Rehearsing

I recently had a really interesting email from a friend about the chorus she directs. She has been working with them for some weeks on making a significant shift in their vocal production over the course of two months, from a sound she describes as ‘wide’ to one that is ‘forward and tall’.*

They have got to the point where the singers grasp what is being asked for, and agree with the value of making the change, but habitually revert to their previous placement any time they’re not specifically working on the new sound. This is proving somewhat frustrating.

My friend’s email talked about the process of change in Kotter’s terms – of unfreezing, transforming and re-freezing. She feels they have managed the unfreezing well, and are making good headway with the ‘communicating visions’ and ‘short-term wins’ bit of transforming, but are finding the stage of re-freezing is not getting any nearer. She specifically mentions one aspect of the process that I think she is absolutely right to focus on next:

The Communicator and the Manager are two characters who have popped up in several previous posts, and who are making increasingly frequent visits to my coaching sessions. So I felt it was time they deserved a post of their own.

I think I first met these two characters in the guise of the Writer and the Editor. When I was on the final leg of my PhD a lecturer friend advised me that the only way to get anything done is to send the Editor off for a cup of tea while the Writer gets on with things. Yes, it will need a good deal of editing in due course, but if the Editor gets on the case while the Writer’s still trying to write, you’ll never get anything done.

I always imagined these two as sitting on either shoulder, like a devil and an angel. Which is slightly strange imagery, since the Writer-Editor (and indeed Manager-Communicator) pair have much more of yin-yang than a good-evil one. You do actually need both, but they need to get involved in different stages of the process.

I have remarked before how rehearsal methods one chooses for a specific reason often have secondary effects that you didn’t necessarily anticipate but that nonetheless chime with your overall aims and ethos. One particular instance of this rule of benign unintended consequences we have experienced in Magenta is the practice of having all members out front in turn to coach the group as a whole.

The routine is this: each person stands out front, and we sing a section of maybe 16-20 bars to them. They feed back (a) on something that they liked about the performance and (b) on something that they would like to see added or improved. (If they accidentally tell us something that was wrong, we rephrase in positive terms; so for example if we’re told the start was a bit tentative and insipid, the instruction becomes, 'Please perform the start with more confidence and clarity'.). We then sing the same section again to give them what they wanted. We then go on to sing the next section to the next person.

In my last post on this subject, the question emerged as to what kind of overlap there is between activities/approaches that generate a flow state with activities/approaches that generate a charismatic encounter. I’m thinking particularly of the choral rehearsal here, since that’s the primary context in which I’m likely to apply these ideas – though if we learn more generalisable things in the process, that’s fine too.

Now, for all the structural and experiential resonances between these two states, theorising their overlap has been trickier than I expected. This is partly because there is one huge apparent contradiction between the two. A key element to Flow is the sense of personal control, that what you are doing makes a defining difference to the outcome of the activity. Whereas, a key element of a charismatic encounter is the way people hand over their sense of executive control to the leader.

These are three qualities that are desirable in choral (and many other types of) singing.* They are also related to each other in interesting ways – and contemplating these relationships can help clarify our thinking about rehearsal and practice strategies to develop them.

One of the things we talked about in last week’s ‘Conduct with Charisma’ workshop was the idea of ‘communion’. This is the particular form of social bonding identified by sociologist Raymond Bradley in charismatic groups whereby all members bond with all other members. This sets up the free-flow of affection and fraternal love that is experienced as a state of euphoria or exaltation.

We identified a number of different activities and structures you can set up within a choir that will either promote or inhibit the building of these bonds. These included social events (particularly those in shared social spaces, and in which the director schmoozes widely, not just hanging out with the same people each time), changing rehearsal layout/groupings so that people stand with and sing with different people, and a culture of knowing and using each others’ names.

Well, the day after the workshop, Chris Rowbury published a post over on From the Front of the Choir on why he doesn’t get people to introduce themselves at workshops until after they’ve had a good sing together. And it is a textbook example of practices that promote communion.

This is a subject I was thinking about in a very particular scenario – giving feedback to competitors after a contest – and gradually realised that the thought-processes involved generalised very well to many other teaching and coaching situations I have found myself in over the years.

There are 4 basic types of factor involved.

I recently read Robin Stuart-Kotze’s book Performance: The Secrets of Successful Behaviour. I picked it up wondering if it was going to be one of the business-management genre books that have been feeding into my charisma project. Not directly, it turns out, and where it does, mostly by contrast. Nonetheless, it proved a stimulating read, both in the dimensions in which I found myself persuaded, and in those where I found myself wanting to argue back. (Possibly that is the definition of a stimulating book!)

Anyway, one of the areas I found particularly useful was where he discusses performance-blocking behaviours – i.e. those habits and forms of interaction that actively prevent people from doing well. The problem with these is not just that they are counter-productive, but also that they are highly contagious. So one person’s blocking behaviours very quickly inspire similarly unhelpful habits in others.