As opera training begins to include more acting skills and stagecraft, hopefully singers will get to practice some improvisational theater as well. Improv has some great lessons for our work on the stage—and equally important ones for the rest of our lives. Successfully creating an improvised scene requires you to be fearless and playful, affirmative yet flexible, and willing to lead as much as follow. Aren’t these good qualities to cultivate anyway, onstage or off?
For example, there’s a wonderful warm-up exercise that involves a group of players standing in a circle and using eye contact to pass a “yes” around the group. You simply look at another player across the circle, smile and tell them “yes,” and they pass that exchange on to someone else. When else in life do you get to be surrounded by so much positive energy?
The exercise helps players apply the same ideas during an improv, offering support of each other’s decisions and creating an atmosphere that lets them experiment with new ideas. Improv is sometimes called “yes and practice,” reflecting how players practice building on what their colleagues create, never contradicting someone else’s choice but incorporating it into the scene. It may seem like an obvious skill—you can’t make much of a scene out of two people “saying no” to each other—but it takes some work to set your ego aside for the benefit of the whole.
See how this is a great lesson for singers as well? The most satisfying performing experiences involve much of the same practices: helping others onstage, trusting that no one will upstage each other, and collaborating to produce an artistic whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. As colleagues we “say yes” to our fellow performers by being as professional as we can, knowing our music well so that others can rely on us onstage. If everyone reciprocates, this creates a supportive environment that nurtures our best performances. The principle holds true offstage, where friendships and rapport only strengthen our abilities as performers.
Think about the people in your life—professional and otherwise—who “say yes” to you, support your work, build on it, and give you confidence to continue. How can you spend more time with them?
Starting your own performance project is one way to do it. Projects can grow from existing friendships and collaborations, when like-minded people come up with an idea and decide to work on it together. This can be ideal, especially if performers have different business and artistic skill sets that complement each other. On the other hand, even like-minded people can have their disagreements, and unlike improvising a collaborative scene, building an enterprise can require some tough decisions. In collaborative entrepreneurial projects, even ones that are run like a business, the same guidelines apply: courtesy, trust, and prioritizing the needs of the project over individual concerns.
Whether you’re building something on your own or with others, you can also recruit outstanding artists who would be perfect for the performance you have in mind. Even if you haven’t worked together before, it’s a way of “saying yes” to their skills.
When you start to recruit other artists for your own performance project, there are many different ways that people will “say yes”—or “no.” Let’s say you have a duet program in mind and you’d like to sing with a soprano who is a few rungs ahead of you on the career ladder. You work up the courage to ask her, and she says she’d love to and that she charges $1,000 per performance. Unless you’ve got lots of cash lying around for that, accept that even if she says she’s flattered that you asked, she’s really just given you a great big “no.” This will happen. What you can do is thank her for giving the project some thought, be happy that she is so successful in her career, and strive to one day have a budget that can pay artists really well.
Plenty of people will also “say yes,” literally and figuratively to what you’re doing. Other players will agree to do your project, prepare well enough, and even offer help above and beyond what they committed to. But then, something about their attitude—how they bolt out of rehearsals, their preoccupation with their smart phones in the middle of rehearsal, the occasional snarky comment—doesn’t exactly “say yes.” In that case, either they are so valuable to the endeavor that you are willing to keep working with them or you realize that other people can do an equally good job or better, and so you seek those people out instead for the next time around.
Occasionally, whether you gravitate toward each other as friends or colleagues, are introduced by other performers, or recruit someone to your own project, you find someone who is that ideal mix. A stunning performer who can also build you a website, bring in an audience, and pick repertoire for the next show: “say yes” to that person in any way you can. Keep the lines of communication open to make sure they stay happy working with you and make sure you’re giving to the project as much as they are.
These are some ways to build a “yes and practice” into your professional life. But being a good colleague doesn’t always have to involve creating your own entrepreneurial project. You can be a good colleague just by attending other people’s performances and giving them a shout out on Facebook. In a profession that rewards individual performance, it’s helpful to remember that we’re all in this together—and that by supporting each other, we can all move forward.
So think about how to “say yes” to others, and they will start “saying yes” to you. And if you’re looking for even more practice as well as a terrific performance outlet, consider making theater improv a part of your life. Not only is it great fun, but it’s a field in which women are the slim minority and good players are constantly in demand. It’s a nice change from the soprano-filled audition circuit!
