The art of Perfomance

It might be a dream to put one's self out there- you, right where everyone can see, setting the mood with your own creation, audience-ready, deft, natural.

A dream, to some. A nightmare to others! - Merlin, Excalibur (1981)

So, take a great scribe of poems, a mighty shower singer, and the daydream, above. How do you get there from here?

Well, if we are talking Performing, there is a cornucopia of performing arts, and many roles within them that bring deep satisfaction. But we're talking about any situation, where, presumably, the room is yours.
And what do you do, in that powerful moment?
Is it any wonder, applause before entry is our cultural signifier of our receptiveness to a given focal person?

Trained musicians can begin, do begin, from silence. The symphony deserves your undivided opportunity to fill the air with sounds.


Here's my notes on, well, the other kind. I'm a trained instrumentalist, but, alas, not in any of the instruments I use, today. I'll tell you about my first performance, solo, in front of hundreds of people, my community, actually. I gave a five-minute stand up comedy routine. Everything was rehearsed. It was necessary for the director to understand I intended to begin, posed as John Travolta did with that ever-loving finger shooting his dance energy to the disco ball-dappled ceiling. Facing the wrong way.

The first thing I had to do was not face them, but make them laugh.
The laugh welcomed me to talk. See?

So, any kind of performance will help you. Naked wedding speech, what have you.
Oh, if you thought that was funny, you need to hear our circle's Todd Jasko- and I will learn the shortcuts for special letters- who wrote that scenario into the lyrics of "Introverts, Unite." We will get that to you in a blog soon.


Todd wonders about going from writer to performer, and I thought it's good to talk about.


Now that's somewhere I can support anyone in the circle who feels that way, and you can in your circle, too. Get one of the Circle to give you, oh, a beat, some auxillary instr. Maayybe ask someone to play along on rhythm guitar.


Then it will feel body-wise like you are joining a happening, rather than, i.e. 'it feels like I'm busting in on everyone's senses for my own self-aggrandizing purpose.' I mean, you wouldn't want your fellows feeling that way.


So, certainly not Todd, the fellow who we are all more than willing to hear out, as he stiched together this round table, anyway! And he isn't coasting on that.

Though if you have $25/hr to pay for an interactive audience, lol...I kid, but Todd, it's crazy. That is a service for which people might pay. Similar to Music Instructor.
That's how hard it is to get the kind of audience you've assembled out of the goodness of all our hearts!


But yeah, invite yourself to the Circle and you'll feel right at home playing.
I mean, if you have Bernie Taupin stay on the farm while Elton sings, you're set, but if you're talking about being a singer-songwriter...knowing there's always another one a stone's throw away, we're like churches, down South, one every where you go....
Be Chill, Cease ill


Lue Lyron on Performing

I started using mirrors to get me to look up off my fretboard and thinking of connecting with my audience. The performance kinda flies out of you, and there's this 'oh shit I am a passenger on a roller coaster!' feeling, you know what I mean?
I think everything about addiction- to fame, pills, groupies, etc.- for performers, stems from dealing with that power, and its place in the rest of one's life.

I think I had to remove a lot of undue anger at myself over my playing miscues. I'd have had a heart attack by now!


Some choose to sing in imitation of a given voice. Some singer I've never bothered much with named Anthony Newly inspired a persona-voice David Bowie used to great effect, over and over!


And I had to overcome that 'I'm not worthy of playing this thing, and the bills are gonna come crashing in and I'll never make it' Dealie-O, to rejoin my engagement with the Muses each time. It was hard once, but now I love the sound of that first chord when I pick up Pretty Baby or Luck.
If you haven't named your guitar, and it's presumptious of me to even suggest, sorry, but if you have a name for 'her' you will feel like you are going through this stuff with a dear friend. It's the emotional settlement- the sense of deep serentity- which makes performing and creating possible.

Finally, you might get sudden urges to veer off and try a new chord at some point in a progression, or a notes-riff. Go for it. Everyone in the Circle has the potential to show us all how you 'go for it' - and if something doesn't work, we all recognize that, and we will laugh and laud the nuts it takes to go out on a limb. I predict. I know you want to promote experimentation, as well as the Process.

Continue Playing,
Lue