notes on writing for performance, from someone who used to play in bands
Just got back from a group workshop meeting for 2nd Story. If you're not familiar, 2nd Story is a theater collective I've been working with that produces readings at wine bars around Chicago. The process is what sets it apart from other reading series: 2nd Story pull actors and directors from the theater world to workshop pieces of short narrative nonfiction with writers, to craft the stories and their performances into something that people at a wine bar will actually want to engage with while imbibing.
It's challenging for me: frustrating, rewarding. All of my prior performance experience is via playing in bands, where the only verbal interaction with the audience was short quips in-between songs. While performing the songs, the guitar served as a crutch separating myself from the audience, and I was performing practiced, relatively polished songs with a group of other people. We were delivering loud, complete products with clearly delineated beginnings and ends, barreling over chatter and indifference with unnecessarily loud amps.
Performing a ten-minute short story, alone on a stage with a spotlight on you, there's none of that contract that separates band from audience; instead, you're having an intimate experience with an audience that demands you respect the give and take of the room. You need to be agile and comfortable enough with to riff off the audience and the unexpected, to feel the ebbs and flows of the room in the moment. A band has to consider this, but is far less agile: once you're locked into a song, you're committed to finishing that song, and there's little course-correction to be made. If they're not going your way, you steamroll your way through it. In a reading, it's a much more delicate give and take with the audience. This is terrifying.
From the writing standpoint, it's also challenging: I'm still finding my voice for narrative nonfiction, a far different form from feature articles or half-baked culture punditry or satirical riffs or fantastic/satirical short fiction, all forms I'm a lot more familiar and comfortable with. Certain skills can be transposed, but there are a whole load of new ones to develop. Particularly, writing for a live audience, not readers.
It's tough and scary and frustrating, but worthwhile. I also suspect that a lot of what I'm getting from this can be used to inform my other writing. Seems like in the current new media/publishing climate, honing your writing so it can hold the attention of a groups of drunks in bars, well, that's a skill that would serve me well to consider when writing for the web audience.
Anyway, this is already TL;DR, but a few notes from today's meeting about writing with performing in mind, that I found particularly useful:
Have an hypothetical, ideal audience member in your mind that you are specifically speaking to--I know this is a writing trick--to have a hypothetical reader you're writing for. It's one that I've deployed in the past. I hadn't thought about doing something similar when performing for an audience.
Not every response to an unexpected audience action needs to be a witty zinger. A genuine response is just as valid and effective.
Live in the scene
- create eye contact with the character you're speaking to, when speaking those lines
- have first scene and last scene memorized
- memorize first sentence of each paragraph
Trust your instinctual reaction to the stimuli around you. Unless of course, your immediate instinctual reaction is, as it is for me: "FLEE!"
