Flow vs Hyper-focus: As exemplified through "The Lonely Goatherd"...

When you think of a ‘state of flow’ - what comes to mind? Perhaps an artist or an athlete ‘in the zone’ or maybe an easy going friend who ‘goes with the flow’. All of whom are deftly navigating whatever the present moment is bringing to them with a sense of ease. 

Okay, now think of ‘hyper-focus’. A state of intense focus and complete concentration on a sole task. 

Not exactly the same thing, right? BUT a lot of overlap. BUT the feeling around either of these sensations is wildly different. 

Both of these states have many things in common. Both have the capacity to transform your sense of time. It might feel very slow or very fast. Both have an element of intense energy use. Both demand your full mental facilities to execute a specific task. Both require being in the present moment. 

However, to me, as a performer, flow and hyper-focus have one distinct difference that can be intangible to the observer but feels very significant while onstage. The flow state takes a great amount of trust that you will be able to execute your skills expertly given any of the present stimuli. The hyper-focus state attempts to force the greatest possible execution of your skills you believe you are capable of onto the present situation, no matter what happens. 

Performance as an art form is unpredictable and fleeting. Every time I go to sing a song - the set of circumstances are different. Even if you are doing the same show 8 times a week for months - or even years - there are always changing variables. How much sleep did you get? What did you eat today? What is your emotional state? What is the state of your most cherished relationships? What is the state of the WORLD? 

Not to mention - what is the humidify level of the theatre? How does your body want to move today? Is anything sore? What is the weather like? How do I feel in the clothes I’m wearing today? — you get my point. 

Now increase those factors exponentially given the fact that actors do not exist in vacuums so all of those variables  are present for every aspect of the performance - the other actors, the musicians, tech and backstage crew, and…the audience. 

So, in a state of hyper-focus (and there are absolutely times this is helpful and necessary) an actor might attempt to self-isolate. Tune out the rest of the world. To me, it feels like the rest of the turns black and quiet except for a distinct tunnel in front of me, with my goal in front of me. Perhaps that is 'crushing' an audition, a scene, a show, or even one note. Blocking everything else out as “noise” and relying on the one thing you feel you have control over - which is the delivery of your skill.

However, I know from experience that if you are in that zone for more than a couple of minutes - you can arrive back in the real world an exhausted mess. Everything has been stripped from you. I emerge hungry, tired, thirsty, and likely don’t remember much of what happened at all other than my general judgement of whether I executed what I set out to or not. 

Alternatively - let’s imagine this in a state of flow. You are performing in a show. You warm up that day and take note of how your voice feels, how your body feels, where you are emotionally. You eat a nutritious breakfast, drink water, stretch, walk, listen to music that fills you with joy, journal a few lines of excitement and gratitude. You go through the rituals of “getting ready”. You have a routine, a process. The hair/wigs, costumes/shoes, makeup, sound check. The cues you remind yourself for tricky moments in the upcoming performance. You take a few deep breaths and you trust. 

You trust, that this is not the time for practice, this is not the time to micromanage. This is not the time for control. This is the time to be. To rely on the skills you cultivate tirelessly in order to arrive at this performance. When a tempo speeds up, you go with it and change your dramatic beats accordingly, when a bright light hits your eyes, you twinkle in it, when a tricky musical passage appears you trust your body has learned the coordinations it need to execute with precision and you revel in the moment. 

Now…let’s take this another step forward and bring you to my brain while ‘acting’. 

Singing has always been organic to me. I’ve been singing since before I can remember and I KNOW I am exceptional at it. I have been told for 30 years that I am a beautiful singer, and even if someone important and fancy told me I was NOT a good singer, I wouldn’t believe them. When I make a mistake, it doesn’t make a dent. I could completely botch a note in a very high profile situation, and still walk away KNOWING I am a good singer, who had a bad vocal moment. I forgive myself and move on. I trust my voice more than I trust pretty much anything else in life. I talk to my voice as if she is a separate entity from the rest of my body. I’ll say things to myself like “my voice knows what to do”, “she never let me down”, and “I trust her to do what she needs to”. 

However, ACTING is a different story my friend. Acting, historically has not organic for me. I often times have felt like acting was playing catch up to its exceptional older sister - singing. So what do I do with acting? I micromanage. I find ways to indicate I am a good actor, to PROVE I am a good actor. 

