SHAPE of Things
The to Come p. 8
TAPROOT
Music Festival p. 23
Compared to What? Jazz and Politics p. 34
IT TAKES TWO p. 44
gateway ROBERT AND MARGRIT MONDAVI CENTER FOR THE PERFORMING ARTS UC DAVIS FALL Issue 2019–20
Mind over Matter: The Psychology of the Stage p. 12
OVER The Psychology of the Stage
BY LISA MEZZACAPPA
T
he day-to-day work of an internationally touring performing artist is rife with contradictions and incongruous realities. Practice and rehearse until the material is airtight, but not so tight that it becomes rigid or lifeless. Steel yourself to bolster your stage presence, but not so much that you are impermeable to the in-themoment revelations of your fellow performers. Remain open and responsive to the input of other ensemble members and your director in rehearsal, but don’t flinch at the critical moment when you need to play that passage, execute that movement, hit that high note with 100% conviction. Feed off of the energy of the audience, but don’t let their whispering, coughing, rustling or phones dilute your focus.
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rofessional performers develop strategies for navigating this complex psychological terrain, where rigorous training and expectations of excellence meet the more human, often lesscontrollable factors of anxiety, interpersonal dynamics, mental focus and physical fatigue. Despite what might be happening offstage—a punishing travel day, family drama, ensemble conflict, boredom, exhaustion, self-doubt—they know they need to walk onstage each night and leave all that behind to deliver a transformative experience for the audience.
Despite what might be happening offstage, performers know they need to walk onstage each night and deliver a transformative experience.
Preparation is key, but so is perspective: Is the audience a source of comfort or dread? Do you trust that your peers have your back? Do you see the composer as an ally or a foe? Do you believe your director is acting with everyone’s best interests in mind? What is the worst thing that could happen, and can you handle that if it comes to pass? I spoke with vocalists, instrumentalists, ensemble leaders, a ballet dancer and an acrobat—most of whom will appear at the Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts this season—to learn how elite performers tune in to create memorable performances, while tuning out the mental clutter, emotional baggage and nervousness that can threaten high-stakes appearances. Whether the performance is a world premiere or a well-known work from the canon, a solo recital or a symphony concert, each live scenario invites distinct mental and emotional challenges. The goal is to flow, and there are ways performers set themselves up for that in the years, months and minutes before the curtain rises.
Don’t flinch
Flowing
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Hungarian American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi first developed the concept of flow in the mid-1970s through his research into psychological fulfillment and well-being. He studied composers, performers, athletes, poets and chess players, many of whom described a similar phenomenon of being “in the zone” or “flowing” as part of their work: a trance-like altered state of total absorption and effortless concentration. Flow state is a feeling of deep immersion, where a sense of passing time and of self-consciousness disappears as a task consumes all focus and awareness. A person in the flow takes great satisfaction and contentment from the process as it reveals itself in the moment. Research has shown that flow state (also known as “peak performance”) is also accompanied by physiological changes: As breath deepens, heart rate slows and brain waves transition from the beta waves of normal waking consciousness to the borderline state between alpha waves (associated with daydreaming and meditation) and theta waves (which occur during REM sleep and just before falling asleep). Both the left and right hemispheres work complementarily to integrate artistic expression and technical skills in this state. The brain also deactivates the prefrontal cortex during creative flow, which
is the region most closely associated with our “inner critic.” The flow state floods the brain with feel-good neurotransmitters and hormones like dopamine, endorphins and serotonin—no wonder many people describe the sensation as a kind of high.
Preparation is key, but so is perspective: Is the audience a source of comfort or dread? What’s the worst thing that could happen? Can you handle that?
The artists I spoke with described the flow state as a feeling of connection: with the audience, with their collaborators onstage, with the musical material or choreography, with their own bodies and imaginations. They access it through a partly rigorous, partly informal process of preparation that sometimes began with their very earliest training, but often developed through years of personal observation. These skills are rarely taught in music conservatories or dance academies, but they work in concert with artistic training to allow a stellar artist to do what they do at exactly the moment they need to do it.
Rehearsal and Ritual
The ideal performance mindset emerges from a layered series of preparations. There is the training that instills the confidence that the work at hand is within your powers; the practice and rehearsal that creates and reinforces deep familiarity of the specific work at hand; and the collection of idiosyncratic behaviors, decisions and rituals on the day of a show, or just moments before walking onstage, that can make or break the experience.
