the last five years - guildhall school of music and · pdf fileresearch professor, the...

John Sloboda April 2011 Guildhall School of Music & Drama

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Research Working Paper 11/01 April 2011 (http://www.gsmd.ac.uk/understandingaudiences)

What do musicians and actors learn by working together? “The Last Five Years”: A Case Study . John Sloboda Research Professor, The Guildhall School of Music & Drama, Barbican, Silk Street, London 2Y 8DT. [email protected] ABSTRACT It has been claimed that there are significant mutual developmental benefits for actors and musicians working together. This paper contributes to the evaluation of these claims by reporting the results of an interview study with participants in an actormusician collaboration which involved musicians participating in the dramatic action on stage. Participants were predominantly students at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama. Reported benefits to musicians included the opportunity to incorporate elements of dramatic practice (e.g. warm up routines) and dramatic values (e.g. risktaking, audienceorientation) into their performance. Reported benefits to actors included being able to draw on the intensity of the emotional commitment provided through music performance. Reported challenges of working in this way included compromises in technical exactitude on the part of musicians, and compromises in dramatic freedom by the actors. Implications for teaching and learning practice within an institution training both musicians and actors to the highest level are discussed. For a number of years, staff and students at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama have been productively exploiting the fact that their music and drama programmes are taught in the same building, and so there are ready opportunities for frequent interaction. A small but enthusiastic group of the teaching staff at the School have been devising opportunities (both within and outside the formal curriculum) for music and drama students to work together on projects which result in public or semi‐public collaborative performances.


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The distinctive element in most of these projects is that musicians and actors are integrated within the performing space under a unified artistic vision. Musicians share the performing space with the actors, rather than occupying a pit or cordoned‐off area, and major aspects of their stage presence (be it movement, gesture or facial expression, positioning, clothing etc.) are explicitly designed to have dramatic, in addition to musical, effect on an audience . This generally means that lessons and rehearsals (sometimes spreading over several weeks) take place with actors and musicians working together intensively from the outset. This contrasts with the more traditional model for cross‐disciplinary collaboration (in, say, opera or musicals) where the musicians and actors rehearse separately until towards the end of the rehearsal process. When these collaborative activities were first introduced into the curriculum they were elective, and involved only a minority of the students. As time passed, and more people became enthusiastic about the benefits of such collaboration, Participation in these cross‐disciplinary projects has now become a regular part of the School curriculum, with most undergraduate students expected to include some element of such collaborative work in their overall programme, even if such experiences do not result in public performances. There is one very compelling justification for exposing students to this way of working, and this is that such “crossover” projects are becoming more common in the professional world that musicians and actors inhabit, and therefore it advantages students to enter the professional world with experience of such work. But even if students never get involved in such collaborative work professionally, there is an additional reason claimed by some senior School staff for the benefits of doing such work within the training curriculum. This claim is that the collaborative work has direct benefits for the more traditional single‐discipline activities that musicians and actors undertake. Working with actors makes musicians into better musicians. Working with musicians makes actors into better actors. As a newcomer to the School I was intrigued by this claim. I wanted to know in what ways such collaborative work could improve musicianship and acting craft, and whether clear evidence of this process at work could be gathered and assessed. My sense was that, although there was a great deal of informal knowledge within the school community, this knowledge was as yet insufficiently documented, formalised, and critically scrutinised, to be able to fully justify the central role that this type of activity is now beginning to assume in the School’s teaching and learning strategy. I also sensed that there was a substantial sector of the school community that remained, at best, neutral about the claims being made for the benefits of collaborative work. The curriculum is very crowded, with many demands


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being made on both students and staff. Is it really worth diverting student and staff energy onto a non‐traditional activity which some may see as a luxury rather than a necessity? A second question about this type of activity relates to performer‐audience communication. Does actor‐musician collaboration have potential to enhance the richness of the communication between performers and audience, and can involvement in this type of work heighten performer awareness of and understanding of their audiences? It is often claimed that the relationship between actors and their audiences is more direct and well‐articulated than that between musicians and their audiences. Actors are acutely aware of their audience and seek ever more intense engagement with them. Musicians are often insulated from their audiences and more focused on their instruments and the music than on their audience. Are these claims accurate, and can collaborative work contribute to productive shifts in awareness and understanding? The Last Five Years At the precise point in time that I was beginning to ponder on these questions, I was offered the opportunity to undertake research on a specific time‐limited collaborative project of this sort. This was a project to stage the one‐act musical “The Last Five Years” (Jason Robert Brown, 2001), involving two actor‐singers and six musicians. The project, directed by Christian Burgess (Director of Drama) and produced by Fernando Pinho, (a student in Stage Management and Technical Theatre) ran from December 2009 through April 2010, with seven public performances, two at the Guildhall School in January 2010, and five at the Barbican Arts Centre in April 2010. The bulk of the rehearsals took place in an intensive period between December and January 2009, with some additional rehearsals prior to the April performances. The key element of particular relevance to this research was the placing of the six musicians (pianist, guitarist, and string quartet) on the stage, with actors moving around them, and interacting with them in a number of ways. Musicians were asked to respond facially and gesturally to the unfolding drama, and there was one particularly striking scene in which the female cellist explicitly represented a character alluded to in the libretto (a woman with whom the principal male character had an affair, but who had no actual stage presence in the musical as written or previously performed). There were other occasions also when the actor‐singers addressed specific lines in their songs to a member of the band, and so the band members became witnesses, empathisers, and assumed elements of the functions often taken by a chorus. As one musician involved expressed it:

