might say in reference to finding one’s balance on a ship. It’s interesting because ships and theatres have a bit of a common history – in English, a lot of nautical terms are used in theatre rigging, because a lot of the same rigging techniques were used in theatres as on ships. It’s why in English the stage is sometimes called a deck, for example.

Finding your sea legs is something you have to do at sea – you can’t fully practice before setting off. And that’s going to be my metaphor for what I would call professional experience – experience outside of the academic environment, before a real audience.

So let’s tell a story, now, which I hope will be inspiring to anyone who finds themselves struggling with their next steps:

Imagine a dock full of ships. I imagine this to be a Venetian dock sometime in the early 1600s, since that’s where my original format, opera, kind of took off in earnest, but it’s also a fictional dock with its totally fictional rules, as you’ll see. Now imagine a person on this dock, who wants nothing more that to become a sailor. They’ve learned a lot about sailing, have even gone to a respected school, but haven’t sailed on a real ship, yet. They need to put in their time as a sailor to become a sailor.

It’s an uphill battle, convincing ship captains to let them sail – maybe one ship captain will give them a chance, but because they’re still learning, they aren’t as much of an asset to the crew as they could be down the line and it’s always a delicate process convincing captains to take them on again after that. And it’s really not just about getting that first, one, opportunity. Not at all – they need momentum and there are many obstacles to that. Some ship captains need a smaller crew for their next trip, or their next rout is too dangerous for someone with less experience; there are captains who like giving young hopefuls a chance but don’t retain a lot of these ingenues after the first trip and also – ships with previous collaborators sink, trade routes change and so on.

But this young sailing student needs to get on ships to become a good sailor and every day they spend on shore is a day lost. Maybe they wait a month, two months. They have to spend more and more time making money some other way, which makes it harder to put the work in to getting on ships. Then a captain asks the dreaded question: When’s the last time you’ve sailed, kid?

Here is where I really have to stretch the metaphor a bit – let’s imagine, now, an added difficulty to all of this. This young hopeful has been trained in an ancient technique of sailing, which requires a lot of specialised training. and heaps of skill. There are still ships that sail like this and need crew members, but there are very few and there are many hopefuls who train in this coveted ancient craft rather than the newer, more popular ones. But many more ships set sail every day that this young hopeful never tries to get on because these ships don’t use the techniques our hero has been trained for.

Now if this was a novel about an ambitious young person who dreams of sailing the world – what obvious advice would you frustratedly yell at them as they sit on the dock, wistfully watching another ancient ship sail off into the sunset without them?

Well, one thing you might yell is: What about all those other ships? Could you work on those?

There are many ways we could continue this set up for our story. Here’s one: Our hero decides that they will try some of those other ships which don’t require the same training. The captain of one of the other ships wonders why this ancient-craft-trained individual wants to work on their ship but then they decide to give it a try. The new ships don’t require the same academic training and much more can be learned on the ground. It also turns out that the fact that our hero trained in this ancient shipcraft makes them more adepts at certain of the tasks on board, even as others are rendered useless and elicit laughter from their shipmates. Our hero starts observing how things are done differently in this other environment and learns from this but they still believe those ancient techniques have their uses. Not all of the experience they gain on the new ships is applicable on the old ships, but – they do finally become a sailor. One day, they go back to one of those beautiful old ship except, this time, they’re not an ingenue – they’re a professional with something unique to offer. And their goal, now, is not to just be accepted onto the crew of an ancient ship, they’re interested in building a new ship based on a unique skillset, one that draws on the best that modern and old techniques have to offer.

I decided to try this fantasy-novel-like analogy because I’m hoping every listener can translate this extended metaphor in such a way that it makes sense for their discipline. In real life, there’s a lot more variation, of course – it’s not just old ships and new ships. Metaphors have their limits, don’t they? And I admit that I stretched this one to the seams.

