Sketching a performance

April 14, 2009 11:13 AM

How do actors, dancers or musicians compare different takes of their performance during rehearsal in order to iterate and improve? I'm interested in how they "sketch" the variations.
posted by Jeff Howard to technology (24 comments total)

For example, in the graphic arts an artist or a photographer might make dozens of literal sketches or snapshots of a given subject. They can compare these images side by side before choosing the most promising to serve as the basis for further exploration. They can return to older sketches and branch off in new directions, creating multiple possibilities without losing earlier potential.

In film it seems that editors can compare different variations of a performance after the fact, but how does this work for live performances? How do people iterate on their past trials? Is it strictly a linear, cumulative evolution based entirely on memory?

I'm interested in learning about methods (processes or technology) from the performing arts that address the ephemeral nature of performances; allowing for multiple paths of exploration during rehearsal.

These techniques could cover artistic performance, technical performance (such as lighting design) or even a sporting performance. Anything that's essentially temporal.

How do you "sketch" multiple variations of a performance?
posted by Jeff Howard at 11:13 AM on April 14

This is what a director is for. The director is responsible for having a vision of the end result that the cast and crew are constantly working toward. This vision can change during the rehearsal period as artistic discoveries are made, but in the end it all comes down to the director and his or her ability to recognize, encourage, refine, and inspire everyone else's contributions.
posted by hermitosis at 11:19 AM on April 14 [1 favorite has favorites]

In Twyla Tharp's (awesome) book The Creative Habit, she talks about the specific ways she uses both memory and video to do this when she's choreographing.
posted by ourobouros at 11:35 AM on April 14

I use a combination of feedback and feel.

Feedback: Verbal stuff like notes from the director and omments from other actors are very useful. But even more useful is non-verbal stuff: did anyone laugh in rehearsal when I tried out that new bit? Did the stage manager watch? Did the cameraman laugh at the end of the take? The other people in the room might comment to be nice, but the real valuable feedback is when they react involuntarily with rapt attention, abject boredom, discomfort, intrigue, or laughter.

Feel: Did I feel connected to the text and scene partners? Did I feel embarrassed or uncomfortable? Did I know what to do with my hands? - Because if you ever feel awkward about your hands, it's the number one sign that you don't know what you're doing onstage. Was I able to use all the choices I'd made with regards to the physical centre of the character, where my voice resonates, where my eyes go, etc, were the lines clean, did I surprise myself a little, etc. Basically, "did I have flow".

If the director liked it but I didn't feel right, I keep working at it.
If I like it but the director doesn't, I try to add in as many of his/her notes as possible & do it again.
If we're both happy, that's the ideal.

I don't need to get something perfect in rehearsal to be comfortable doing it onstage, though. I need to have done each part either to my satisfaction or such that I'm confident I can make the small adjustment on the day to get it right. Over-rehearsing is bad, too.
posted by pseudostrabismus at 11:43 AM on April 14

I was taught, as a singer, to record myself (either audio or video) during rehearsals and practices. The idea was to review the recording on the spot or later to identify problem areas in the vocals or physical tics that took away from the overall presentation onstage. I guess "working to a mirror" counts as a similar technique.

Much goes on during the performance that is impossible for the performer to judge objectively. The recording allows you to step away from the performance enough to judge it on its merits, and make adjustments as you go.

Another technique I use as the director of a choir, is to ask the choir to sing a particular passage different ways. I'll ask them to sing it softly, loudly, assertively, angrily, passively, etc. Their favourite is "schmaltzy", which is my preferred way to get them to smooth out the vocal lines. It gets everyone laughing, but it does highlight the differences in performance presentation to the choir members.
posted by LN at 11:45 AM on April 14

This can really really vary obviously, depending on the people involved, what the goal is, parameters in terms of budget and time frames, etc etc.

For the most part if I am working on a play with a script already written we use rehearsal time to get initially get at the essence of the script. How does the play work? what is most important? what are we going to want to highlight? how will the props work, many questions like that.

Once we have an early take, we start working scenes, actors on their feet, trying blocking and movement that serves what we had found in those first discussion. We try to follow impulses, we try to tell the story clearly, we try to create dynamic things to look at.

Then we start to get a look at the whole thing. Is it fitting in with what we had initially thought. What did we miss? anywhere we were totally off base?

We start locking things in and adding technical elements, again with the same questions. What is the story here, what is the best way to tell?

We start bring in other people to have a look. We ask them questions, what are they getting, again what are we missing that working so closely has made us lose sight of?

And then we add an audience.