“We were always there to be interacted with. Christian (Burgess) kept saying we were sort of witnesses to everything that was going on. And it meant that the actors felt that they had people there on stage. They weren’t just on their own. They could interact with us at moments. And we knew


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what they were feeling because we’d seen everything that had gone on. We really had to feel what they were feeling, so we weren’t completely cut off as musicians. ”

I was able to attend one of the public performances (January 2010), and conduct semi‐structured interviews with nine of the key people involved (including the producer, director, all the musicians, and one of the actor‐singers). The interviews took place between May and July 2010, after the project was over. I was also able to draw on some documentary data regarding these performances, including published reviews, and written feedback from some audience members (for example, in formal assessments of student performance made by staff members, blog entries, and published reviews). The remainder of this article addresses a number of key questions by drawing on the research materials available to me. These include questions that framed the research design (see appendix 1 for a list of the primary questions used in the interviews), but also include some emergent issues that the interviews revealed.

1. Historical background and individual motivation for participation I was interested to know what set of beliefs and expectations about personal and artistic benefits the key individuals brought to this project. I began by asking Christian Burgess (Director) “What have you observed happens when musicians and actors are encouraged to work together, and why you’re so enthusiastic about this work?” He answered:

“It springs from something I observed when I asked a pianist to come and work with some first year actors. She reluctantly agreed to improvise on the keyboard. When she actually connected with the keys, the level of commitment was something that the actors intuitively understood, and it was something I’d been struggling with them to communicate for about 3 weeks, using my probably ill chosen words. In that moment they sat up and they understood what it means to find that level of imperative, which will match a heightened text. There was something that was completely obvious about the emotional imperative in music, that wasn’t previously clear to the actors. And that set me thinking. That pianist actually stayed with us, unexpectedly. She had a response to the actors in the room, and she started to come and engage with them, warm up with them. There was something about the rituals of their activity which she found useful. There was something about their notion of being prepared to fail, which she hadn’t understood before. As far as I understand it, there is a lot about learning to be a high‐level musician that is about finding a


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level of perfection which is not connected to the human condition. But for actors it’s fundamental to their process to accept that they must fail and fail again, and as Samuel Becket says, fail better. They must fall on their face and get up again and try again, and gradually they will unpeel the layers of armour that they’ve used as a protection in the process, to access something , and to actually share something with somebody else in the space. The pianist started to understand that process, and she started to engage in it. She started to do a bit of acting with the actors. She started to learn a bit more about who she was, and I think her self‐esteem started to rise. I heard through the grapevine that her playing was helped. That was the start of what has been quite a long period of exploration in lots of different contexts. “

In another early experience of this kind of work, Burgess told me that

“Two (music students) got the two highest marks in their final recitals. And I was told that it was because they really knew how to come in and take the space, set the agenda for what they were going to do, and announce ‘this is me; this is all there is; and I play this instrument’ rather than ‘this is my instrument; I am going to hide behind it. I’m technically brilliant, but don’t look at me. This isn’t me. Just listen. Cover your eyes and listen’. I think they were saying ‘open your eyes; meet me’. And of course that’s something that an actor (without perhaps talking about it in those specific terms) has to take on board if he or she wants to perform in a theatre space.”

