Another Bit of Philosophy

… there may be a whole bunch of these…

So my first philosophical point was that the ideal to strive for is invisibility, that perfection is when no one realizes we’re doing anything.

My second point is that, particularly in the community theater world I live in, we should be doing a lot.

I live in a world of untrained voices, untrained artistic visions, and untrained technicians.  One view might be that this is what community theater is and our audiences know what they are getting in to.  Of course, there is a lot of the world that views community theater with contempt precisely because of the lack of skill that “untrained” implies.

My view is that anything I can fix, I should fix.  Why should I leave something be that is within my power to correct, simply to pass along that flaw to the audience?  In the name of… what?  Telling the audience the truth?  No, fix it any time you can.

Untrained or only somewhat trained voices tend to have 3 major categories of problems – pitch control, breath support, and dynamics.  I can’t fix pitch without resorting to AutoTune (evil!) so that’s out of my hands.  Breath support I’ve been known to have a chat with the Music Director when I realize that’s someone’s issue, so I’ll take an indirect interest in fixing that but the direct action is above my pay grade.

Dynamics, on the other hand, is why God put all those faders on the sound board.

I’ve been asked how much of the dynamics “we” should remove from a performance, since that’s changing the performance as the actor is giving.  I answered incorrectly at the time, and this very question is why this blog actually exists.  The answer is: “Remove every last dB of dynamics that detract from the show.”  Line-by-line mixing exists as a concept for a reason, because even the best and most trained actors and singers are not constant from night to night, scene to scene, line to line, and even syllable to syllable in their volume.  If your choices are single syllables that will blow out the audiences’ ears, single syllables that aren’t audible, or adjusting moment by moment to make it work… make it work.

Untrained vision… that’s a topic for next time.