A regular Carnival Cinema column of showbiz life musings by Captain Frodo.
Natural Acts
It is a tough world out there. Always competition. There are so many of us. Circus artists, carnival freaks, and performers of allied arts, all competing for limited paid work. New artists are coming out of circus schools, magic circles, gymnastics clubs, skateparks, and improv jams, every day. Many of them with skills some of us from the old guard could only dream of. They are young and beautiful, which is all the rage these days. They are the hope for the future, but also our competition for survival in the cut-throat world of showbiz.
In a competitive environment, you must adapt and be constantly developing your acts to make sure they are fit to survive. The fittest will survive. What that means is almost impossible to pin down. It’s not just enough to hit the gym six times a week. The performing market, the demands of the environment, are constantly changing, and new niches will always be discovered and created. I’ll talk about evolution for a bit and then we’ll find some ways it can benefit our own act development and showbiz survival.
Biological and Cultural Evolution
I find the analogy between our art of showmanship and the theory of Evolution to be an interesting and illuminating exercise. I have been in love with the subject of evolution since it was first taught to me at the Steiner School in Haugesund, Norway by Trond Skaftnesmo. I then moved onto reading the essay collections of Stephen Jay Gould, before getting onto Richard Dawkins, whom we’ll get back to.
With the fundamentals of Darwin’s theory as a mirror, we can greatly increase our understanding of the creative process and development of acts.
Just as Darwin’s theory never aimed to explain the Origin of Life, this analogy does not deal with the Origin or Creation of Acts, only the development of them after their premiere performance. The process of Creation is different and subject of a future study.
The Shapes of Time.
Before we go any further, let’s have a quick refresher look at biological evolution. Evolution is the process by which organisms change over time as a result of changes in heritable physical or behavioural traits. That’s a bit of a mouthful, let’s unpack it a little.
There are four principles at work in evolution. They are variation, selection, inheritance and time. Any variation, random or otherwise, that makes an organism better suited to its environment increases its chances of survival. The process of who survives we call selection. Any advantage in survival, such as longer necks on proto-giraffes, or Brontosaurus, giving them access to more food in regions other animals can’t reach, increases said species’ chances of surviving and having more babies. As long as the advantageous long neck trait can be passed from parent to progeny the next generation will arrive with an advantage. This is the principle of inheritance. Finally, all this, like everything under the sun, unfolds in time.
Let’s look a little closer at inheritance. The fundamental element of biological evolution is a gene. This is the thing which makes it possible for us to inherit the traits of our ancestors. A gene is made up of DNA, and that’s all we need to say about that. You won’t be expected to know anything more for the test, but those of you who remember anything from biology class at school might remember that circus acts are not considered living beings. Hence they have no DNA. Is this where the analogy falls apart? No, it is not. One day it might fall apart, but that day is not today.
Circus acts are cultural phenomena, hence no genes, but genes aren’t the only kind of replicators. There are two kinds of replicators: Genes and Memes. In 1976, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins came up with the concept of a meme. These days a meme is most commonly thought of as a picture of a cat, or sweet baby Yoda, with a funny slogan. When it was coined it was posited as a unit for cultural content which can be passed from one person to another, analogous to the unit of biological heredity. Memes spread through culture like genes spread through the gene pool, with imitation replacing bodily reproduction.
A meme is an idea, a behaviour, or style that spreads between people through imitation. Monkey see monkey do. One person turns his cap around to be cool, others see it and imitate it. Next thing you know you have fifty people wearing caps backwards, the wrong way around during a sports event so the lot of them have to shade their eyes with their hands.
Any phenomena, as simple as a hat worn a particular way, or as complex as a religion, are memes. The memes that survive are the ones which manage to spread themselves. Religions are strong replicators partly because they have built-in features aimed explicitly at spreading themselves. Proselytising is a feature of most, if not all, religions, and this gives them viral power. It doesn’t take much imagination to see the link with proselytising and a gene’s function of heredity.
Natural Selection of Acts
With all this in mind, can we get any practical advice from these esoteric speculations? I think so. We’ll soon get to a simple, yet supremely effective, method for improving your act, and the key to unlocking this will be natural selection.
Natural selection is not a random process, it’s guided by death, or its flip side, survival. This is how organisms get so perfectly adapted to their environments. Like how the Mountain hare, Lepus Timidus, changes the colour of its fur to match the seasonal environment. It’s reddish-brown in summer and white in winter. It’s a supremely perfected adaption.
These kinds of phenomena were explained by supernatural solutions, like God made it this way, until Darwin published his theory of evolution in On the Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection (1859). The basic idea is simple but extraordinarily powerful in its ability to explain complex natural phenomena.
Offspring is not identical to the parent organism. Mutation and change happens. Some of these mutations can be passed on from parents to offspring. This means there is variation in groups of animals. Not everyone is the same. This is where natural selection comes in. Some animals with favourable traits are more likely to survive than others. It feels almost funny to point that out. A dog born with extra strong legs will have a bigger chance of surviving than a dog born with no legs. Further, the strong-legged dog has a bigger chance of finding a mate and having puppies.
In our Craft of Showmanship, there’s no real death involved, unless something goes horribly wrong, yet the concept most certainly exists on a more regular basis.
If a comedian comes off stage and tells you they just died on stage it means they failed. On stage, you live if the audience likes you and die if they don’t. If the showman fail in keeping an audience’s attention, they die a stage death. The author Brian Boyd expresses this idea beautifully in his book On the Origin of Stories (2009).