And you know what? Sometimes it totally works. And other times I get a note like “Hmm...I can tell you’re very smart”. I used to look back with a furrowed brow and think - how on earth did they glean that I am intelligent while singing “The Lonely Goatherd?!" 

What I think they are saying, is they can see what is going on in my brain when I’m attempt to display the fact that I’m a good actor. If I were to slow my brain down into a level at which I could think of every passing throught while performing in THIS state - it might look something like this: 

I have analyzed the scene “The Lonely Goatherd” and have surmised that Maria Von Trapp is having fun with the children. However, with this fun comes great pressure to impress the Captain with whom she has complicated feelings towards, she is nervous to be performing in front of Elsa, whom she feels inferior towards, she wants to ensure the children are having a great time, but she feels sadness that she’s grown close to these children and they are not hers, and yet grateful for the opportunity to know them in the first place which reminds her of the intense love she has for the Mother Abbess and the deep grief of losing her parents and then OH MY GOD HOW DO YOU OPERATE THIS MARIONETTE AND YODEL AT THE SAME TIME!!!! 

And in hyper-speed I would identify all of these feelings - gratitude, joy, bittersweet, anxiety, sadness and find ‘beats’ to incorporate them all. Then, I would go into the immense data dump I have in the recesses on my brain on how these feelings FEEL in my body and perhaps, more importantly, in this moment, how they physically manifest in myself and in others and THUS how they might manifest in this moment for Maria. 

Well, are you tired just thinking about that?? Yep. Me too. But I do this. A LOT. 

The alternative and remedy I would sometime pivot towards is just going into a deeply emotional state and living out my own ‘trauma’ via the words of someone else and the circumstance of character. Not ideal either. 

But I’m happy to say an increasingly number of times I’m able to analyze a scene, a character and a scenario and just simply conjure the feelings associated, and TRUST that my body knows how to physically manifest those feelings and emotional objections. Perhaps even in a state of, dare I say, flow. 

I feel myself in that world where I can take in every stimulus around me - a lighting shift, a dynamic change in the orchestra, an emotional realization for the character, and I masterfully float from moment to moment, living inside it and making decisions in real time that best support the effectiveness of my performance. 

And I emerge from that world filled up, invigorated, excited and proud. 

It changes the “The Lonely Goatherd” from a terrifying minefield of emotional and vocal obstacles - to perhaps what someone might identify as FUN?!

Newsletter #1

I have yet to write about this particular 'survival job' but I am one year into being a virtual assistant for a boutique consulting company (Check them out!) Among many tasks including scheduling and social media marketing, I am also heavily involved in relationship management and cultivation - something we in the arts industry practice, daily. 

I started a newsletter for the company and I thought to myself - hey, I should do one of those for my company (aka the entrepreneurial nature sharing and sometimes selling my artistic work). 

So, here is my first newsletter (click the image to view a zoom-able version). And if you'd like to be added to my mailing list - just drop me a line HERE. 

Life is Art.

 

Waiting for your roles…

The Psyche Mirror - Morisot (1876)

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I was teaching a lesson the other day to a student working on “Home” from BEAUTY AND THE BEAST. I began to demonstrate something in the song to show a certain phrasing, and she exclaimed:

“Oh my gosh, you would be such a perfect Belle.” 

And I responded…

“Thank you, I’ve auditioned for her countless times, and I think I would be a very good Belle. But, I’m really not a Disney mezzo, I’m pretty tall and what I really am is Mrs. Potts in 20 years.” She frowned and I followed up “No, really just think of me with some wrinkles singing “Tale as old as time”, people will WEEP.” 

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And I was surprised by my own response to this. So often, I (and probably the collective WE as actors) tell ourselves that if we keep getting called in for the same role and keep not booking it there’s something WRONG with us or the way we are interpreting the role. And if we could just figure out how to play the role just right, we’d book it. 

But what more likely it means is that, you’re doing good work, the creative team is interested in the work you do, and wants to see you, but right now you’re the age and ‘look’ for Belle. But something about it isn’t quite right. They invite you back because they like you, but you’re not booking the role because it’s not ‘your role’. 

I think about that all the time with the show INTO THE WOODS. I’ve played Rapunzel and Cinderella but really, at my core, I’m the Baker’s Wife. I can’t wait to Maria in the SOUND OF MUSIC, but I will absolutely slay the Mother Abbess one day. Sure, I’d be a cute Clara in LIGHT IN THE PIAZZA, but my lord I’ll be a great Margaret. 

