Music Stands

Matthew Everett posted the follow comment as part of a review on his Fringe blog:

"Just a quick side note about music stands. Laura and Curt perform their stories with the words on sheets of paper in front of them, on music stands, to which they occasionally refer - as many spoken word performers do. This seems to bewilder some people. 'Didn’t they bother to memorize their lines? Isn’t this theater?' Well, to be simplistic about it, no and no. This isn’t the kind of theater where the actors are pretending to be somebody else whose thoughts spring from their mind and out of their mouth as if the playwright didn’t exist. There is no fourth wall. There is no alternate reality. The words are the point. The words need to be in front of them, not as a crutch, but as a reminder to the audience that this is about the crafting of language on a page. This is telling you a story. This isn’t just rambling on randomly the first thing that comes into their head. This isn’t fiction. This is their way of processing moments in their lives, culling them for universality, and then opening them up for other people to experience. I’m not a spoken word performer. But having seen a number of spoken word offerings at the Fringe, this strikes me as being part of what it’s about. So, please, get over the music stands. The music stands are the point. They’re supposed to be there."

I was aware that there was a divide in thinking about this issue; but it wasn't until I performed my first storytelling show that I realized what a source of controversy it is in certain circles.

For my part, I'm very much in agreement with Matt here -- the point of my performance is the language itself. I actually did several rehearsals off-book, only to discover that I actively disliked the results: not because it was more work for me, but because I felt that it shifted the focus of the audience away from what I was saying and onto what I was doing. The presence of the music stand on stage, even if I barely use it, both physically anchors me and insures the primacy of the written word.

(That said, there were certainly points, particularly early on in the run when I was still feeling my way around the material, when I was relying entirely too much on the stand -- hiding behind it, rather than communicating more directly with my audience. I do think I'm working my way past that issue, however.)

But -- to invoke the phrase that seems to be becoming my anthem in my various blogs -- I think it goes *deeper* than that.

I'm not a great actor. People often chuckle and shake their heads when I say that, thinking that I'm being self-deprecating, but I'm really not: I've seen great actors, I've worked alongside great actors, and I've spent enough time in their company to recognize that I'm not among their number. I don't have the chameleon-like versatility of a Steven Epp or a Charlie Bethel. I don't think that I'm necessarily a bad actor, but I am a limited one: I'm a specialty act, and if people enjoy my performances it's at least partly because I'm very conscious of what my limitations are.

I listen to books-on-tape, and my observation is that the worst readers I've ever heard are actors. They don't know how to *trust* a text: they feel a need to embody the characters, create "voices" for them, and ham up their punchlines in a way that ends up being distracting, obnoxious, frequently untintentionally hilarious.

Allegra Lingo is a skilled performer precisely because she *doesn't* feel the need to do that: when she describes conversations, she simply reads them to us, without needing to come up with a walk, a voice, a contrived cast of characters. Her words tell the story for us: that's what gives her her approachability. (Theatricality, of course, has other virtues -- that's the trade-off that you have to weigh in rehearsal.)

Keeping the music stand there is largely psychological, both for the audience and myself. It reminds us that that I'm sharing a story, reliving it through word rather than action. Sometimes that's the right choice; sometimes it's the wrong one -- depends on the nature of the show that you're doing. But I do think that we tend to get excessively dogmatic about this is "supposed" to be done. As far as I'm concerned, the only real rule to this little game of ours is whether we're successfully entertaining you -- and if we are, do the trappings really matter?