In sum, the belief expressed through these observations is (a) that musicians learn from actors how to develop a fuller and more engaging stage presence, and (b) actors learn from musicians how to insert a higher level of emotional power and commitment into their performance. These broad beliefs underpinned the artistic conception for this production of “The Last Five Years”. The producer, Fernando Pinho, observed that :

“The decision about having musicians more present than usual was made by Christian. Because Christian always wants to work with musicians on stage, he likes to explore this by looking to a musician as a performer rather than just a musician. So, a performer is much more complex, more complete than just playing the notes. He came with this idea that the Last Five Years is quite a big demand for two actors, so let’s use the space for musicians. In the beginning it was quite a naïve decision, but we very soon realized that it was much more important than we thought, because there was so much stuff in the music that the musicians could transfer to the actors, and vice versa”


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The student performers in “The Last Five Years” had varying degrees of awareness of Burgess’ intentions and beliefs when they first agreed to take part in this elective extra‐curricular activity. These ranged from relatively uninformed curiosity through a more strategic awareness. Most had little prior experience of this particular kind of collaborative work. For instance, one student said

“Fernando (the producer) just sent out an email to lots of musicians saying ‘would you be up for this?’. And I am not really sure why I decided I wanted to do it, but I am always curious to try new things and they said something about us being involved with the acting bit, and I thought it would be good for me to do something different”.

Another said

“I have always wanted to be on stage… Fernando said ‘ you’ll be on stage, doing acting’, and that’s what really drew me… having the experience of working with actors. .. I knew there was a programme “Open call”1 that was going on. But apart from that I was was pretty unaware of it, but always thought there should be more. I was always a bit disappointed at the lack of collaboration.”

A more strategic comment was

“ I want to play music that people enjoy… I think a lot of the time, orchestral music is great, but I don’t think people enjoy concerts as much as if they went to see, say, a musical or a band or something where there was an element of performance as well as somebody getting up and doing a necessary thing to produce the sound… I’ve never sat through an orchestral concert that I haven’t got bored in at least 10 times. I feel it is educating me, but that’s about as far as it goes. I much prefer to be doing stuff like the L5Y, because I feel there’s a lot more enjoyment for everybody to be had from doing that.”

Experience of the rehearsal process It was clear that Christian Burgess operated on a directorial model where specific artistic decisions emerged from the group interactions in a somewhat organic way, rather than being pre‐planned in detail. This is rather well described by the producer, in elaborating on the two‐way collaborations from musicians to actors and from actors to musicians.

1 “Open Call” is the title of one of the elective collaborative activities that had recently taken place at the school.


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“I think that discovery came from everyone. We already made the decision that the lover was going to be the cellist. As soon as we started to look at the piece in detail, we noticed “here’s a place where he’s talking about a lover, and if he’s talking about the lover, he can look to her at this point. And the cellist can look to him as well”. So we started to discover these connections and – to be honest ‐ some of them were created by us..…..The musicians and specifically, in particular one player, started to analyse the score in detail and say “this bit of the music is a repetition from that moment on the previous song, so that might mean that he’s feeling the same kind of feeling”. So she analysed the score in detail, trying to find these connections. And Christian used them to make a connection, a visual connection between the actor and the musician. And so this discovery was a collaborative project, everyone discovered something, and every time they discovered something they came to rehearsals saying “look, I’ve found this”. Does this make any sense?” And we decided for some of them “yes”, and some of them “no”. For example, the score was written to have all instruments in balance, but at some points we found that in a sad moment we needed to have more bass, to increase the drama in the scene. So in some numbers, we did some arrangements in order to have more bass at some point. And then the actress, at that point looked at the player, establishing a connection, saying “I’m feeling that, you are playing now. You are playing these sad notes and I’m feeling it.” ,, These were the kind of things that we found out during the process.”

How did musicians and actors experience this way of working, and what did each learn? Musicians learning from actors Musicians’ accounts of what they learned, particularly from the rehearsal sessions, were rich and varied. They learned both from the activities that actors undertook, and also the qualities or attitudes that they demonstrated while undertaking those activities. Here, six themes are highlighted: three activities (warm‐up, lengthy rehearsals, concentration on text), and three attitudes (openness to the group, engagement, and risk taking). ACTIVITIES WARM UP Musicians were introduced to the extensive pre‐rehearsal warm‐up activities that are habitual for actors, several of them for the first time, and this clearly was an eye‐opener for some of them: e.g.

“The way (actors) prepare themselves, their preparation for even a rehearsal I think is incredible, and they really get themselves into a


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zone and the way in which they use their bodies to the full potential every time, and musicians don’t particularly do that…. I have been trying to relax and get myself in the right state of mind before picking up my instrument in the morning. whereas before I would warm up by playing scales – I wouldn’t warm up my mind and body as much….”

LENGTHY REHEARSALS Musicians experienced, again often for the first time, the intensive day‐long rehearsal schedules, running over several days, that characterizes theatrical work. This was both enlightening and challenging, and the same musician would often express both feelings: e.g.

“It was really nice to be able to work at that detailed slow pace most of the time.. When you’re rehearsing in an orchestra you have an afternoon to learn the repertoire for the night…. The worst thing about about it was the fact we had so many hours to rehearse. And for a musician that’s not normal. .. It’s a bit frustrating for us because we’re just sitting there waiting for them to do their stuff. “

CONCENTRATION ON TEXT Some musicians remarked on the centrality of text for actors., e.g.