The ideal performance emerges from a layered series of preparations. ROBERT CARTER has been a company member with Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo since 1995. As his alter egos Olga Supphozova or Yuri Smirnov, he says he has danced nearly every lead role in the company’s repertory—most notably, the roles of Paquita and the famous solo in the Dying Swan. “I don’t have any pre-show ritual— just take a deep breath and go!” he says. “There have been hours of rehearsals and we do these works so many times over so many years, it’s in my body. The music comes on, and my brain and body click on, and it’s almost an automatic reaction. The movement comes to me almost unbidden, with the music.” He takes advantage of moments in the workday to center himself before a performance. Ballet dancers take class as part of their daily warm-up and maintenance of their technique. Carter says, “For me, class is like taking vitamins every day. It’s my time of meditation, despite what’s going on in my world. For that hour or so, I can just delve into what I need to do in my physical being and let the surface energies melt away.” Then there’s the makeup—it is a drag company, after all: “Part of my routine is the alone time doing my face before the show—I can calm down, zone out, prepare myself.”
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FREDERICK LIFSITZ, second violinist in the Alexander String Quartet, said the quartet has a habit of joking right before they walk onstage. “It’s so important to get out of the mundane worries—my luggage didn’t arrive, our flight is so early tomorrow morning, do I have all my music in my folder—but if you walk out smiling, the audience knows you’re happy to be there. You’re comfortable, and it puts them at ease and then we can look at each other and we enter a realm where we can leave everything—including even arguments about the repertoire we’re playing that night—backstage. When we come out onstage, it’s almost like operating on a patient. Everything has to be about making sure it’s a success.” Jazz pianist FRED HERSCH’s pre-performance rituals are tied to the realities of playing a different instrument each night. “The first thing to do is make friends with the piano,” he explains. “Having a good piano is the most important thing. Sometimes you just don’t connect with a piano even if it is ‘good’—it can feel cumbersome, hard to play. If I haven’t made friends with the piano in 45 minutes, it’s not going to happen, so I have to deal with that.”
“The first thing to do is make friends with the piano.” —Fred Hersch
“[Before I go on stage] I take some time to try to remember who I am. I recount my ancestors.” —Steven Schick
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If the hall is not reverberant enough, or the sound doesn’t move him, he has some tricks to help navigate that psychologically while he is playing—he will bring his own microphones to amplify the piano and put the sound in a monitor speaker near him, with added reverb, to make the hall sound more alive (to his ears) as he plays. He also travels with specialty hearing aids that magnify the higher frequencies of the piano sound, so that when he wears them, he hears a brighter tone, with “more sparkle.” The audience doesn’t experience either of these treatments—these are just sonic holograms to help Hersch hear himself in a way that helps him play better. Before a solo performance, he will soundcheck, then have dinner. “Then I want to do everything possible to avoid thinking about the concert—I’ll talk to stagehands, do crossword puzzles, talk on the phone. I don’t want to think about it before it is time, because the more I think, the more I plan, the worse it is.” He doesn’t plan out the pieces in his solo piano sets, though he will often start the program slowly and hypnotically, and use that first piece to feel out the space and hear how the acoustics in the hall have changed once the audience has come in. Percussionist and conductor STEVEN SCHICK takes a moment to ground himself right before walking on. “I take some time to try to remember who I am … I recount my ancestors, and I recount my living relatives and the people that I love, and my friends, as a part of a practice of meditational centering,” he says. “I will do that before performances, just to say ‘this is who you are, and you can neither expect more of yourself than you can give, nor should you ever expect more from yourself than what you are capable of.’ So from that standpoint, I am happy with what happens—of course I don’t want to screw up, but if I do something other than what I wanted to, I don’t beat myself up because all of this is coming out of the person I am, and have decided to be.”
Get It into Your Body
Several artists speak passionately about the need to get the material they are performing “out of their heads” and “into their bodies,” as a means of combating anxiety and realizing their full potential as performers.
Getting centered doesn’t happen just before walking onstage, it is instead part of a methodology that begins as soon as [the performers] start working on a new piece.
