CHAPTER 7
Great Performers Rehearse
When I miss class for one day, I know it. When I miss class for two days, the teacher knows it. When I miss class for three days, the audience knows it. 28
(RUDOLF NUREYEV)
All great performers rehearse, and that includes you. Rehearsal is space and time for practising and improving the impact you want to make on yourself and others – your audience, team, stakeholders and organisation. The better it’s rehearsed, the better the performance. The better the performance, the more buy-in. Rehearsal is profit.
In its simplest sense, rehearsal is doing. It is action. It is experiential. Consider the well-known maxim about learning: ‘I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.’
In the act of rehearsal, you embody ‘doing’ with your whole self: body, mind, emotion, imagination, voice, energy and purpose. This is a profoundly different process from merely reading through notes or thinking through something in your head or repeating something over and over to memorise, polish or perfect.
When you take a bit of time to rehearse out loud, rehearse physically, and rehearse creatively by trying things out, you are mightily rewarded: You make discoveries, and you break through limiting habits. You upgrade your performance.
In my years as a professional theatre director and choreographer, the rehearsal room was (and remains) my favourite space. Like a scientist’s lab, it’s a place for experimenting, exploring and discovering. Often the most powerful and poignant moments show up in rehearsal by accident. We allow ourselves to fail and fail again, but ‘fail better’, as Samuel Beckett says, 29 because we can. The rehearsal room is a safe haven where you can dare to take risks.
Rehearsals are a liberating opportunity to tear up your script and dig a little deeper; to generate new ideas, new thinking and new material. This is the time and space where you can revitalise your vision, your messages and your self.
So practise but don’t lock it down right away! The art of rehearsal can truly cultivate your creativity and confidence and grow your performance.
Lisa, from a medical research organisation, was invited to give a TEDx talk. She spent several weeks crafting her story, assembling visuals and practising as often as possible. About a week before the event, Lisa asked me to help her rehearse.
She was word-perfect, but her data had no soul. Lisa wasn’t connecting personally to her story; she wasn’t speaking from her heart. Her content was well structured and substantial and contained some life-affirming messages. But all the good bits were buried under the how of her delivery.
Radical-action alert! The stuff rehearsals are made for. I asked Lisa to put her script back in her briefcase and begin again without it. I asked her to slow down, really slow down , and to paraphrase each unit of her story, talk to me about her feelings and notice what her body was doing.
Lisa gamely plotted her way through. There were tears. There was laughter. There was playfulness and even a bit of singing. Through rehearsal, Lisa was able to take ownership of her story, show her vulnerability and humanity and embody her messages. She took hold of that axe of Kafka’s and broke through the ice of the ‘frozen sea’ within her.
When she practised it again after this exploration, the performance was so nuanced and alive! More importantly, Lisa had discovered another aspect of rehearsal that was vital for her performance growth – connecting to herself . Her talk inspired the hundreds of women who were in the audience that day.
In its best form, a rehearsal is a process through which you connect powerfully, truthfully and deeply to yourself and experience energy, flow and fearless creative fire. Your unique life force is set free.
Fall in love with language
Poetry, songs, great speeches, literature – anything in the world of words that inspires you – helps you to fall in love with language. For a little while, you step into the realm of the extraordinary. For a little while, your body, voice and emotions are uplifted. For a little while, you connect with the performer within. When you speak words that inspire you, you are more playful, daring, and courageous. You take your moment to be heard. You hear yourself differently.
Cut to the world of work: Language is PowerPoint presentations, bullet-point agendas, company acronyms and corporate jargon. Messages are often pat, slick and repeated. After a while, it’s hard to hear the words you’re speaking habitually much less maintain a living, vital sense of what they mean, why they’re important or what matters to you about saying them.
Speaking language that is extraordinary in some way, heightened beyond the everyday, wakes us up to the power of words to influence, inspire or illuminate. Start now. Find a poem, song lyrics or speech you love and read the words out loud as a warm-up to energise your voice, inspire your imagination and ignite your love of language. Speak as if you’re speaking about ideas, not just reciting words.
Now return to one of your workplace messages and do exactly what you just did with your inspirational text:
Work out loud and on purpose
I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve said this thing about working out loud, but it’s so important that I’ll probably say it a few more times along the way. It’s a foolproof litmus test of how you value what you’re talking about.
When you rehearse out loud:
Play it big
One of my modern-dance teachers, the late and great Joyce Trisler, always said, ‘If you make a mistake, make it big.’ She meant that we need to commit wholeheartedly, not tentatively. Only when you commit and work big do you see clearly and understand what needs to happen. By working big, you physically step into your thinking. You feel, sense, see, hear, embody, and go with your gut and heart. Reading silently through your notes while sitting at your desk just doesn’t cut it.