“The way they approach their text. You know, text is everything to those guys and it really helps you appreciate how the music’s been structured.. more than anything it really makes you understand.”

In some ways, it should be no surprise to musicians that actors give the same kind of detailed attention to text that musicians give to a score; but the above remark shows that this particular musician had not fully realized that deep attention to text has musical implications too. QUALITIES OPENNESS TO THE GROUP Musicians observed that among the actors there was a quality of being fully present and fully available to the group which was not typical of the music rehearsal process which was much more solitary at its core. e.g.

“It was good to see how actors work.. I had no idea. It’s really engaging – the way they work, and so much more of a team than musicians. Musicians spend hours a day on their own, whereas actors have to work together to produce anything, and they’re so


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open about everything, because they have to be‐ because the have to be so in touch with their emotions and each other.”

ENGAGEMENT Equally salient to musicians was the level of engagement with the work and the process. There was a clearly expressed belief that is was possible for musicians to get away with less than 100% commitment in many situations, particularly in the more typical group situations, such as orchestral playing: and that actor’s attitudes were something of a “wake‐up call”.

“Staying engaged with the piece all the way through One of those things about really engaging with the actors and the way they work, is how you just need to be there the whole time. You can’t just drift off and go, oh now I am going to do this, now I can pay attention.” “What I learned most is completely believing in what you’re doing. That’s something about acting. If you have a bad actor you really see that they are not convinced in what they are doing. And I suppose it’s the same with music, where you don’t always see as much because you are covered up with technicalities… So, just believing more in what you doing and not really caring…”

RISK TAKING Musicians observed that actors seemed to have less inhibitions than the typical musician, and that this could be productive in rehearsal.

“The best thing was the director saying “if you’ve got any moments’ rest always shout out… Every time someone would say “well I’ve got this here, he’d jump straight on it and said “well then, we’ll make something of that”. And the more that happened the more they could see the sort of thing that could actually be quite good. It was just having the confidence to dare to do things, which the actors have no trouble doing whatsoever. They’ve got no inhibitions. It’s inhibitions. That’s what it’s about. You know, musicians have got hundreds of them.” “It was really good fun working with actors, because they seem to have lost any inhibitions a long time ago, and its very refreshing to work with people like that because you question yourself in the things that you have hang ups about.”

Cast members observed that actors were much more willing to be experimental and improvisatory during rehearsals, and that this brought some benefits.


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“This idea of really engaging with the audience and looking out of your sheet music and really baring your soul. Christian always says – you need to have thin skin. You need to let what you’re feeling out, and that’s what’s beautiful. And I think it was a really difficult process for the musicians to be focusing so much on the story and what we were trying to convey and what we were trying to do. And we did lots of exercises connecting with each other and warming up together, and I think that was very new for them [ the musicians]..”

Obviously you have to follow the music and the structure and the rhythms and the times, but within that, and especially in rehearsals, really allowing yourself to get it wrong and to fail and to push it.. Christian was always saying. forget about that, forget about that, this is what we want to do.. and driving X (musical director) crazy, because she was saying, no, we have to stick to the music. But I think in rehearsals this thing of going crazy with it and seeing what happens.. [is necessary].

Nonetheless, the risk‐taking approach did lead to perceived tensions, as freedom to experiment came into conflict with the needs for exactitude and co‐ordination brought by the score.

“I think the challenge for the actors was to hold back, because if they overdid it then I think the music suffered. X had a massive song, but he really threw everything into it. The music would suffer because it is quite hard to keep the vocals restrained if you are going full pelt. Whereas the musicians, who are used to restraining everything, because we know that the music suffers if you lose yourself, then had to learn how to lose ourselves a bit more, get a bit more of what they had. We had to end up trying to meet in the middle, because we are not used to letting go and they are not used to holding back, so I thought that was really interesting, finding that balance to make it work.”

Actors learning from musicians The actor perspective was similarly divided between observation of things that the musicians did, and qualities that they brought to that. A key process of learning for one of the actor‐singers was a greater appreciation of how details in the music, particularly thematic similarities across numbers, could be used as cues for dramatic decisions.

“X the violinist would always find echoes in her part of earlier lines I had sung, or played in a different key…, and we would never have found those things and the connection between them. Discovering that through rehearsals was amazing. It makes it more exciting for


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the audience eventually if we can convey what we found, those little connections between what we were doing with the musicians, and feeding off each other.”

