The Sunday News
Raisedon Baya
A LIVE stage performance demands more from an artiste than most of our young artistes are giving it. A performance should be more than a ritual and not everyone should be able to do it from the blues. A performance should not be about someone standing up, jumping on stage and singing some melody, or trying to rhyme or wriggling his or her body to the accompaniment of some music. There should be more to a performance than just walking on stage and delivering a few lines.
Before an artiste goes on stage he or she must know what the audience that has come to watch that performance is expecting.
Audiences don’t just come to the theatre or the concert hall or to a stadium to while up time. Maybe pub and nightclub audiences have little expectations from an artiste than those that leave their homes to pay for a particular performance. A paying audience comes to the theatre or to a particular performance for a particular experience. The audience wants to be transported and to be shaken out of their dull and monotonous reality. And this transportation requires more than a few rhymes, a few dance moves or some kind of melody. A performance must come in its totality. Audiences come expecting nothing short of an experience, a total and memorable experience. But are we giving them that?
A total performance requires preparations. An artiste needs to prepare, to rehearse adequately so that when he or she goes on stage there are no excuses. The audience is not there for excuses but for a spell-binding and total performance. An artiste needs to know the place he or she will perform at way before the audience gets there. He or she needs to familiarise with that space, to do a walk through. When the audience is watching a performance they need to feel like the artiste belongs on that stage, that he or she has performed there before. An artiste needs to psyche for the performance. Not what we are seeing these days where artistes are called to the stage from the audience and everyone sees them running straight to the microphone and starting their performance. This is the kind of performance that takes the audience nowhere but away from the arts. There is no mystery here.
Psyching for the performance means taking time to mentally prepare for the performance. If it’s acting it means looking for that character that you are supposed to play and if you are a musician it means looking for the right mood and preparing for that grand entrance. A proper performance demands that the artiste make up and dress up for his or her role. One must look the part. A stage costume might make or break your performance. It is not right to dress for a performance eight hours before the show, then go about shopping, spending the rest of the day in that costume, only to come to the show through the audience and then expect everyone to go wow and be transported! It doesn’t work that way. Good artistes always surprise their audiences. Good artistes know how to create some mystery around their performance.
Michael Jackson became a legend not just because he had a good voice but because he knew how to create magic out of his performances. Thriller is regarded the world over as one of the best music videos. Watching it always leaves one feeling creepy. The attention to detail is magical. On stage Michael Jackson was known for his total performance. The costume, lighting, stunts and of course the choreography. All these were combined to create that magic the mesmerised that hypnotised millions of people. That is how he created his legend.
Show business is about magic, about creating impressions. So what impressions are young artistes creating when they don’t take time to prepare, when the same clothes they wear at home are the same they want to use for their stage acts? What impression are the youths and young artistes trying to create when they go for a performance and spend most of their time talking and drinking with the audience instead of being backstage and psyching for their performance? What magic are they trying to create? Where can they take their audience to except the same boredom and monotony that the audience will be running away from their homes?
Perhaps it’s high time the artistes and maybe the promoters that work with these young artistes tried to return the magic back to the art of performance because magic is all the audiences are looking for when they come for our performances.