Percussionist CHRIS FROH, who teaches in the UC Davis Department of Music, specializes in performing the music of living composers, having premiered more than 150 works by Chaya Czernowin, David Lang, Steve Mackey, John Adams, George Crumb, Matthias Pintscher and others. For him, the key to performing thorny contemporary works on a range of percussion is to focus on the “inherent physicality” of his instrument. “If you look at the marimba, it’s 10 feet long and threeand-a-half feet wide, and you’re always separated from the instrument by a lot of physical space, always separated by a mallet. And a lot can happen in between when you raise the mallet and when you hit the note.” So when Froh learns a new piece, he works on the physical choreography implied by the score: “You can’t move just laterally, you are moving across all these different planes—shifting your hips and feet placement—it ends up being almost like a dance. You get a physical fluency in your body once your body knows what to do and then it’s not just about hitting the pitches, it’s about deciding what the motion’s going to be and trying to physicalize it.” Gospel singer and choir director TREY MCLAUGHLIN has a similarly embodied approach in leading his 20-voice ensemble, Sounds of Zamar. “I coach Zamar with a lot of movement, the way I learned myself,” he says. He grew up mimicking his favorite performers, studying how their physicality helped convey the music they were singing. “It’s about opening up the body, getting people vocally free.” “The movement energizes the performance, adds to your air flowing, adds to relaxation and makes us more engaged when we sing.” He says this focus on the body and movement also dispels nervousness, because it slows people down, encourages group awareness rather than self-centered worrying and helps the singers tap into and project “how the music makes them feel physically.” Both Froh and McLaughlin have figured out ways of infusing their rehearsal routines with the values they feel make for the best performances. Getting centered doesn’t happen just before walking onstage, it is instead part of a methodology that begins as soon as they start working on a new piece. They are practicing getting into the zone along with all the notes and rhythms, from the very beginning. Schick spends months memorizing complex solo percussion works so that he can feel more physically, mentally and creatively present in performance. He says that performing a score from memory makes him feel like he is creating the music anew with each performance.
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“Playing from memory, I increasingly see the boundary between myself and the piece of music as being an unsubstantial one. If it’s not on paper, then it’s located on you.” And then he can flow into “that fluid molten state of improvisation,” a “merging of emotional and physical being.”
“Anywhere from probably 50 to 70% of all classical musicians have some level of performance anxiety ... and subject to early retirement because of the trauma of dealing with their anxiety.” —Patrick Gannon
Nerves Jitters, nerves, stage fright, performance anxiety—Carly Simon, Barbara Streisand, Jimi Hendrix, Glenn Gould, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Lawrence Olivier and Vladimir Horowitz are just a few household names who famously suffered from performance anxiety at some point in their careers. “Peak performance and performance anxiety are really two sides of the same coin,” explains San Francisco psychologist Patrick Gannon, whose practice focuses on helping athletes, public speakers and performers overcome anxiety to access the flow state through a menu of techniques rooted in cognitive behavioral therapy and the latest research in neuroscience. He has spent the past decade understanding the extensive collection of symptoms that characterizes performance anxiety, and believes the condition has been largely overlooked by traditional clinical psychology. “Anywhere from probably 50 to 70% of all classical musicians have some level of performance anxiety,” he says. “That doesn’t mean it’s always impacting their performance, but it’s significant, it affects their satisfaction, their enjoyment of performing. And then when they do this for 20 or 30 years, they’re subject to early retirement because of the trauma of dealing with their anxiety every time they perform.” He believes the pressure on classical musicians to excel is a contributing factor, plus a mentality in the professional world that individual players are expendable. “The competition for these very limited orchestra contracts is so (strong) that they don’t really care if (a musician) can’t handle it. Somebody else behind you will. So they don’t approach this like, ‘let’s do the best for the whole person’.” Plus, conservatory teachers don’t understand how to treat anxiety, so music students are not getting the information they need to self-regulate in stressful situations as part of their training. Mezzo-soprano ASHLEY DIXON is among the distinguished young artists in the Adler Fellowship program at San Francisco Opera. She said that she has had to deal with performance anxiety at different points in her career. “In college I was almost crippled by nerves, and then my dad, who was an F-16 pilot in the military, talked me through a lot of that.” He taught her to manage her nervousness: “You can trick your mind into understanding those feelings as excitement. Fear and excitement almost live in the same place, and if you convert that feeling it makes such a difference. Sometimes now backstage, if I’m feeling fluttery or my heart is beating faster than I would like, I’ll do slow breathing techniques to slow things down.”