Happy to answer more specific question that this might bring up.
posted by miles1972 at 11:50 AM on April 14

From the point of view of chamber musicians (small groups without a conductor), it isn't really the norm to record rehearsals. Usually what you do is run through the piece, talk as a group about what you think worked and what didn't, mark up your score to reflect adjustments ("louder here," "wait for Fred's nod," "don't bury Judy's melody" and so forth), run through it again, talk about it again, etc., etc.

There is also the convention of "coaching", where you have someone else listen to the rehearsal and offer their "notes" on what they think needs fixing.

You might want to watch a documentary about a musical group--this recent one about the Emerson Quartet is quite good--to see footage of rehearsals and discussions.
posted by Sidhedevil at 12:15 PM on April 14

These are wonderful insights. What I'm hearing (with the exception of LN's example of the choir) is that most of these methods are about converging on a perceived ideal (refinement), rather than using divergent thinking to explore multiple possibilities. Is that fair?

I'll definitely track down any book or video suggestions, so recommendations are appreciated.
posted by Jeff Howard at 12:31 PM on April 14

OP: "...is that most of these methods are about converging on a perceived ideal (refinement), rather than using divergent thinking to explore multiple possibilities..."

For a piece aimed at individual performance, you are on the right track. These have an end in mind. Though, at least in the realm of live theatre, there is a "synergy" element (or rather, super-element) where the personalities and visions of individual performers, designers, etc. all end up converging under the eye of the Director (who, in turn, does have producers to report to). Some Directors rule with an iron fist, and may well need to. Others love to be among a group they can trust and surrender some control to and do more of a gentle steering.

A rehearsal exception to this is what I often hear when musicians are recording original material, any amount of which may be written in the studio (even when main sketches are brought in pre-assembled). In a democratic group setting, say U2 for example, pieces can and often do end up very different from beginning of the process to end result. "One" was two different songs eventually combined. Some songs survive for years in "drawing board" phase before finally coming into their own and getting completed. Multi-track recording and other such layering and collaborative techniques really change the game. Sometimes collaboration can even happen over long distances or without all (or any) of the musicians being together ever. But, even in these looser cases, a Producer is in charge of cracking the whip and keeping the vision before the band, even if the band itself defined that vision at the outset.
posted by skypieces at 12:58 PM on April 14

converging on a perceived ideal (refinement), rather than using divergent thinking to explore multiple possibilities.

Yes, this. Although, in theatre at least, there are many exercises that are done during rehearsals to create new, previously unseen opportunities in the work. For example, you might have your cast perform a scene with double the intensity they'd normally use. Maybe this ends up changing the blocking you decide on, or you realize that one certain actor should always be using this much intensity. Or that if pushed this far, none of action makes any sense, so then you have a new boundary to consider.

In this way, you refine a little and then destroy a little, back and forth as you go. You can (and often should) diverge from your path, but there basically has to be a path to start from or else you're just wandering in the wilderness and won't be able to replicate your results when it's time to perform. Hence the importance mentioned upthread of solo artists recording their work as they go, so that they can shape their work and envision it through the audience's eyes.
posted by hermitosis at 1:05 PM on April 14

Speaking a an (ex-)dancer: Yes we would use video for this sometimes, though not always. Typically you have a choreographer who is watching and directing dancers and when you are doing the choreography you can generally rely on your memory and/or immediate impressions to do this. When rehearsing it has always been a case of working on small chunks then bringing them together, so you can focus on different aspects at different times (in a similar way to that described by miles1972). Video is useful if you want to look at stuff outside of the studio.

As a dancer you have several different feedback mechanisms. Most obviously a lot of dance studios have at least one mirrored wall so you can watch yourself moving. Less obviously, as a dancer you develop a highly tuned sense of both bodily and spatial awareness and you come to rely on this (an exercise we used to do was blindfolding ourselves and running at a wall so see how close we could get before stopping without hitting it). Thus you can tell a lot from your own internal sense of the movement, how it felt performing it, what kind of energy you were putting into it etc, much of which comes from paying attention to your mental state as much as the physical movement itself.

This comes into play especially if you are working without a choreographer and/or improvising. Improvising is often used to generate movement in contemporary dance, both by choreographers and by dancers (whether under the direction of a choreographer or not). When devising a piece I would rely heavily on this internal sense to build up a picture of the movements (which would themselves often develop incrementally, building one on another).

