Making a moment

The question I reduce singing and music and all of art to is this: 

As a singer and musician, on the most basic level, what are we doing? 

Possible answers:

We’re trying…

to entertain. 

to impress. 

to get the attention of that guy or girl. 

to make people stop and listen. 

to express an emotion or thought. 

to make money.

Et cetera.

Any of those answers are valid, along with any combination or all combined, as well as others further down the list. But to me, those are byproduct answers. 

My question really is: 

'What should we as artists/creatives/singers be attempting to do?’ 

And for me, as I attempt to reduce it to ground zero, it really comes down to one thing, no matter the media or discipline; whether music, film, theater, literature, dance, sculpture, visual art, or mixed media. At its very core, at its most reductive point, all art is trying to achieve one thing: 

To create a moment.

That’s it. 

I feel, at its core, it’s the common, central target of every piece.    

There have been many times I felt I’d gotten there in music, theater, or sports. When or whether I’d ‘achieved’ it or not is largely subjective, irrelevant, and besides the point. But there was an example, a sort of rehearsal-performance when things went screwy, where its importance and necessity became ever more clear that it was maybe the essential spark of life in a body of work.

(Just as a note: I differentiate between creating a moment and re-creating a moment. I’ll speak to that another time.) 

***

I was invited by a director/filmmaker in Salt Lake City into a workshop that gathered once a week. It was him and about 20 actors just getting together to hack at scenes and material and be ‘onstage’. The sessions were a casual but serious roundtable of work, reactions, and critique. 

The week came for my scene. It was about 4 pages with 2 characters — mine and a girl a bit younger. We’d worked on it and felt fairly ready, though acting for a room full of actors is always a bit nervey. 

The setting was in the home of my character (a youngish, married professor) during a party. By chance, these two find themselves in a room alone, struggling individually with navigating around their unbroached attraction in a stilted and wobbly conversation. The pages had a delicious sense of dialogue overlaying discomfort. Even though there was a progression to the conflict, it was nebulous enough for us to get lost in it. 

And I did. 

I went ‘up’, meaning I forgot my words, lost my place, or both. My scene partner and I both stayed in the scene. We didn’t break. There were three moments where I almost did break to say ‘Sorry, can we start over?’ But I didn’t, and she stayed with me. Amidst silences and secret struggles, we somehow got it back on the rails to reach the script’s ending. 

When we finished, I stepped toward her and apologized in an aside underneath the applause — applause that was waaay more enthusiastic than our group’s usual show of appreciation. She didn’t seem to register my regret. The applause continued. I was stunned. I laughed while we waited. After their clapping stopped, we listened to multiple impressions with words like ‘incredible’, ‘suspense’, and ‘amazing’. 

I felt like I’d gotten away with something. So at the end of it, I confessed to the group that I’d ‘gone up’ and had almost ended the scene multiple times to start again. Something that helped is that the scene lent to it — there was discomfort, awkwardness, inner conflict, and stuttering rhythm to the relationship as written, or should’ve been if we’d considered and injected it. But that would’ve been different as something planned and rehearsed. It all came out naturally and was pure discovery for us, no matter how inadvertent. And truly, when I think about it, those moments of discomfort and odd rhythms are ubiquitous in life and, as it happens, exactly what we want to see performed. 

A friend listened to my idea of a moment’s creation as universal to all art. He said, “Yeah, well, but, I think art should have some thought and skill to it. Otherwise, I don’t know. It doesn’t really qualify.”

You may be thinking something similar, that there has to be some further criteria. And yes, there almost certainly, but not necessarily will be layered qualities of any given work. But, I’ll say here what I said to him: Beware and be mindful of moving from that idea outward. Recognize opinions, tastes, and sensibilities — but also differentiate them from criteria. But what I’m proposing is a common element to all works. 

Having been schooled in music, I can say that most, if not all of analyzation is post-mortem. The piece is done, then we dissect it. In my experience, very little time is given to what brought it to life. No matter how deeply informative the coroner’s autopsy is, the spark that turns a clump of cells into a dancer is a mystery.