Know Your Performance Space Part 1

Your goal as a musician is to offer your audience an experience. The performance is not about you but about your audience and the saying “people do not remember what you said as much as how you make them feel” is very true on stage.

Though this may sound initially like quite a basic idea, it is very noticeable when done well! This I would say is almost the defining difference between an amateur performance and a great show from a pro.

It also develops a focus on the performance as a whole. This moves us away from the more detrimental mindset of going on stage and only trying to not make any mistakes – an approach that is understandably common among beginner and intermediate performers.

The room has an atmosphere before you arrive on stage. You need to gauge your playing to either fit in with and compliment this, or to intentionally develop and change the atmosphere in line with how the crowd reacts.

Some obvious examples: If everyone is out for a mellow evening and a relax with friends or maybe a date you will come across as offensive if you turn up the volume and aim for high energy. That is not what they went to the venue for and is a misjudgment on the atmosphere. Likewise if your audience is out for a night of fun and dance you can loose the whole room by killing the energy and focusing on your softer acoustic set or ballads. Though these are more extreme surface level examples there are many subtleties that become more and more apparent with experience.

How important is flexibility in your performance? The process or being booked for a gig usually goes through the venue promoter and events manager. They may have read or heard a brief description of your band or sound. This is not much to go on when needing to fit the artist to the night and many assumptions are usually made. Very regularly you will find yourself in a venue you were not expecting to be in! In the middle of an acoustic singer/songwriter evening when you are ready for a loud rock gig or vise-versa. Maybe there were last minute changes due to illness? Or a simple miscommunication? But it happens quite frequently. I’ve personally been on tour in a venue with 1500 people one night and an empty pizza shop the next evening.

A lot can be expected before you even arrive at the venue if you take the time to research. The venue and promoter specifically advertise and brand the evening. The name of the event, images used in posters, styles of music and bands chosen and even what day it is on will all point towards the evening they want to create for their customers. This will in turn draw in a crowd that specifically fancies the evening they would expect from the advertising they have seen. It is important to remember that each person in the room has a different story on that day. This story has lead them to specifically choose the venue and event you are part of. They have come to this venue for a reason and it is essential for you as a performer to support this.

But this does not mean you could not be in for a surprise! All it takes is for the sun to be out when it was not expected for the energy in the room to change. This along with mistakes made by the promoters makes the flexibility mentioned before vital!

So your first challenge is to find what it is the room wants. This may take you away from the dynamics and sound you practiced in the bedroom. You do not want a performance that will only work if it only matches by chance with the energy, length and style among other things with the evening. This is a hit-and-miss approach that may give you very few performances with a good response from your audience. By understanding your audience you can avoid this and take a big step closer to becoming a pro.

With the unexpected nature of your audience in mind, what can you do to prepare yourself? Two main ideas will very much help with this:

1. Take your songs and play them with a number of different interpretations. For example some high energy and some low. This is very important as a regular part of your practice. It will allow you to react to the audience without needing to venture into something new and risky on stage.
2. Practice on stage with or without an audience as often as you can. There are many performance venues around and many of them are open for cleaning or office work. If approached politely and with an explanation of your reasons, many are happy to accommodate. This will help you by setting the scene and letting you test out ideas.

We could go on for hours on ideas about the audience but I hope these will get you going with some new thoughts and I will leave the rest to your questions! Let me know your experiences with your audiences, the surprises, stories and confusions and I look forward to sharing with you Part 2 in which we venture into ideas relating to the venue.