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Nervousness arises “because you expect something, instead of dealing with what’s there.” —Fred Hersch
LISTEN Mind over Matter
Hersch says he works on the performance mindset with his students. “Jazz should be a flow, like a conversation,” he explains. “If you’re already thinking about what you’re going to do in two minutes, then you’re not present for those next two minutes. If you’re thinking, ‘I should be playing this, I wish I was playing that, I’m upset that I just played that’—these things ruin the flow.” He said nervousness arises “because you expect something, instead of dealing with what’s there.” So he advises young pianists to refocus by keeping it simple, reconnecting with the sound, the rhythm and then “all the other stuff just melts away.” Beta blocker drugs are a common treatment for performance anxiety, and Gannon says about 50% of professional classical musicians take them regularly. The drug works by inhibiting the effects of the hormone epinephrine, in turn lowering heart rate and blood pressure. But Gannon is concerned that reliance on the drug means performers are treating the symptom without addressing the root causes of their anxiety. In treatment, he combines methods from the fields of trauma, anxiety and sports psychology with neuroscience research to help patients get closer to the flow state and further away from an anxious “fight or flight” state. He works with them to replace traumatic memories and fearful patterns with new neurological connections that are more productive for their lives as performers. Using cardiovascular exercise to make the brain more receptive to new information, his patients rehearse visualization exercises that model positivity and poise instead of panic and fear.
Beta blocker drugs are a common treatment for performance anxiety, and Gannon says about 50% of professional classical musicians take them regularly.
McLaughlin’s strategy is similar. “I’m always nervous—always,” he confides. “It has never gone away for me. I’m nervous every time that I get up in front of people. I’ve learned over the years to turn that nervous energy into something that works for me. I’ve kind of become a master at doing that—onstage I channel that nervous energy into performance energy.” Now that he understands it, he says, “I’m almost more comfortable being nervous. If I’m not, the magic is not going to be there.”
Some performers suffer from debilitating performance anxiety regardless of the situation, but for others, legitimate reasons do exist to be nervous in certain contexts. McLaughlin says that it is especially “nerve-wracking” for him to sing in front of classical vocalists since he left that world to pursue a career in gospel music. “Classical singers can be the worst. As soon as somebody opens their mouth, we are analyzing their technique. I know how classical singers think, and also how they feel about gospel. There’s this consensus in the classical world that gospel singing is damaging to your voice, and you shouldn’t make these sounds.” He was advised by his voice teachers in college to quit singing in gospel choir, warning him it would hurt his instrument. And there was a sense that this was not legitimate music for him to be singing. So on these tours with Sounds of Zamar, McLaughlin is returning to academic music environments, and performing for vocal departments, where all these psychological issues resurface.
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PATRON PROFI LE : Supporter & Board Member
Patti Donlon Behind the scenes at the Mondavi Center, there are some special people who work hard to ensure that things not only run smoothly from day to day, but that there is also a solid long-term plan in place. No, we’re not talking about ourselves, the staff members (though we do work hard!); we’re talking about our dedicated board members, donors and volunteers. One person who fits all of those descriptions is Patti Donlon. Patti is a 19–20 season Mondavi Center board member and has been a donor since 2001. She also volunteers on the Advisory Board and Patron Relations Committee, and she is an annual subscriber. When asked why she supports the Mondavi Center, she states: “I studied piano as a young child, but attended my first orchestral performance when I was 13 years old. I lived in a small village and had to travel an hour to do so. I regularly listened to both symphony and opera before that, but only on the radio. After hearing that concert in person, I realized how accessibility to the arts and art education is so vital for young people. The Mondavi Center provides that access, and now everyone has the opportunity to enjoy orchestras, dance companies and jazz concerts very close to home.”
