A regular Carnival Cinema column of showbiz life musings by Captain Frodo –
On the way of the Showman: On Music
Emotional Amplification – On Music
Not long ago a friend and tremendous circus musician called Peter Bufano hit me up on the wireless for a conversation about music in circus. I agreed with enthusiasm as any prospect of spending time, digital, analog or otherwise with Mr Bufano is appreciated by me like bread by a duck. The following essay is heavily inspired by the thoughts we discussed. Thank you Peter! And to all you faithful readers, do yourself a favour and look up Cirkestra, Peter’s more than excellent band.
What does music do?
For acts, music is an amplifier of emotion. It heightens the experience of the act, often without the Crowd knowing exactly why. (Lighting also has this kind of ability, but that will not be the focus of this essay.) Sound design is an integral and essential part of any theatrical or filmic creation. We can learn a lot from watching movies with an ear on the multitude of ways it is used to heighten emotions, increase tension and so forth.
Even choosing to not use music, is a form of music. (Think only of John Cage’s 4’33.) Silence influences and colours acts as much as sound. No music is also a tool in your sound toolbox. Not having music at all creates one type of experience and turning the music off, or having silence, for a section of your act, have different yet similar effects. Silence, used sparingly, for instance one track ending with a pause before the next starts, can build a lot of tension. The sound of silence is powerful. It really points the Crowd’s magnifying glass at you. This is one reason why clown shows, with exploratory, theatre-style clowns, often perform in silence. It serves to focus on the action.
Why use Music?
In my experience, a Showman gigging around town often has very little control of lights, staging and scenery. Whilst almost any gig will have a sound system. As bang for your buck, sound is the number one. Music is the easiest, most effective, and most powerful way of staging your Act. It serves as back curtain and theatrical set. It can help placing your Crowd in the headspace, time period, place, and mood you want before you even enter the stage. It can guide your own actions and your audience’s emotions. Like the much talked about rug in the film The Big Lebowski, music really ties the room together.
A few bars of music before you enter the stage can tell the Crowd so much about what is about to happen. It sets up anticipation in a subtle and unconscious way.
A phat beat.
A wailing clarinet.
A string quartet.
A crooked accordion waltz.
A drum roll.
Wild wind and sound of crows.
Each sets up a palette of emotion, a realm of expectation. It builds a world.
Music as Transportation
Music moves you. You’re driving along and a song comes on the radio and immediately you are transported to a particular time and place. It can be specific to a memory or purely emotional from a song you haven’t even heard before.
I choose the music for my acts because I feel a particular track is the kind of music which is played in the world where my character belongs. The music you choose for your act is a way to transport your audience into the world where your act exists.
More often than not I will have my music begin before the audience sees me. The music suggests the world – then I step into it, and act in accordance with it.
OR subvert it.
I do a magic act, which, like most act I have, is very silly. It is set to classical music (Rossini’s Thieving Magpie,) and I’m wearing a tail coat and turban. The juxtaposition between the grandiosity of the music and the strangeness of my actions and look creates nice tension and with it comes great possibility for comedy. It also explains my odd bird-like behaviour and references. The grandiosity of the music further mirrors the way my magician character feels about his magic. Which is that it is all deep mysteries to be beheld with great reverence.
In my Tennis act I use Herb Alpert’s sweetly comical Tijuana Brass to soften and offset the brutality of, and unease with, the promise of a dislocation. I behave and belong with the music as a character even if some of the things I do could be played for revulsion or fear like some horror show. In this way the music serves to guide the Crowd into watching me like an animation or Buster Keaton slapstick character and thus tell them its OK to laugh at my misfortune.
If you are doing a full evening show, and can control the house music playing as the Crowd comes in, you have a great opportunity to guide their emotional expectations of what’s going to happen even before the show begins. A well thought out playlist might do some of the lift to transport your Crowd into your world. This kind of thinking is what a good DJ masters, ways to use sound to move a crowd.
Showman and Crowd dances
As you create and practice your act, you are creating a plan of how the act will be performed and how it is to be received and understood by the Crowd. This plan is, in a way, a memory of the future. A map of a situation that hasn’t happened yet. As you master your act you will become better and better at executing your memory of the future and be able to make it happen closer and closer to the way you want it. But no memory, of the past or the future, is perfect. The map is not the territory, so the true skill is to find the ways to playfully improvise and make even the most broken version of your future memory into a pleasurable experience for your Crowd.
Even when you have your act completely worked out and set and your music is recorded, each show still has a major variable in the Crowd. Each Crowd is different. The receptions differ and this again influences the feelings in the performer which, if properly attuned, affects her performance.
People often ask me how I deal with having to do the same thing all the time. I think part of the answer lies in the fact that the act never is quite the same. It is in a constant re-creation every time it is performed.
The variable of the Crowd influences every aspect of the performance. The music is in creation, through a conversation between it, the performer and the Crowd.