There was a quality of commitment to, and immersion in, the music that showed the actors something of value to them. This was both about an intense attention to detail, but also an emotional power deriving from these factors. One actor remarked:

“It absolutely filled me with confidence, and it allowed me to fee that there was a real sense of sharing the story and sharing responsibility, rather than it all being about me and [the other actor]. It totally became about all of us, all of us putting what we were doing together… And watching the musicians play and just really listening to them is invaluable for an actor I think, because their dedication, their commitment, is just fascinating, and sometimes as an actor it’s really easy to pull of a bit or feel a bit shy.. and I am sure musicians have the same problems, but it seemed that when they were really playing, just everything was being poured into what they were doing with complete commitment, and it was so inspiring for me to watch. And the music totally ignites something in you, emotionally.

Musicians were also aware of their effect on actors, whether positive or more challenging: e.g.

“X said that when I was playing… to him into his singing that he could get a lot from that, just the energy I put into that, or the emotion. But I really don’t know, they always seem so involved with themselves [laughs]”

“One of the best bits of training I have had from the Youth Music Theatre Company is not let any little detail go, which unfortunately with LFY was a practically impossible task, especially seeing as X and Y were not coming into it as trained singers. You know, they’re not used to being pulled up on little musical details like that. So one of the biggest challenges I encountered was allowing them to have the freedom they wanted with the text… There were so many of these little (musical) details that were never going to get them all in, so it was a case of me deciding which ones to be pedantic on and which not, to the extent that it drove the actors mad a couple of times. .. There are hundreds of mistakes in the recording, you know. Is that to say that Jason Robert Brown was happy to let them go? Probably. But I guess I just wanted to instill in the actors what is written, and then we can go from there.”

Experience of the public performances


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One of the musicians did not take part in the first two performances, but happened to be in the audience for one of them. She remarked, of her experience in the audience:

“It just felt like they were a team, the actors and musicians, and its really nice to see musicians smiling when they’re playing, and enjoying themselves for once, you know, rather than being bored and just doing their job before they go home. It was really nice to see interactions between the different players. The guitar and bass had something.. a really good interaction, and then one of the actors had something with the bass. That was really nice. I really liked that because it’s so nice to see people enjoying performing rather than just doing it, which I think you get a lot of the time. In a pit most musicians have no idea what is going on on stage. They’re more interested in chucking minstrels at the conductor.”

One of the other musicians provided an almost mirror‐image account of this experience from the stage.

“I became much more relaxed with myself and with playing. When you’re brought up on classical music, and classically trained to do concerts, you get into this mindset that there’s certain things you mustn’t do and certain things that you must do. And to be completely free is something that you mustn’t do as a classical musician, because you really have to be focused at the same time as being slightly free. But (in the Last Five Years) when we were on stage it did really feel like the music was not the most important thing there, which meant it actually came across quite well I presume, because it was really free. You could just enjoy playing it.. the music was not extremely complex which helped so much as it meant you could just relax and enjoy playing it whilst acting and interacting with other people.”

Connection to, and feedback from the audience The interviews also probed the awareness that those involved in the production had of the audience, and what kinds of information they received from the audience, during and after the performance. Some of this information came from the performers themselves, and their interactions with audience members, and some from the director and producer (including press and other public‐domain reactions collected by the producer). Performers and audience Three elements of audience influence emerged in the narratives of the performers. First was that element provided during the performance itself by the cues coming from the audience experienced as an entity


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(and a somewhat anonymous or impersonal entity). Second was that element that hinged on the performer’s advance knowledge that certain individuals known to them would be in the audience, and how that awareness affected them during the performance. Third was the element provided by direct feedback provided by audience members in their post‐performance one‐on‐one interactions with performers. Overall audience cues

“I could tell when (the audience) were on my side or Jamie’s side of the story, who they were siding with. Interviewer: how could you tell? From what? P: I don’t know what it is but I could just tell.. if it’s something in the energy of the room.. you can tell when an audience is really listening and sympathizing with you…. It’s like a temperature…” “The audience really make a difference to how you feel as a performer, you know. If they’re laughing with you it sort of really encourages you. If they don’t laugh at a moment you think is meant to be hilarious, you sort of think, oh God, what are we doing wrong? … Sometimes you’d see someone laughing and really engaged and you’d think – oh great, this is wonderful. And then sometimes you’d see somebody sat there and they’d just be looking at the ceiling, you know, sort of looking around peeling their nails, or looking most unimpressed, and you feel you’re breathing in their feelings somehow.”

