When You're Smiling

cincycub wrote in bobaloo's journal:
[...] A few years ago we were sternly warned when singing a rather emotional song and people were crying during rehearsal. We were told that performers were NOT to cry on stage. That robs the audience of being able to experience it for themselves and react to it themselves and it is unprofessional. Performers should be invested in performing the work well so that inspires a reaction (whether it be tears, laughter, whatever) from the audience... not SHOW them how to react.

I wrote back that you can't sing very well when you're crying (or laughing, for that matter), it gums up the vocal production. And I promised to expand on that statement in my own journal, so here goes.

Back in Rochester, our director tried to articulate some similar advice but it came out as "you really can't enjoy yourselves too much when singing this or it ruins it for the audience." Which I didn't quite understand at the time but now I do.

I can recall three songs, or rather, passages, that nearly set me to crying the first few rehearsals until I'd "worked it out", so to speak:

* the climactic passage in "Jonathan Wesley Oliver, Jr." (about a childhood friend visiting the Quilt from the NAMES Project) where the author of the text says "if we have a boy, he'll be John," with a key change and a major crescendo in the music (powered in part by the basses descending into the lower register and opening up).

* the end of the first refrain of "Am I Welcome Here?" (about someone coming back to church on Christmas Eve after a long absence) on the "Noel" section; again, the basses follow the melody and then drop into the lower range and open up.

* and almost the whole of "Not In Our Town". That, I think, wasn't the music so much as the associations it had. The song is about an incident in Billings, Montana where the Ku Klux Klan threw a cinder block through the window of a Jewish family displaying a menorah, and the townspeople in great numbers responded by posting paper menorahs in their own windows in solidarity. I first heard it performed by the SMC at GALA VIIe in Montreal, the day after one of the chorus members was gay-bashed on a side street mere steps from the heart of "the Village" on rue Ste-Catherine.

And yes, it took a number of rehearsals and rehashes of the material before I was comfortable singing these songs without worrying about choking up and not being able to sing them properly.