The performance is in creation, shaped by the Crowd’s response and the Showman’s interaction with his material and the music.
Further, the Crowd is in creation. For themselves, their inner experience is an act of creation. (Esoterically). The Way the Act and music affects them, the pictures they create inside themselves in response to the act are in conversation with the individual’s previous experiences and dreams. The memories it triggers. The decisions about the future it might trigger. The feelings it stirs, the thoughts that arise, or the desires each of them experience, are all different.
The other way of creation is the Crowd’s outwardly expressions. (Exoterically). Their reactions to what’s happening, the nature of their attention, their level of interaction, whoops and whistles or quiet contemplation, are important aspects of the complete creation/performance of the act. The way a group starts as individuals and unifies to form a Crowd.
In particularly good shows one can actually experience the crowd forming a kind of group self, behaving as one entity. All in response to the showmanship and totality of their own experience of the Act.
Each of these creations are a part of the Act, and the Act is influencing and conversing on all these levels at the same time, making each performance subtly different.
Music, Performance, Crowd; a trinity, if you will.
The Crowd’s contribution as an integral part of the creation/performance process is not taken into account often enough.
With the Crowd in mind, no versions of your act are ever the same. No version the quintessential, final version. Each performance is just the latest manifestation of the Ideal of the act, as Plato might have put it.
Fluidity through complete predictability
As you perform, if you read the room well, you suit the Act to the current situation. If you have the luxury of performing with a live band that are ready to follow your lead, or that reads the room well themselves, the potential for shaping the Act to the particular situation grows enormously. As we know, having a band in today’s cultural economic situation is a luxury not often possible.
Having a backing track you know really well brings many other great possibilities.
-With recorded music, the music is of course set. This means that your track isn’t paying attention to you or the audience. If anything unforeseen happens, the future does not play out the way you remembered it, the music will churn on like nothing has gone off-track. This means you not only need to fix the problem, but you also have to keep the music in mind.
In my Tennis act, which follows a set piece of music, if there are any unforeseen problems, like a microphone not working, I have to make sure the Crowd has the best time possible while we wait for the problem to be fixed, but I am also thinking ahead to what material I need to cut to still end the Act as the music ends.
-You know what’s going to happen with the music. This predictability is a tool for you, like with the broken microphone. If you know exactly what the music does at any given moment, and how long each section lasts, you stand free to improvise around it with great precision.
-You can also choose and use any piece of music you want. It gives you a whole lot of choice that having a band can’t so easily provide. Your two acts can use a symphonic piece and a drum n bass track creating two completely different worlds. This is harder, but not impossible, for a live band.
-If you are in a show where you have a time constraint, recorded music is the perfect way to keep you exactly on time, every time. As I have mentioned in a previous post, having a time limit that you work to fill up with more material, rather than just add time to your Act, can be a valuable tool for your Act’s growth.
-Clowns often talk about the concept of a game. The clown enters the stage and the first thing that happens is that she looks for a game. A game with the audience, a game with a chair on stage. A game can be anything, like “I’m going to sit on that chair, but only when I am ready to.” Walking around on stage trying to find the funniest spot to stand as judged by the audience laughter and reactions can be a game.
Peter Bufano suggest a piece of recorded music can be a fixed object much like the chair or the funniest spot. I think this is a great way to describe it and I use this in my work. The fact that I know my music so well means I can use it to play up against or run along with it. For instance in my tennis racket act I use a few tracks played in a row, which means there are silences as one track ends and before the next starts. The audience hears this and it brings up a certain expectation. It dictates that something finishes, so I follow this dictation and have sections of my act fit the music pauses. But as I mentioned in the Get Your Act Together post, there should always be development in your act if you have any kind of repetition. So, since there are several pauses I use slightly different ways to interact with it. I finish right on time. Next time I am too late, and this becomes obvious because of the track finishing, and topped with a lacklustre “I give up” toss of confetti, shows that I fucked up. Next one, which is after a major bit of chaos where I get tangled up in the microphone lead and get into a fight with my stool, I time it so that I finish the slapstick and get my applause just before the track finishes. As the applause dies down and I have finished a section just before the silence, the quiet becomes very poignant. In this pause, having just barely made it back onto my feet I half whisper an “oh fuck,” like I’m glad that’s over. This gets a great reaction. It appears to them like they catch a moment of truth, a real moment they only hear because of the silence. It’s slightly off mic and it is the perfect break to the few seconds of pregnant pause. Then I’m back into it. This is an example of a game I play with the recorded track.
-With the music as a fixed object, or grid, overlaying your act, you get an interplay between the live actions and the audience reactions and the fixed music which just churns on regardless of what happens. Comedy and any kind of creation comes from contrast. One thing being fixed and another fluid gives great potential. Particularly because of the predictability.