Some observations suggested an ambiguity about being over‐aware of the audience during the performance itself, because of the need to remain focused on (and a full part of) the unfolding drama on stage. For instance:

Interviewer. “When (spontaneous) applause happens, do you think it directly affects how you are for the rest of the performance. P. “Yes and no. Of course it’s great to receive applause and to receive an immediate enthusiastic response from the audience, because it does spur you on. You think you’re doing good. But at the same time, as an artist, you shouldn’t be spending the whole thing aiming for the response. Because it really is a case of, who are you performing this for? Of course it’s being mounted for an audience, but there’s a difference between old‐fashioned music theatre and some of the newer stuff that’s coming out. In the older stuff there is very little story line or plot, you know. It is all for the audience’s pleasure. Whereas this is very different. It is to tell a story and the drama of it is so paramount to the way it happens. … I guess the biggy was to hear what people were saying afterwards… It was really flattering really – a lot of the feedback was how much they were watching me because I was so involved. So clearly I was doing


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something right because I did make such an effort to stay engaged rather than hide in my music.”

And also:

“The play was designed so that there wasn’t time for applause because it broke up the story. It was kind of seamless. Interviewer: that’s interesting, if there wasn’t applause, how did you get a sense at the end of a number that they’d enjoyed it? R: Because you could see the front few rows, if you dared to look. There were times when the lights went down and you could see everyone’s faces but they were always looking at the actors, so you were safe to have a little peek at what their faces were like.”

One theme that was evident in the narratives of both the musicians and the actors was a sense that their engagement with the audience was not so much a direct communication as projected and mediated through their engagement with each other, on the stage. For instance:

Interviewer (to pianist and musical director): “How did the musicians engage with the audience?” P. “The engagement I am talking about is with the actors and with the action, because that is not something we are used to…. X (actor) was probably the only person who directly went to the audience, just because he could. He had moments when he could do that. If I am honest, I almost block the audience out. I don’t know. I certainly don’t look at them, or if I do I feel I am doing something wrong, because I start thinking “who’s looking at me today”… On the nights that did fill up I had people sitting almost right next to me. But I certainly didn’t look at them. You can’t feel anything from them, exactly how they are responding unless you hear a little response like a gasp or a laugh or something.”

And from an actor:

“I didn’t have much eye contact with the audience. And I think that was to do with the lighting. In some of my songs I had big spotlights on me, so I could see the audience’s faces. And in my more emotional songs at the beginning I was totally imagining where I was… I almost forget the audience is there… the moments which were most intense I did forget about the audience because it was just about me and him (the other actor). It was about me and him signing and telling what we were feeling, with this music kind of fuelling us.”

Effect of known audience members in the room


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Performers mentioned both positive and negative aspects of knowing particular people in the audience:

“During the performance, when we can on and sang “I do” we had to find someone in the audience. It was quite interesting that you could actually find who you wanted to find. And that made me smile, because one of my friends was there one night and I sang “I do” to her, and she just laughed. It was great.” “If there are old friends in the audience who I haven’t seen for a whole, it really distracts me, and that’s something I’ve got to work on… It’s almost worrying that you won’t live up to their expectations of you, and feeling that you’re not able to exceed their expectations, because you should always be what people think of you or something.”

Postperformance feedback from known audience members Every performer interviewed indicated that several audience members sought them out after the performance to give explicit feedback. This feedback was clearly highly salient, and highly valued. Among the performers, the main categories of feedback came (a) from friends and family, and (b) from professionals such as teachers, critics, and potential hirers.

Interviewer. “Did they (friends) give specific feedback on the way the actors and the musicians were..?? P. “Yes… one of the main things they noticed was how we interacted with the actors and the actors interacted with us. We were just all sort of one.” “One of my friends commented that every time I’d been rehearsing for L5Y I was much more alive as a person. “ “My teacher came as well.. which I was really nervous about… She was really impressed.. She was most impressed by my ability to just go on stage and to that scene. She said “oh, you have a really good aura” or whatever, which I suppose is really different from classical music. Because I’m always so used to playing to her and being nervous, because I know she’s going to say this, this and this are wrong – she knows so much! This showed her I could do something a bit different.” “In one review I read “flawless orchestra”, you know, absolutely the highest praise you can get.” (see: http://lurkmoophy.twosacompany.org/review‐last‐five‐years , also http://oughttobeclowns.blogspot.com/2010/04/theatre‐review‐last‐five‐years‐barbican.html )


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It was rare to find cases where negative audience comments were reported. One respondent remarked that if audience members did have negative reactions they would tend to keep them to themselves. However one performer did remark

“The second night I was terrified because my dad was there and he is the harshest critic in the whole world. So the way that you’d find out whether you’ve done well in something is ask his opinion, and if he doesn’t say anything bad about it, it means that it was ok… He said that the timing was off in the band sometimes. He also knows that I am not very good at (instrument) yet so he was nitpicking about that. But I think overall, actually, I was quite impressed with the lack of criticism of the production, just because normally he’s quite hot on criticism. “