In any case, maybe you’ve noticed that the above, rather fairy-tale like, story features both strategies I talked about in the introduction: Both broadening one’s options and building one’s own opportunities using a unique skillsets. But I’m not saying that that is a necessary sequence, or that it’s necessary to employ both strategies. So, to make this more concrete, I’m going to give some more realistic examples of what a kind of classical (un)training – which is what that whole story was a metaphor for – might look like for various performing artists living today. Elements of these ideas for either expanding your audience or combining skills are based on people I know but they are overall fictional no matter how weirdly specific they may seem:

1) an organist gets tired of the fact that they can only really play their instrument in churches and a few concert halls. Being a piano accompanist on the side is fine – but they feel something’s missing. So, they learn to play accordion (not so difficult for an organist) and start playing in a totally different set of spaces – bars, open-mics, funky little theatres. Their fusion of Bach-like counterpoint and French chansons makes them stand out in places that ordinarily feature mostly non-classically-trained musicians.
2) an academically-trained actor has a knack for linguistics and decides to learn what’s called original pronunciation, which is a reconstruction of what English may have sounded like in Shakespeare’s time. They not only make some extra cash teaching other actors original pronunciation, but they also build a small online following doing original pronunciation versions of Shakespeare’s sonnets and monologues. Finally, they write a solo show for themselves which capitalises on their knowledge of original pronunciation and teaches the audience about the history of the English language – this leads to other shows, created with bigger casts, which are all unique in how they playfully draw on the special interests of language development and dialects, leaving audiences more aware of the language they use every day
3) having finished a short career as a demi-soloist, a dancer gets involved in researching the use of movement therapy in helping patients with Alzheimers. Not only is this research directly applicable to making the lives of people with a certain illness better, it also inspires the dancer to create a new movement vocabulary, based on their newfound understanding of the relationship between the mind and body, which results in a dance show which allows non-dancer audiences to understand their own mind-body connection, which in turn leads to the founding of a dance company that does both dance therapy residencies and shows
4) an actor has a lifelong passion for video games. They use their knowledge of story-driven video games – which involve multiple storylines based on player choices – to create an immersive theatre experience which uses some of the principles learned in that digital format. This leads to cornering the niche of immersive theatre in their area.
5) a classically-trained singer is unsatisfied with the aesthetic limitations of opera and with the fact that it’s a shrinking industry with a very specific audience and decides to do artistic research developing a kind of sung theatre that could have smaller budgets and casts, could be adaptable to more spaces, and could speak to a broader audience (without resorting to the tropes of either opera or musical theatre)
6) an academically-trained composer, who also plays the violin, grew up secretly loving techno music, but the more they immerse themselves in composing, the more they crave techno which would be both viscerally and musically compelling. They use techniques used by electronic music composers to become a DJ while using live-processing on their violin to create original, melodic, electro-acoustic dance music – they stand out because who has ever seen a DJ play violin?
7) a classically-trained pianist grew up speaking English and Czech and has been able to have a parallel career as a translator. Because they do a lot of translating of film-related texts, they learn a lot about how stories are plotted for more mainstream film audiences. They also happen to love a particular Czech singer-songwriter and are inspired to translate the song texts into English and arrange them for singer and piano. Unfortunately, English-speaking audiences don’t really get why they should be interested in these songs and the English versions of them don’t gain much traction. Then, the pianist is inspired to create a show about the singer-songwriter’s life and their significance to the culture, which they are able to do because of what they learned from translating cinematic stories. The show is a compelling homage to an artist from a smaller culture which puts the songs into context and charms English-speaking audiences – it also proves that the pianist has a parallel skill, that of creating stories for the stage, which opens new opportunities to collaborate on hybrid shows.

Okay, so, maybe these examples are compelling to you or maybe – like I would be in your place – you’re thinking: But all of this is such a crapshoot! People creating shows, and getting them funded? Founding dance companies and theatre troupes? Learning a whole new instrument or creating a new genre without going crazy in the process? And, how do you fund any of this, anyway? And what exactly does any of this have to do with the importance of failure?

Well – I’ve promised myself to be more optimistic and optimism requires seeing the best-case scenario. And the examples above are possible, I think – but they are the best case scenarios, which aren’t going to happen every time. Maybe the organist never manages to learn accordion properly. The pianist never gets the show they wrote funded, because they just can’t prove to anyone that they should be taken seriously as a playwright. The dancer never finds dancers who want to learn this new movement vocabulary, or the therapy they developed ends up not really working. The immersive theatre show based on the actor’s love of video games ends up being embarrassingly bad. The new form of singing theatre never really finds its audience. No one actually thinks a DJ playing violin is cool – in fact, they find it creepy.

In life there are a lot of bad-case scenarios. I guess being classically (un)trained requires a bit of disregard for that – which is fitting since disregard for bad-case scenarios is what lands one in the performing arts, or in the arts in general, in the first place. But the optimistic aspect of all this is that – there are other scenarios besides auditioning and crossing your fingers, which means there is a bit more hope and a lot more agency and a heap more actual creativity to be had.