“Because art involves external forms, the testing mechanism operates also in the minds of other humans, in terms of their interest. Attention provides the selective mechanism of art. If a work of art fails to earn attention, it dies.”
Attention is the great decider. Attention decides what lives and dies. Luckily stagecraft and showbiz is more like a video game than real life. If you die, it will be horrible and agonisingly embarrassing, but you’ll get another chance. Maybe not at the same venue, because, again, like in video games, you haven’t got unlimited lives. If you keep dying on stage the job offers will dry up. Game over.
Now we have two levels of natural selection working on our acts. Competition for gigs, and the struggle for stage survival. So, what can we learn from the biological process of gene selection to ratchet things up for our cultural process of meme selection?
Difference is the fuel of evolution
DNA replication is extremely accurate, it’s estimated there’s about one error in the copying of every ten billion nucleotides. But even such incredible fidelity is not perfect, there are random flaws. This is called mutation. Most errors are bad or inert, but some are the start of a major survival benefit… You see where this is going?
The replications process of an act is each performance. Each performance is a new version of the act. As you step on stage you bring the experience of the last times you performed it. This is your ancestry. Tonight’s performance is, in a sense, the child of all previous performances.
You have your script, your music, your skills, and so forth, and each night the audience reacts differently. The result is that your act is never an exact copy of the night before. You might’ve had a hard day, maybe you missed the bus that was supposed to take you to work, or you got stuck in a traffic jam on Las Vegas Boulevard, even though you had sworn never to drive that way again. Take the back way. Always take the back way.
I have an ideal version of my act in my head. How I imagine it. How I plan it. How I expect and desire the response to be. How incredible my pratfalls will be. Like Plato’s world of ideas where the physical world is not as real or true as the timeless, absolute, unchangeable world of ideas. Each performance is just a version of this ideal Act. Some nights are amazing; perfect flow, perfect confluence of Showman and Audience. Others, not so much.
It doesn’t matter how well-rehearsed, practiced and performed your act is, as you take the stage unforeseen things will happen, deviating your act from the ideal act. It can be mistakes or serendipitous discoveries. The light blinds you, a heckler puts you down, a child walks onto stage, or your skills temporarily eludes you, the possibilities for minor errors and novelty in the execution of your act are endless.
Some mistakes are big enough to lose your Crowd. Like if you accidentally stumble over and hurt that child that wandered out onto stage, in my last example. You’ll lose their trust and attention, and die. If you are an attentive performer, keeping your mind on everything, you can usually avoid the real big mistakes.
In amongst the bad mistakes, there are potential gems. Little changes which turn out to benefit the Act. A funny bit of improv in reaction to the heckler, a line delivered in a strange way when blinded by the follow-spot, a funny comment from the audience, a stumble that gets a laugh, funny moments, impressive moments, groans, everything can happen as you struggle for survival in your stage environment.
My suggestion is: Remember the differences, the deviations, the discoveries. Just one per show is enough. One extra laugh. A new giggle from a funny look you do after a skill presentation. A wow moment improved by a significant instance of timing. Write them down in your Craft Journal.
There is always more to discover in the beginning of an acts life, so I recommend filming each one of your first ten or fifteen shows. Film, review, recreate.
If you discover one new moment each performance and manage to recreate each of them in your subsequent shows, you have a rapidly evolving act. Given you do regular gigs. This will soon create yet another level of selection pressures on your act. After several seasons of shows, say a hundred shows along the Way, you’ll have added so many extra moments of interaction and reaction your act will be full. (At least it will seem full, but you might soon be in the game for taking it to the next level, but I’ll get back to that.) Some of the new moments you have discovered in show 89 will be better than others you found in show 23 and 46. Enter selection pressure. There’s now an evolutionary arms race within your act, material begins fighting for a right to remain in the act. Unless you let your act get longer and longer, which isn’t something to strive for.
All your material gets honed and perfected if you use the audience and their reactions as your compass and director. The new moments develop and slowly becomes part of the act proper. They become bits of new material which in itself become solid dependable laughs or wow moments. The standard of each bit, joke or cool move improves, thus raising the bar for the survival of future mutations and moments. Any new fortuitous discovery must now not just be new, but better than the gag, groan, or wow it replaces.
Back to the idea of the act being full. This is where we get into layering. I wrote extensively about this in an earlier blog post called Get Your Act Together. This is the concept of having several things going at the same time. Like how I, in my tennis racket act, have a contortion act, a slapstick act, funny script, and a running gag of throwing confetti, all intertwined. It wasn’t always like this. It started as a silent two and a half minute bit. I collected moments. For twenty-one years. Yes, that’s how long I have been doing this act. Almost half my life. I collected moments, recreated them, and when there was a lot of them, themes began to appear in the discovered moments. I began ordering the slapstick moments, I tuned the script, I scrutinised every confetti throw for how each one differed from the last. In this way the act went from one thing happening after the next, and getting longer and longer with each added moment, to working on several levels at the same time, collectively punching harder than the sum of its parts.
Natural selection should now be working on all sorts of levels. You have reached peak selection. It is working on improving your act so you can outcompete your fellow artists for gigs, you’re using your audience’s attention to guide you into discovering, choosing and improving your material, and finally, natural selection is working to improve your added new moments.
In this way, your act is like life. Complex. Complicated. Filled with mistakes and mishaps. But if you have the right attitude you can use all this to strengthen yourself. Learn from evolution. Learn from life. Nothing in life makes sense except in the light of evolution.
See you all along the Way
Yours truly, Captain Frodo
Master Showman, dad, husband.
Currently performing in Opium at The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas.
(And Carnival Cinema Co-Founder)
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