Director/Producer and audience Director and producer are in a different, and somewhat privileged position regarding audience feedback, compared to the cast. They will tend to receive direct comment from institutional and external sponsors (e.g. publisher), and other major stakeholders, which will not, in general come the way of an individual performer. Some of this feedback will be more important to them than others. Christian Burgess, the Director, was quite explicit about this:

“I know when something is ok. I don’t need massive reassurance. There were three really considered responses, and those three were the major responses that counted for me. Barry Ife (School Principal) was one of then. He’s brilliant. He comes and sees all the work, and if he doesn’t like it he says ‘I understand why you put that on. To me it didn’t work’. But he was very positive about the Last Five Years… Julian Philips (composer) sent me a wonderful email. He’s a man I hugely admire. Patrick Marber (playwright and director) equally. These are individuals whose own work I admire so much that I was really delighted with their response. “

Likewise, Fernando Pinho, the producer, observed:

“X, the Josef Weinberger representative, the person who represents the author, the composer, came to see me and said ‘Fernando, this was the best production of the Last Five Years I’ve ever seen. Because you found a solution for this problem of having just two actors, who have 90 minutes on stage on their own. You found an amazing answer for the invisible characters, because you made them visible. You created more emotion because we could see the face of the cellist, knowing that she was a second option in his life, not his wife. “


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Influence on musicians “normal” activity The last theme in the interviews related to how this production had implications for the ongoing and future work of the instrumental musicians. The most extreme, and possibly institutionally unsettling response, came from those musicians who were experiencing frustration and dissatisfaction of one sort or another with the traditional instrumental route on which they had embarked, and found a strong “conversion experience” through this production which made them feel that this was the sort of activity that they wished to concentrate on in future. For instance:

“I’m really hoping that I get more work like this. It’s helped me to change direction, actually. It made me realise what I need to do if I want to go in this direction, so it’s been more useful than anything I’ve done in the past five years. Playing in orchestras has got me into music college, but now I know where I want to go, so its’ good.”

At the other end of the scale were musicians who felt that the experience could in some ways have been detrimental to their other activities: for instance

Interviewer: “I wonder the extent to which it’s possible to say that being involved in that kind of thing would have actually had positive feedback on your straight classical playing in some ways.” P. “I am thinking it has a negative impact because you start worrying less about intonation and you’d start worrying less about your technique… I just kept thinking, with all the rehearsals I am not having time to practice my technique… but on the other hand it did free me up… I would say it’s had more of a negative impact on my classical playing than positive. I don’t mind, I am not fussed by that. I have enjoyed it. “

A third category of response could be considered “neutral”, the experience had neither helped nor hindered other activities: e.g.

Interviewer: “where does what you have learned have its greatest impact? Would it be in solo performance? “ P. “Maybe a bit on chamber music, but not really. I think chamber music is much more detailed than what we did in L5Y.” Interviewer: When you do a solo recital do all these issues ‐ about stage presence and how you should hold yourself – get taught?” P. “I think it’s supposed to be part of the consideration, but actually in the end you either have stage presence or you don’t, in a way. And I don’t really know what you can do to make it better. I’ve never actually thought about it before. Nerves, and things like that are much more of an issue. .. You don’t want to walk on like a mouse: you want to make the audience reassured, but sometimes if you’re too flambouyant or over the top, people accuse you of taking away from the music, and this kind of thing.”


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“Interviewer.. “Did your (main instrumental) teacher know you were involved?” P. “Yes, he knew that I was involved. He didn’t come. I did ask him and he wanted to come.” Interviewer. “But he’s supporting of you doing that kind of thing?” P. “I think he’s fairly neutral. I think if I want to do it then that’s fine. I think he’d rather me be doing things than not doing anything really.”

Equally common, however, were responses which identified specific ways in which the experience had the capacity to enrich and deepen their musical activity across the broader range. For instance:

“It made me learn that if I am going to perform in front of people then I have to perform as a whole person rather than just a musician, which I guess I had been told already but you don’t realise until you’ve really got to do it. It taught me to free up a bit. I just had more licence to sort of improvise or do what I wanted, which I am not used to, which was amazing because you have to free up and you have to also be convinced by your own performance, and you have to take control of it, while if you are sat in an orchestra you can just follow.” Interviewer – “Do you think anything you have got from actors has got into your playing in any particular way, outside that production?” P. “Definitely: Partly being around actors who don’t have to know that much about music means that you’re not being judged all the time. And they’re usually pretty respectful about what you do, so you don’t have to worry about people making judgments and things like that. So I guess that helps with one’s confidence, because they all think you’re really good, and then afterwards it runs on into other things.”