Think of the last time you came across a passage, quote or piece of data you wanted to capture. Chances are you highlighted that bit. Perhaps you underline key points in red on your ‘to do’ list or when editing a document. We use underlining and highlighting to capture, pay special attention to, recall and remember.
Exaggeration is the embodied, physical equivalent of using that highlighter pen. By exaggerating things, we can capture our awareness just like we capture data with the highlighter pen.
Think about your last meet-and-greet; perhaps you were at a networking event or just meeting a new colleague for the first time. No doubt you politely shook hands and smiled, made eye contact and said something like ‘pleased to meet you’. It’s likely you did this naturally and without much effort (even if you hate networking or are shy meeting people you don’t know).
Now imagine yourself at the airport about to reunite with a loved one you haven’t seen for a long time and have missed terribly. You’re there at the gate ready to meet them. You see each other and run towards each other and… well, it’s your story. You finish it! Whatever you see in this scenario, though, it isn’t likely to involve a handshake (personally, I’m seeing bear hugs and squeals of excitement or even tears). Whatever your version looks like, it doesn’t look the same as your meet-and-greet moment in the workplace, right?
By exaggerating and playing it big, you instantly reveal your huge range of energy and expressiveness, from more contained and neutral (your workplace handshake) to heightened and highly charged (your reunion at the airport).
Exaggeration is a magnificent tool for building your range of dynamics and expressiveness . Here’s a quick and effective exaggeration exercise to try right now.
EXAGGERATION EXERCISE
Staying in this realm of the magical, describe this object using words that befit something that is the most extraordinary thing you’ve ever seen (yes, close your door for this one). I’ll bet you sounded very different from your usual self when you did this, and I’ll bet your body language ramped up too. Hopefully, you’ve discovered in an instant what a big range of vocal dynamism you have – you just need to remember to use it!
Exaggeration helps us to remember what we already know deep inside but have forgotten; it is simply dormant.
Improvise and be surprised
On a rainy day in Dublin many years ago, I arrived at the studio theatre where I was directing a production, ready to rehearse with the cast for the press preview the following night. I loved working with this ensemble of talented young actors, and I was excited about the originality of the show we had created together. I felt the usual anticipation and buzz.
Oddly, the door to the theatre was unlocked, so I figured one of the technicians had already arrived. But it was dark inside. Something was wrong. I turned on the lights. The shock of what I saw made me cry out. The theatre had been vandalised. All the sets and costumes were destroyed. Everything was ruined. I just sat there, numb. A few minutes later the cast arrived and joined in the shock and horror. Thoroughly dismayed, we were stopped in our tracks.
After a few minutes of processing the catastrophe before us, something kicked in: a determination to fight back with all our humanity and creativity. We had worked for two months pretty much 24/7 on this production, and through our intensive rehearsal process we had become a family, connected through trust, reliability and teamwork of the highest order.
We were going to have to improvise our way out of this mess .
So here was my plan:
Step 1 – Clear all the debris and make the space a fresh slate, a clean space without the reminder of the vandalism.
Step 2 – Get agreement from the ensemble, the team, that we would commit 100% to carrying on and getting the show up.
Step 3 – Inspire and motivate every performer to believe in their talent and experience and envision what we could create anew.
It was a very long day and a very long night. By the next morning, we had created a ‘poor man’s theatre’, which was lean but exciting. Without props, costumes or sets, this radically stripped-down production offered a brave, unapologetic, intentional form of story-telling. The performers acted as if this bare-bones style was their magical USP. Not only did the show get great reviews, it had an extended run!
Improvisation is the art of transforming uncertainty into new possibilities. It can be a liberating opportunity to tear up the script, the plan, the blueprint and take a risk, take action and find creative solutions – something new.
You are a master improvisor
We’re often terrified by the idea of being unprepared or unscripted, of ad-libbing or taking a step into the unknown. Yet we’re all highly experienced improvisors in our everyday lives.
I’ll bet you can recall a time something went wrong and you improvised your way through. Perhaps you were about to give a presentation only to discover your notes were missing or PowerPoint wasn’t working. Somehow you gave that presentation and the sky didn’t fall in just because things didn’t go to plan.
Maybe the improvised version of your presentation was more alive, more memorable than the one you’d planned! A scary experience but an exhilarating lesson as well. You might have forgotten some of your points, but the audience didn’t know the script – they were engaging with you .