While this is memory based I would not say it is typically linear. One of this things that defines dances for me is that it is both temporal and dynamic. Much of what defines a dance occurs in the moment of performance. So although it is a pretty essential skill to be able reproduce movement consistently, for me there is not always a straight one to one mapping between what was produced in rehearsal and what is performed, even if this movement has a strong resemblance. It is difficult to define exactly other to say when you perform you put a different energy into it that comes from the fact of performing, which is rather more wishy-washy that I would like, but its something I know primarily from experiencing it. This is probably much less the case than in something like ballet, which is famously unchanging, but I was working at the opposite end of the scale, including in improvisation. The latter does not preclude rehearsal but its perhaps something like sketching without it heading in a single direction to a finished end piece.
posted by tallus at 1:09 PM on April 14

These are wonderful insights. What I'm hearing (with the exception of LN's example of the choir) is that most of these methods are about converging on a perceived ideal (refinement), rather than using divergent thinking to explore multiple possibilities. Is that fair?

I would say that the latter is at least as common as the former in dance, and often precedes it.
posted by tallus at 1:11 PM on April 14

It occurred to me that acting and music both have a written structure. The script or lyrics; the notation. Is there a similar structure I'm not aware of for dancing, or might that be why choreography affords more opportunity for divergent exploration?
posted by Jeff Howard at 1:30 PM on April 14

Is there a similar structure I'm not aware of for dancing

Dance notation, which I don't think anyone really uses to any significant degree.
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 2:07 PM on April 14

converging on a perceived ideal (refinement)

I'm not sure these are synonymous, actually. Often in rehearsal I'll try things lots of different ways until something feels right. I try not to come into projects with too clear an idea about the endpoint- it's more rewarding and usually produces better work to work collaboratively and discover what works. So I'd definitely agree that there's a process of refinement- we might say something like "I felt that take was too aggressive, although I did like the sense of menace and the manipulative tactics, maybe try it again but this time it can feel less linear, less of an attack off the top", etc. But the end product isn't necessarily preconceived outside of rehearsal in advance- often it becomes clear as more and more iterations are, um, iterated.
posted by pseudostrabismus at 2:07 PM on April 14

Oh, Jeff, the choir technique I described *is* about refinement - the point of having the choir sing a passage different ways is to highlight what works and what doesn't, so that all the choir members are on one page, so to speak. In directing an amateur choir, it's not enough to simply say, "smooth out the line on that passage" (the way you can with a professional ensemble); the performers need to feel/hear/understand what that means before they will be able to perform it properly.

Sorry - I should have made it clear I was referring to a community/amateur group and not a professional group.
posted by LN at 2:34 PM on April 14

Obviously techniques are going to vary enormously even within a single discipline -- for example, I was surprised by the assertion above that it's not the norm to record chamber music rehearsals. In my group (link to audio in my profile, if you'd like to judge our worthiness for yourself) we've constantly used rehearsal recordings to reality-check our perceptions from our chairs. It turns out that you hear much, much more from inside a group than you do even a few rows back, and that cuts both ways -- on the one hand, you can get a positive fix on issues that an audience member might only perceive as vaguely "weird." On the other hand, you can spend ages stressing out about some problem that becomes inaudible 12" away from the group.

We've made kind of a point to never (intentionally) play a piece the same way twice, so in our rehearsals we tend to focus on larger structural points that we want to make, the overall "philosophy" of a piece, and the technical issues in how we communicate what we want to do through our playing (e.g. I was trying to create a phrase here, why didn't it happen? -- Because you don't have as much melodic leverage there as you think, so do more -- etc...)

Ultimately, in a chamber situation with no leader, there's a long (usually painful) process of establishing an overall group style and philosophy, after which you can spend your time working out kinks rather than arguing over who's sharp and who's flat (or, phase two, arguing over whether you want to make 4, 8, or 16 bar phrases). Hint: then answer is, 100-bar phrases.
posted by range at 2:42 PM on April 14

It is not only refinement. I worked with a group that had a long established set of rules for ways to perturb and possibly change how something would be performed.

Once you have your basics (lines, parts, blocking, whatever, depending what kind of live performance you are preparing for), you invite someone you respect to a cold viewing/hearing. This person gives instructions. You can't argue with the instructions, and the guest does not have to justify them whatsoever. You have to do your best to accomplish what they ask for. Once you have tried out a version of a scene/section/whatever with that instruction, everyone talks about the consequences. This process is repeated, different instructions are tried, different combinations are tried. Later, with the outside friend gone, the group decides which modifications to include in the final product.