It was significant that, although this project was informed by the highest level of acting teaching available in the School (through the directorial presence of Christian Burgess, Director of Drama), there was no staff member from the music school involved in any way in the production. The role of musical director was actually taken by one of the student players, the pianist. This was perceived as causing an imbalance in the relative attention paid to musical versus dramatic details in the rehearsal. As one of the student musicians observed

‘I think there was one thing which was maybe not quite as good as it could have been, because we were always so involved in what the acting people wanted. We never actually had any musicians telling us, the balance here is not good, the intonation, whatever. So the music was all sort of secondary to that I think. And as much acting and flamboyant as you are, it doesn’t actually make technical aspects of it any better. So we might have had more sensitivity, but not really... Christian has more power [ than the student musical director], so he could always say, I want to do this bit rather than... the actors would never wait for the musicians to rehearse. We were always


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made to wait for them, and if we ever wanted to rehearse something we had to find our own time.’

Another musician observed: “I don’t know whether the musical team built up a particularly musical relationship. I just felt very frustrated because I am used to trying out things, and there was no way you could do that because we weren’t given time together as musicians. It was great to bond with the band on the acting part of it, so there was a great connection between all of us, but I don’t know how musically based this was.”

In response, Christian Burgess observed

“Yes, I think that is a fair criticism, and that’s a reflection of my inexperience really in terms of this genre, you know. I’ve never done a musical before, ever. It was not deliberate abuse of their process. And that’s a fascinating reflection that they never had an outside musical eye….And I think if somebody had suggested that to me, I would have been actually very interested to get somebody who really knew their onions on the music, to come in and listen and say, okay what about this, and maybe work with them separately a bit. So very good thought, I would say. And actually the comment about me having more power is of course true, but equally…sometimes I would overrule [the musical director, and side] with the musicians, because they wanted to go a different way from her.

He went on to observe that an upcoming collaborative project would indeed be involving a senior music staff member working with the musicians alongside him.” SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS Doing this project was an educative experience for both musicians and actors, who clearly learned things from working together that they didn’t know before, or hadn’t fully appreciated. The project was artistically successful, enhanced the knowledge base of those involved, and generated a high level of positive engagement. It was undoubtedly a high quality and enriching experience for all involved. Evidence of a direct impact on the way that musicians approached their playing in general was scattered through the comments. Perhaps the most clear impacts were in the area of overall confidence and stage presence, as well as in a greater appreciation of the benefits of an improvisatory and risk‐taking stance. The project was not one which presented new challenges to musicians in terms of technical or interpretational issues within the music itself. As several musicians observed, the music was well within their technical and musical grasp, and so did not particularly stretch them musically. The challenges were more


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about adding things on top of the notes, and paying as much attention to how they came across as stage persona, as how well they played the notes. Inevitably, as would be expected when any new challenge is faced, some musicians experienced this as getting in the way of, and possibly even adversely affecting, their more “mainstream” musical concerns. Similarly, the dramatic challenges of the piece for actors were not commented on as being particularly out of the ordinary. More challenging appeared to be the imperative to achieve the kind of faithfulness to the score in their singing which the musicians in general, and the musical director in particular, considered non‐negotiable. Thinking of this production in the context of a process of institutional change, it might be that the lack of involvement of a senior staff member from one of the music departments was an opportunity missed. Although some music professors were impressed at what involvement in this production allowed their own instrumental students so show, other music teachers were more neutral. For all her undoubted talents, the student musical director felt she lacked authority at some points in the production process, and clearly she would not carry the kind of political influence within the institution as a whole that a staff member would carry. For both musical and strategic reasons, it might be advisable to ensure where possible that the collaboration which was so clearly fruitful at a student level be also better manifested in collaboration between peers at the senior staff level too.


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APPENDIX 1 ‐ QUESTIONS FOR SEMI‐STRUCTURED INTERVIEWS Describe how you came to be involved in this production, and why you agreed to participate. Did you anticipate that it would enhance your creative skills in particular ways? What were they? Have you done any intensive work with actors/musicians before. What was the best thing about being involved in this production? What was the hardest thing? What particular challenges did you face during rehearsals, and how did they get resolved? What was your experience of working with drama/music students? What did you learn from this? What changes in your way of performing, if any, happened during this production? What did you notice or feel about the audience on performance nights? Were there particular people in the audience you knew (or knew about)? What were your feelings about them being there? Were there specific things that you were trying to communicate to the audience / at specific moments? Was this different in any way from other performances you have been recently involved in? if so, how? What are the most important things you feel you have learned from being involved in this production? Do you have anything else you had hoped to say but didn’t get the chance?

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