Froh still has anxiety dreams about missing cymbal crashes and miscounting rests in orchestral pieces, even though he rarely plays in orchestras anymore. And almost every performer’s pulse quickens at the sight of an expert audience. McLaughlin says church musicians are “brutal,” and that audiences and musicians in Atlanta where he performs are very exacting and unforgiving, since the gospel scene there is so packed with talent. Dixon, the mezzo-soprano, says singing recitals is more stress-inducing than opera, because of the challenge of singing expertly in multiple languages within the same program. “The most terrifying experience for me would be going into a French house and singing in French,” she confesses.
Every performer’s pulse quickens at the sight of an expert audience. It’s not just mistakes—some performers need to confront the real possibility of bodily harm as part of their work. Circus performer KIMBERLEY O’BRIEN has been a full-time member of the Australian circus troupe Circa since 2011, having trained in the company’s youth programs since childhood. “We take precautions, but there’s always going to be a moment where I stand on the top of something and I think, ‘wow this floor is pretty far away’,” she admits. “But then I remember everyone down there is looking out for me, and it’s going to be OK.” Some ensemble directors build tools for group connection and ensemble focus right into the works they create. O’Brien explains that Circa’s director, Yaron Lifschitz, has developed a language of improvisation that members of the troupe call upon in performance, tools that she says help keep the material fresh, strengthen ensemble chemistry and trust and keep the live shows flexible. Circa rehearsals serve to train the performers’ bodies, but are also a forum for developing a “group mind” around a new work, with plenty of discussion and workshopping of ideas. O’Brien says that the improvisation that takes place during performance—sometimes connecting tightly orchestrated acts—also helps the performers maintain focus when they are repeating the same routines night after night. “The freedom to change it up keeps it fresh. The improvised sections affect how the set parts of the show feel each night. Each time, how you get in and out of (those parts) is different.” So for Circa’s performers, the attention-dulling aspects of repetition and over-familiarity never take hold to distract the mind. This ensemble flexibility also means that mistakes can be turned into happy accidents, and the fear of failure is softened by knowing that there is space in the ensemble to rescue a misstep or unintended interaction.
Strength in Numbers
Who an artist is sharing the stage with has an enormous impact on their experience of flow, their confidence level and their sense
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of possibility rather than constraint in performance. The trust, camaraderie, and creative exchange that members of string quartets, jazz trios, circus troupes, choirs, opera companies and chamber ensembles develop through years of working together helps individuals click into place come showtime, regardless of the day’s travails. For Dixon, the context of an opera production puts her at ease, as she is pulled along by the drama, and focused by the interaction with other vocalists, the orchestra, the chorus. “In opera, if you’re fully in the character, it’s hard to bring personal drama onto the stage—even if I’ve had the worst day. The second somebody else starts singing to you, that stuff just leaves your mind. I feel very connected to everyone else who’s onstage in that moment, and my personal baggage is left at the door.” The Alexander String Quartet has been together for nearly 40 years, maintaining a remarkably consistent personnel over that time. Lifsitz reflects on what the individual members get out of this long creative association: “If you are lucky enough to play in a fine ensemble, you’ve got three people who every day are telling you how to play it more in tune, how to play it more beautifully, more accurately. I am always playing better because I’ve got three fine teachers who have made me a much better player, and vice versa. You are constantly growing.”
Seek joy and not judgement in the moment.
“Rehearsals are where trust is built,” he explains. The unspoken pact in a quartet is that no single player will act independently in a concert and try out some new idea. “It’s about respecting the group’s interpretation when you go on stage. There is a tradition within the group as well as within the repertoire, so you don’t do anything to dramatically alter the plan in a live concert.”
The Rest of Us
So much of what singers, instrumentalists, dancers and acrobats do to focus their minds to allow their creative energy to flow during a performance seems applicable to non-performer “civilians” in everyday life. Find a way to work with the right people, and trust them. Try to distract yourself away from self-centered thoughts so you can be a better collaborator and more responsive to what is going on around you. Focus on, and listen to, your body to give your mind a break from the nonstop chatter of modern life. Aspire to excellence, but don’t sweat the details or they will bog you down. Seek joy and not judgment in the moment. Be kind to yourself if you gave it your all, because there will always be a next time. Lisa Mezzacappa is a journalist, arts administrator and independent musician/ composer. She works as a freelance copywriter, publicist and communications consultant for organizations including Cal Performances, Oakland Ballet and InterMusic SF.
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