This lead to a nice horizontal dispersal of authority, without the bland results that usually come from art designed by a committee.
posted by idiopath at 3:04 PM on April 14

Also, Cool Papa Bell: one of the most helpful guests to invite was a fellow named Jeff Glassman, a dancer and mime who worked extensively with notation (and IIRC wrote a number of pieces that nobody but him could perform due in part to the notation he used). Dance notation may be used rarely, but it has a definite presence in the experimental performance world.
posted by idiopath at 3:09 PM on April 14

As a lighting designer I will sit down with the director with a collection of images relating to the color and feel of whatever script we are working on. Once I've watched a rehearsal and gotten a feel for the blocking, timing and energy that the cast is bringing to the piece I'll figure out the cues, or changes I feel we need. Then tech starts and half of them get thrown out or we add a bunch more. We will run a cue over and over again to get the right timing and to change the motivation for the cue.

Theatre is really really a collaborative art based on refining the directors vision of the show. The actors will take their notes to be "sexier" in a scene and will be sexier in their own way which may or may not be what the director wanted but may clue him/her in to another way of thinking about the scene, which may change the color palette of the entire show.

Lighting is probably the easiest of all of the elements to change which can be a blessing or a curse depending on the director. I've worked with some that know exactly when and where the sun is rising from while others just know that the cue isn't right.

I'm starting to ramble so I'll stop.
posted by Uncle at 3:31 PM on April 14

Dance notation, which I don't think anyone really uses to any significant degree.

Dance notation is generally descriptive, not prescriptive--the point of it is to document a particular choreography, not to provide a "recipe" from which choreographers can work. It's more like a transcript of a conference presentation than the score of a musical work, if that makes sense.

People do use it when reconstructing famous choreographies of the past. This article gives a good overview of how people reconstruct choreography, using film/video recordings, notation, description, and other sources.
posted by Sidhedevil at 3:48 PM on April 14

OP: "...is that most of these methods are about converging on a perceived ideal (refinement), rather than using divergent thinking to explore multiple possibilities..."

theatre with a script in a director's hand is about converging on the director's vision. an interesting alternative to this model is devised theatre,* in which there is no script to start with, just a loose idea of what the performance will be, then a lot of exploring and playing around and finding out what happens, and then putting a show together out of that.

and you know when something is working through a kind of intuitive group consensus. if it makes sense, if everyone can go with it, then its worth keeping. and then, when you're in front of an audience, you can feel what's working and what's not. that's true of all live performers, I think. there's a visceral connection with the audience that lets you know what works and what doesn't.

I would say it's same kind of sense that lets you know whether or not someone you are talking to is into the conversation or not.

* - I say 'devised theatre' because I learned about it in the UK; 'collective creation' is the nearest North American term. some people, like those who write wikipedia articles, would say close enough. I am not one of those people.
posted by spindle at 4:43 PM on April 14

It occurred to me that acting and music both have a written structure. The script or lyrics; the notation. Is there a similar structure I'm not aware of for dancing, or might that be why choreography affords more opportunity for divergent exploration?

Dance pieces can be scored and/or have a written structure but what there isn't, is an established conventional format that necessarily gives an exact description of the piece. To be fair there are notations you can do this with, such as Labanotation, but as Sidhedevil points out these tend to be descriptive.

Spindle's description of 'devised theatre' is close to how I am used to making dance performance but its also true that there have been pieces that have been much more structured.

The most structured of these was based around counts (which is fairly typical) and could easily have been represented in written form and almost certainly was. It would have gone something like this:

Dancer 1. Count to 80, turn 90 degrees clockwise to count of 20, lower body to count of 60, count to 120, turn 90 degrees clockwise.....
Dancer 2. Count 60 , turn 90 degrees clockwise to count of 40, lower body to count of 40, count to 140, turn 90 degrees clockwise.....

and so on (for 12 performers, balnces 6ft in the air on iron columns, and a duration of 45 minutes).

At the other end of the scale I devised a performance whose 'score' was a map with a series of locations marked on it. These were mapped to a corresponding location in the performance space each of which corresponded to a 'movement mood', with its own kinetic quality. The piece consisted of the transitions form one point to the next, but the movements themselves and the duration etc were undetermined.

There are plenty of pieces that fall in between such as Steve Paxton's 'Satisfyin' Lover' for between 34 & 84 performers who variously sit, stand or walk across the stage. To the audience these appears to be fairly random though what and when is quite tightly determined by the score, though the essence of the piece is in the variation each performer brings to these pedestrian (i.e. everyday) movements.
posted by tallus at 6:55 PM on April 14

Spindle: "devised theatre ...no script to start with, just a loose idea of what the performance will be, then a lot of exploring and playing around and finding out what happens, and then putting a show together out of that."

In some ways, this seems to share some elements with Commedia dell'arte (though not the scripted Goldoni stuff).
posted by skypieces at 6:57 PM on April 14