Unexpected richness
Furthering the idea of fixed objects, there are lessons to be learnt about any object or prop in your act.
In my Act I enter carrying two tennis rackets and, as far as the audience is concerned, that’s all the props I’m going to use in the act. Subconsciously they might also think the two rackets are all the props available for me to use. They don’t notice that there is a microphone, which is connected to the sound system with a lead. That there is a stool for me to put down the rackets as I talk. I mean, they see them standing there, or that the stage manager places them there, yet they are invisible. They are placed there by a professional. They are professional props. Black, serious and insignificant. There is nothing to a stool. Already here, there is comedy potential for a clown. The fact that these are so everyday and so straight-forward is possibility. I mean, how can you get a stool wrong?
No one in the Crowd sits in the seconds before I come on thinking, “Wow, look at that microphone stand, wonder what he’s gonna do with that?” Same with the deliberately nondescript stool. Further, I am wearing a head band and I am wearing shoes. No one takes much notice of that. As the act proceeds my head band pops off in a moment of significant timing, which leads to some funny gags. My shoe falls off. Later my shoe gets stuck under my headband, sole against my face. I get tangled in the microphone lead, I knock the mic stand over, my dislocated arm grabs the mic and I can’t find it, and the stool gets stuck on the racket which is stuck around my neck. By the end I have used everything, every object on stage or on my body as a prop for a laugh. So, even though it appears the stage is empty when I arrive, there are actually quite a few props. I use them all, and most of them I also combine.
The recorded track of music is the same way. There is unexpected depth in every track. As you listen to it over and over you will find more and more details to accentuate movements in your act, beats to follow or go against. If you look at it thoroughly you will find stuff.
Explode the track and see what’s in it. The artist who created and recorded the track put a lot into it. Find it. Any artists worth repeat listenings have created a soundscape deep enough to be richly mined for inspiration. Chances are you can find even more than she put into it, as you add your own reflections. (Listening is creation.)
A recorded track is a fixed object, a known thing for the performer which gives room for play and development of games.
An attractive feature about these “fixed objects,” like music and my microphone stand, is that they are kind of invisible. As much as the Crowd can see the microphone and hear the music, as soon as I start talking all of that disappears from their attention. So each time you interact with either of them there is a surprise of the kind you get when you see a magic trick. You make something that was invisible visible. Like when the stool hooks onto my racket and I stand up with it dangling, or a silence in the music, becomes a big tension release, it is almost like a reveal of a magical production.
Choosing a track
There is always an element of randomness going into the choosing of a track. But once it’s chosen you’ve said: “I want to interact with this track.” Then go ahead and interact, in every way and on every level. There is potential for discovery in every track. Explore, explore, and translate every idea of synergy, discord and emotion into material.
The fact that you like a track is a good beginning. You might not like it, at least not in the same way, after performing to it a hundred times, but that’s the price you pay. If you like a track, it means, in a way, that you understand it. It speaks to you. There are many things music speaks of. You can like it because of the way it makes you feel, the way the lyrics makes you think, because it’s a great track for making love to, it makes you smile, or makes you want to dance, the ways are endless. This is a good starting point. Take the responses the music elicits in you, then keep listening to it with your Act or actions in mind. Maybe write a list. Get on the floor and begin going through it. Let the music inform you and search in it for beats, breakdowns, or lyrics. (I don’t really ever have lyrics in my performance tracks, but many people do, particularly if they don’t do any talking in their Acts.) Delve into the track, the emotions and the space it creates.
Where does it transport you?
Is this where you want to take your audience?
If so, how can you aid them in their journey?
If you like a track enough to consider it, I would say there is potential in it. It might, of course, not be the right track for the particular act you have in mind, but this will soon become clear after the previous explorations.
Tracks with different dynamics and variation can be good. A flat track without much build-up or changes and potentially different flavours, does not have as many opportunities for interpretation.
You should consider not using a current hit track. Just in case the current top ten song doesn’t age well, you might be stuck with a track which dates the Act. This can be good or bad. If it’s bad, say the track ages like milk, and not like wine, you will have to change the music and this means starting from scratch in your interpretations and amalgamation to the track. It might mean you lose some great moments in your Act that came from that particular track.
Not taking a current top ten track usually means taking an older track or a more obscure track. Even a very popular track from the past, a top ten hit, can be perfect, because in the benefit of hindsight you are aware of what that track represents. A time in the world. A feeling of a generation.
But the basic thing is: settle on a track and then do your Act over and over. Each run, and eventually each performance, makes you know it a little better and you will find more in it.
Turn the track on repeat. Listen and listen. Then interact. The track is like a conversation, perhaps like a conversation in a play, where your parts of the conversation are improvised. Unlike real life, you get the chance to repeat your conversation, fine tune your arguments, rethink all the things you said, and improve them endlessly.
See you all along the Way
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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