So, time marches on, your talent doesn’t wain, and perhaps the roles that are awaiting me (and you) are yet to come. 

On reading poetry...

I’m currently in an acting class on zoom on Tuesday evenings. Among other things, we are asked to bring a new poem every week to class to read as a monologue aloud as a way to ‘warm up emotional intimacy’. 

When I first found out this was an assignment in the class, I did want any emotionally avoidant student with a heavy bend towards perfectionism might: I dutifully picked out a poem every week that seemed like it was the “right length” and “right amount of emotional vulnerability” and then I’d bring it class and read it in the ‘right way’ - clear, quiet, crisp — with a lilt and a musicality to bring out the artistry of the rhymes and rhythms.

And yet, many weeks, I’d get prompted - admit your faults, expose your deepest fears, be more in love. Week to week, I’d differ on my reactions to those prompts. Most weeks I would feel myself tighten, my speech get more pushed, and I’d do my best to muscle through and go through the motions of what ‘going deeper’ might look like - perhaps softening my diction, quieting my voice, speaking with an irregular speech pattern to show where I was ‘getting emotional’. 

Other weeks, I would “go deeper” and end up being a complete mess and crying through the majority of the poem. I would purposefully scan my brain and conjure images of my most troubling anxieties, some of the darkest moments I can remember, and the poem became clouded with deep sadness and emotion but it wasn’t present, it wasn’t vulnerable, it wasn’t really intimate. It wasn’t touching what the poem was describing, it wasn’t specific. It was just generalized emotion on top of words. 

And then one morning, I was drinking coffee with my husband on our porch and he got up to take a phone call. I decided, now would be a great time to find a poem to read in my acting class this week, so I hop onto instagram and pull up an account “@poetryisnotaluxury”. I found several poems by Ada Limon, the 2022 Poet Laureate of the US. My husband returns to the porch and I ask him if he wants to help me pick a poem from class. So, we begin reading aloud to one another and after one or two poems, I stumble across “The Great Blue Heron of Dunbar Road”. 

I started off as I typically do reading poems in class — with a natural bounce and one level removed from the emotional the poem is trying to evoke. But, soon, I become drawn into the story of the poem and images from the text conjure so clearly in my mind that I see myself inside of these words, it is so beautifully expressing exact things I have felt. I remember beginning to tear up about half way through the poem and looking at my husband and saying “Oh, this is really getting to me”. 

I then I realize: here I am — admitting my own mistakes, exposing my deepest fears. And I couldn’t be more in love. 

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The Great Blue Heron of Dunbar Road by Ada Limon

That we might walk out into the woods together,

and afterwards make toast
in our sock feet, still damp from the fern’s
wet grasp, the spiky needles stuck to our
legs, that’s all I wanted, the dog in the mix,
jam sometimes, but not always. But somehow,
I’ve stopped praising you. How the valley
when you first see it—the small roads back
to your youth—is so painfully pretty at first,
then, after a month of black coffee, it’s just
another place your bullish brain exists, bothered
by itself and how hurtful human life can be.
Isn’t that how it is? You wake up some days
full of crow and shine, and then someone
has put engine coolant in the medicine
on another continent and not even crying
helps cure the idea of purposeful poison.
What kind of woman am I? What kind of man?
I’m thinking of the way my stepdad got sober,
how he never told us, just stopped drinking
and sat for a long time in the low folding chair
on the Bermuda grass reading and sometimes
soaking up the sun like he was the story’s only
subject. When he drove me to school, we decided
it would be a good day, if we saw the blue heron
in the algae-covered pond next to the road,
so that if we didn’t see it, I’d be upset. Then,
he began to lie. To tell me he’d seen it when
he hadn’t, or to suppose that it had just
taken off when we rounded the corner in
the gray car that somehow still ran, and I
would lie, too, for him. I’d say I saw it.
Heard the whoosh of wings over us.
That’s the real truth. What we told each other
to help us through the day: the great blue heron
was there, even when the pond dried up,
or froze over; it was there because it had to be.
Just now, I felt like I wanted to be alone
for a long time, in a folding chair on the lawn
with all my private agonies, but then I saw you
and the way you’re hunching over your work
like a puzzle, and I think even if I fail at everything,
I still want to point out the heron like I was taught,
still want to slow the car down to see the thing
that makes it all better, the invisible gift,
what we see when we stare long enough into nothing.