Okay boys and girls, today I’m going to share yet another of my favorite inside tips on presenting/performing/speaking more effectively.
While I often rail against the problem of too much conformity everywhere one looks, today we’re going to consider how the common tendency towards conformity can be a considerable advantage to you as a presenter/ speaker/ performer.
I was playing a Fourth of July concert with Arthur Fiedler once, and some roving television reporter came up to me and started asking me questions on camera. One question she asked me was: "with such a big crowd here tonight, are you nervous?"
This question really kind of threw me, because it never even occurred to me to be nervous. In retrospect, I don’t think the size of the crowd ever made much of a difference to people in the orchestra, and as a new member I had just picked up on that attitude and emulated it. And I started to wonder why that was. Why aren’t we nervous?? And I think I finally came up with the answer.
Human beings tend to conform to the behavior of the human beings they see around them. And so, the more people you have in a group/audience, the more generic and predictable their behavior becomes. If I am speaking to one person, it is very hard to predict what that person might do next. They might interrupt or just walk away. However, with a group of 30 or 50 people, most of those people will not get up or talk unless they see someone else get up or talk first. Your average human being is very conscious of how human beings perceive them, and they tend to become very conservative in their actions or movements when in a large group.
Of course, sometimes this goes in another direction. For example, if you saw a someone lighting a fire and rocking a car back and forth on a city street you would probably walk past them and pretend not to notice them. But if you found yourself in the middle of a street riot, and everyone else in the crowd was rocking a car backand forth, well, maybe you wouldn’t actually start a fire or rock the car back-and-forth yourself. But honestly, would you stand up in the middle of a riot and say to a bunch of strangers, "Hey everybody, I don’t think you should be doing that?" No. Your tendency will be to passively or actively go along with what everyone else is doing.
So anyway, one of the most important things I’ve learned from playing something like 3,000 concerts in my professional playing career is that crowds are terribly predictable. Their collective individual self-consciousness severely limits what they will do. At the same time, because they are suppressed in what they can do, they are eager for permission– from you, their fearless leader– to express/vent some of their collective emotional energy. It’s partly the job of a performer to guide and allow that collective release of energy. People who would never scream at the top of their lungs in a one-to-one conversation will eagerly do so if 30 other people are doing it with them. And this is partly why they bought a ticket and came to the show.
People who have stage fright, in my opinion, don’t really understand the dynamics of crowds. I suppose it’s a little bit like a lion taming or snake charming. If you follow the rules you won’t get hurt. And is almost too predictable at times.
Jerry Seinfeld once pointed out that he was much more comfortable talking to a large crowd of people then he was talking to a single person. I suspect this is because a conversation with a single person is necessarily a little more intimate, and therefore is a lot less predictable , and you have much LESS control. And I feel the same way. I cannot even begin to predict how one individual person will react to me. But a crowd of 30+ people is virtually identical to every other crowd of 30+ people (note exceptions below), and I know that if I say certain things to a crowd of 30+ people I will get the same response every time.
Now there is a difference to be noted . . . if you are speaking to people that are essentially strangers to each other, this is a very different situation than, say, a professional/social group or club, where everybody knows everybody else. In the latter instance, since those people know all of the other people in the crowd, they have a much greater latitude of what they can do and how much of their unique selves they can express in public. For example, I just love talking to Rotary clubs, because they all know each other, and they tend to be independent business people, and they are accepting of each other’s unique personality traits. As a result there are much more likely to raise their hand and ask questions and just generally react with much more individual spontaneity. But how often do you get a crowd of more than 30 people that has that degree of familiarity with one another? Answer: almost never. Even at a big conference of people in the same business or whatever, most of them don’t have daily or weekly contact with every other person in the room. And if there’s just one or two strangers in a crowd, even in a crowd of 50 that’s enough to put a damper on everyone’s eccentric behavior.
Another kind of crowd is a gathering of employees where the boss is in attendance. They are all conscious of the boss, and will tend to be cautious in their actions and reactions, as the presence of the boss makes them suppress a lot of their spontaneity. A good analogy is a class of kids where the teacher is there vs. when the teacher leaves.
So it is true, a crowd is something of a rather large wild animal. But like most wild animals, it is not looking for trouble. They are not likely to attack you unless you say something that every single person in that room a) disagrees with and b) is quite certain that every single other person in the room disagrees with it too.
As I write this blog entry, I realize that I’ve bitten off a little more of a topic that I can chew in one small blog entry. Understanding the dynamics of crowds is a little bit sociology, a little bit psychology, a lot of art, and a fair amount of trial and error. If crowd reactions could be completely predicted in advance, every movie and every song would be a hit.
One of these days I am going to try and write a book on audience-ology. Way too much standard performance coaching and teaching is about perfecting yourself, and virtually none of it is about understanding the dynamics of the people "consuming" your performance. This natural narcissism afflicts musicians, speakers, writers, and everyone else. . .
Just one more "arts education" lesson . . . one that you won’t get in music school.
© Justin Locke
justinlocke.com