What about that speech you gave that came from your heart spontaneously at a wedding or birthday celebration? Or the time you sat in awe as you listened to a friend strum a new piece of music into existence on a guitar, right there and then? Remember suddenly having a flash of inspiration and jotting down the poem that poured effortlessly onto the page? Or that think-tank session where you and your team did some fearless blue-sky thinking, throwing out as many ideas as possible in a short amount of time? What about those occasions when you made up a story on the spot for a child instead of reading one?
Overthinking an action can create more fear and anxiety in us than actually performing the action. Adrenaline and vulnerability are with all of us when we step into the unknown and the unscripted. But with practice, your improvisational muscles get fitter and stronger and fear becomes a more productive form of excitement.
The more we practise something, the more fluent we become in it and the more confident we become doing it, and that includes improvisation. Stand-up comedians make a great study in practised spontaneity as they play off their audience, volley with hecklers and customise their set to their audience’s location and culture. It seems like a contradiction: how can you practise being in the zone of the unknown?
What you’re practising when you improvise is being completely present with others. It builds trust, courage and confidence like nothing else. Leaders today have to embrace change and navigate ambiguity. To do so successfully requires optimism, curiosity and agility. The practice of improvisation increases your fitness levels for these challenges.
By shaking things up, you grant yourself the freedom to act with what you have – see what happens; learn something, interact with people in unpredictable ways, adjust how you do things. We all benefit from sometimes replacing best-laid plans with spontaneous action. We don’t always need a blueprint. Sometimes we just need to call ‘Action!’ and jump right in.
IMPROVISATION EXERCISE
If you’re currently working on a presentation, talk or pitch, or if you want to revitalise something you’ve been delivering for a while, try this improvisation exercise.
You’ll be surprised to discover how imaginative you are under a bit of playful pressure!
Your performance is alive, not preserved
When PowerPoint slide decks become a crutch or when a script is so locked down it’s practically mummified, it’s time for a fresh approach to structuring – one that gives you more freedom and spontaneity. Structure is a great road map and organiser but it doesn’t keep your content fresh and alive.
You need to be agile enough with your content to adapt to different environments and audiences. Your content is always a story about something (even if it’s numbers!). And since you’re the one telling that story, you’re the artistic director. You get to decide how your audience hears that story; you get to decide how to create maximum impact and engagement. You’ll want to be able to remember your content easily to free yourself from notes.
A dynamic storyboard is your fast-track rehearsal tool for this. It allows you to physicalise your content. The link between movement and memory dates back to the ancient art of loci, or the ‘memory palace technique’. Moving to different locations and associating key moments in the story with different images, objects or enactments is like a neurological supercharge. You embody your story, and in turn, it’s stored in your body memory.
You can download a larger version of this template by going to www.theatre4business.com and clicking on the Performing As YOU resources link on the website.
Once you know your story and how you want to tell it, this dynamic storyboard will give you the agility and confidence to expand or contract it for different contexts and different audiences.
You can download a bigger version of the dynamic storyboard template by going to www.theatre4business.com and clicking the Performing As YOU resources link on the website.
Seven top tips for rehearsing
  1. Reading aloud . When you have a draft ready, always read your work aloud. This practice helps you to immediately identify what needs attention. When you read aloud, you can hear the pace, emphasis, rhythm, clarity and colour of your words. You can get a feel for the sequence and structure of your material.
  2. Dynamic storyboarding . Every story has a beginning, a middle and an end. Physically map these transitions in your presentation by moving to a different spot for each section. Use each pause as an opportunity to change the tone of your voice, renew your energy and make eye contact with your audience. Take your time.
  3. Tactics . Explore different intentions with your material. Try delivering your presentation as if to agitate, as if to inspire, as if to challenge, as if to reassure, and so on. Really play with different qualities to colour and stretch your voice and dynamics.
  4. Creative strategies . What’s the first thing your audience will experience? Explore a range of strategies for starting your presentation: ask your audience a question, paint a picture for them to imagine (‘Picture this’), make a provocative statement, begin with silence and stillness, tell a story, etc. See how these strategies impact on your material and inform your performance.
  5. Near and far . Experiment with your presentation in different settings and contexts. See what happens with your energy, voice, pace and passion when you play your presentation ‘as if’ on an epic scale (large auditorium) and on an intimate scale (across a table).
  6. Points of view . Anticipate some questions from the audience. What other perspectives might there be on your material? Enjoy asking some ‘off the wall’ questions of yourself! Surprise yourself.
  7. Visualisation . Mentally rehearse by visualising how you want to be seen and heard.
COACH IN YOUR POCKET POINTERS