Picking up pieces
September 23rd 2008 08:10
I had to go digging a bit to find out what bpm meant: apparently it's business performance management, as no doubt all three of my readers could have told me.
The only kind of performance management I'm involved in at the moment is the play we're currently presenting: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, about which I've spoken previously.
Performance management in a play is no doubt a little different to performance management in a business, although perhaps not too much. In a play, you've got to monitor your performance at all times, to make sure you don't get slack in it; you've got to be on your toes in case one of the other cast members misses something important (like a cue!), and you've got to keep re-enacting the thing. You can't rely on yesterday's performance to carry you through today: each new performance is a whole new creation. Which is why actors love acting, I guess. It never gets stale (well, I've never got to the stale point at least), because each audience is different, the expectations are different, things that go wrong (or right) are different and so on.
Other artists 'finish' their creations at a certain point, like painters and sculptors and composers. Actors never really do. The play is never completely done with, because there's always tomorrow night. It's a strange business. So much of it relies on a group of people working like clockwork as a team: if one person misses a beat, the whole thing can rapidly unwind. Fortunately people who act are often good at spontaneity, and pick up things that get dropped very readily.
The other night we got on stage to find three important props missing (the 'culprit' plastered the walls of the dressing room with a succession of "sorry's" in various fonts). The youngest actor added in a line, which aided the actor who was relying on the props to find his way through the problem.
In The Magician's Nephew, which we did three years ago, I got out on stage in front of the front tabs only to find that a chair with my 'change' of clothes was missing. Out of the blue came a couple of lines which worked, and which reminded the person behind the curtain to push the chair through the gap - to the audience's amusement. The play was saved.
And yet, on another occasion, in the same play, a young actor gave me the wrong cue, and suddenly everything went blank. It was almost as if I didn't know where I was. That was scary.
The only kind of performance management I'm involved in at the moment is the play we're currently presenting: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, about which I've spoken previously.
Performance management in a play is no doubt a little different to performance management in a business, although perhaps not too much. In a play, you've got to monitor your performance at all times, to make sure you don't get slack in it; you've got to be on your toes in case one of the other cast members misses something important (like a cue!), and you've got to keep re-enacting the thing. You can't rely on yesterday's performance to carry you through today: each new performance is a whole new creation. Which is why actors love acting, I guess. It never gets stale (well, I've never got to the stale point at least), because each audience is different, the expectations are different, things that go wrong (or right) are different and so on.
Other artists 'finish' their creations at a certain point, like painters and sculptors and composers. Actors never really do. The play is never completely done with, because there's always tomorrow night. It's a strange business. So much of it relies on a group of people working like clockwork as a team: if one person misses a beat, the whole thing can rapidly unwind. Fortunately people who act are often good at spontaneity, and pick up things that get dropped very readily.
The other night we got on stage to find three important props missing (the 'culprit' plastered the walls of the dressing room with a succession of "sorry's" in various fonts). The youngest actor added in a line, which aided the actor who was relying on the props to find his way through the problem.
In The Magician's Nephew, which we did three years ago, I got out on stage in front of the front tabs only to find that a chair with my 'change' of clothes was missing. Out of the blue came a couple of lines which worked, and which reminded the person behind the curtain to push the chair through the gap - to the audience's amusement. The play was saved.
And yet, on another occasion, in the same play, a young actor gave me the wrong cue, and suddenly everything went blank. It was almost as if I didn't know where I was. That was scary.
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