The pattern I see in the examples above is that many do seem to require re-skilling or developing existing parallel skills, on some level, which sometimes does mean stepping back for a while, and putting more work in than you “have something to show for.” They can also sound daunting because going down an alternate path like this might take attention away from what you’re used to doing: practicing, studying repertoire, honing your craft with coaches, all those things being required for the particular kind of high-level performance expected within the purely classical realm, especially for dancers and musicians but perhaps also for actors. I do think that becoming classically (un)trained, requires a different relationship to your craft, a different way of using the classical training you got in school. I call this approach, as I’ve tried to develop it, my “suitcase technique.” It’s basically the idea that your upkeep as a performer cannot be dependent on having a huge team around you, great coaches, optimal rehearsal time and space – rather, your ability to maintain your skill has to be compact, travel-ready, has to (metaphorically and perhaps literally) fit into a suitcase. I do think this means learning more about the science of your craft (for me this meant learning about how the voice works and adapting my technique to require less difficult upkeep, something that dancers and even instrumentalists might be able to do for their instruments) and getting better at mental practice, the kind you can do anywhere doing almost anything without practice space or making noise (which isn’t to say that lack of practice space isn’t still a huge problem for unmoored performers). It does also mean letting go of certain purely-virtuosic excesses which classical performance disciplines are known for – do you really need to play the most difficult pieces in your instrument’s repertoire? Do you need to be singing over a full orchestra? Do you need to be dancing en pointe? Aren’t there more interesting things you can do with the abilities you have?

Another issue is that, yes, many of the above scenarios do at some point require gathering teams and getting funding, that pesky thing that vexes so many independent performers. Bot those are issues I’ll talk about in the next two episodes.

Lastly – how does any of this relate to the importance of failure? Well, the moment you set out on a very unique path, you’re stepping out of that athlete-like mentality of winning over others or, more likely, losing to others. And at that point, when you’re in uncharted territory, you need to fail in order to learn, because, unlike with the clearly determined path of schooling to audition to career, there is no roadmap, and therefore failure is actually your only teacher. Also – and I feel this pretty strongly with my own classically (un)trained path – when you’re either a one-off, because you’re doing something no one else is doing in quite the same way, or you’re performing for a non-expert audience, there is a very different standard of judgement, because at that point you’re bringing more important things to the table than the kind of technique that requires meticulous upkeep.

I admit that what I struggle with when trying to articulate all this is just how specific to each performer overcoming these challenges will have to be. The pattern seems to be that it’ll involve learning new skills or combining existing skills and interests and looking for audiences outside of the ones already interested in your corner of the classical-performing-arts realm. Beyond that, though – the strategies are as numerous as the number of classically-trained performers interested in not following the standard roadmap. The overwhelmingness of that is why I’ve realised that Classically (Un)Trained might actually be meant to take the form of a community for performers who are combining skillsets or stepping out of the traditional path and who just want other smart and passionate artists to exchange ideas and skills with as equals, not yet another training program. We’ll see whether I manage to launch such a thing – if you’re listening in the future, check out the website to see how things have gone on that front.

So what is your old ship and new ship and what ship might you build? What skills can you learn, or what parallel skills can you combine? What new audiences might you be able to speak to? As always, you can let me know in the (if you wish anonymous) form on the website, linked in the description.

Next time, I’ll talk about another indispensable ingredient – collaborators. There is – to my knowledge – no such thing as a performer without collaborators. Live performance is an inherently collaborative thing. But – relationships are hard, leading is difficult, gathering teams is tricky especially for something kind of risky. And how do you go about it without becoming one of those sleazy networkers? That’s next time.

Footnotes & Sources:

The idea of ship and theatre rigging having a common history is something I just kind of heard in the theatre. Here is a source I found retrospectively.

I might also say that, while I’m not entirely convinced by the genre of “business self-help” a book which talks about carving out space outside of the set path in ways that may be useful to artists is Blue Ocean Strategy by Renée Mauborgne and W. Chan Kim. Early in the book, they talk about the Cirque du Soleil quite extensively as an example of carving out niches, which is why it may be interesting to performers. Here you can find a bit of a summary of how the authors believe Cirque du Soleil became successful.