Carol Roan

I heard a band at The Garage last summer that hadn't a clue about how to play together. The four of them were so out of touch with each other rhythmically that my spine began to itch, and I had to go outside to wait for the next band. But even out on the sidewalk, the effect was so disturbing that I had trouble carrying on a conversation.
Each of them was playing the same rhythm-I could probably have set a metronome and they would each have been with the beat-but they weren't playing that same beat together. Each of the performers was probably playing well, but how good they were separately became irrelevant because they weren't a band.

I once observed an orchestra rehearsal in which Andre Watts tried to connect. He threw a loop of energy around the conductor; nothing happened. He tried again, and again, each time making the energy loop more dense until, after it felt like he was throwing a heavy loden cape around the conductor without any response, he gave up. Watts played the piano and the orchestra played their music, but they didn't make music together.

Togetherness on stage is more than listening and watching each other. Actually connecting with each other through focus and energy is vital. Interpersonal energy is an information field-that's why it's such a good connector. We can't see a magnetic field, but we can feel it's pull when we attach a magnet to the refrigerator. We can't see an information field, but it allows us to feel where the other performers' heads are, to anticipate that the drummer wants to take off on a riff and to be ready with our own response.

Patsy Rodenburg, in her Speaking Shakespeare, describes an actor's use of focus and energy as circles. In her First Circle, actors speak and listen from and for themselves; she calls it "navel-gazing." In her Second Circle, actors are connecting, listening and speaking to each other; she calls it "the most human energy and the most human of connections."

I had dinner with the actress Kali Rocha after a performance of the American premiere of "The Mai." She told me that she had asked the director what she should be doing during a long scene in which she was supposed to sit on the edge of the set, but had no lines nor any stage directions. He told her to listen. She did listen, but she also connected and, without saying a word, became an integral part of the scene.
In my examples of the bandplayers and the conductor, they were focused on themselves and their own music without taking advantage of everyone else involved. If Kali had focused only on herself, the audience might have ignored her, throwing the entire stage picture off balance, or they might have been distracted from the scene, wondering why that silly girl was sitting stage right.

Broadening our focus to include other performers on stage can actually better our individual performances. We can feed off each other's energy, just as we feed off the energy of the audience.