Wednesday at Cabaret Summer School.
I'm tired from sleeplessness and the after-effects of a virus. I give up on the idea of arriving early, and decide instead to get some extra rest. I get up at 8 am and wander in late.
Catherine has commenced her segment on "Acting". This seems a contradiction for me; I thought cabaret was about authenticity, not pretending. But it seems there's more to it than that.
I hate acting. I've always believed I couldn't do it.
So now I join the others in an exercise in which we pretend to be a dog, a snail and Miley Cyrus. I knew there was a reason why I never went to acting school.
We talk about the thought behind the text, emotional flow, intention or "want", and things to avoid:
- "indicating" or "playing" an emotion,
- "imposing" the meaning of a song or how you want the audience to respond, and
- "judging" a character in a song.
The point of this is that actors learn how to "recreate life", and each of us is creating our own little "play".
Sidonie now talks to us about Stage Presentation; body language, gestures, appearance and how to "own the stage".
In the afternoon, a guest tutor arrives to work with us. He is an expert in the music of Stephen Sondheim, and in traditional French and German songs. I speak both French and German, so I should be in my element, right?
I'm hoping to find a way to combine my European language skills with my singing.
Except that I cannot find any German songs that I want to sing. I've tried for the past two years, and still nothing. And I can only find a couple of French songs that appeal to me. Instead of trying to learn a new song, I decide to bring out "La Boheme", which I used for last year's workshop. Last year I had to read the lyrics from the page, but now I've memorized them, so I can take this song to the next level.
It soon turns out that speaking French is more of a curse than a blessing. I'd forgotten that poetic French has some strange idiosyncrasies. Word endings which are normally silent are instead sounded. These endings are even emphasized, in a rather self-conscious way. For example, when speaking you would never sound the last "e" of the word "boheme". But you sing it as a long "er". I would have be better off learning the song phonetically.
He says he's not hearing any "valse" timing from me. I do know what a 3/4 rhythm is, but apparently it's not coming through. He asks me to stress beat "2". I cannot work out why; it makes no sense to me.
I've been taught to sing my cabaret songs in a conversational way; to speak the lyrics out loud until I find the right speech cadences. But when I sing the French words to the beat, it's not conversational; the stresses sit weirdly, on what seem to be the wrong words and syllables. It takes all my concentration to remain focused.
My growing sense of frustration isn't helped when someone starts knocking loudly at the back door of the bar. I can't cope with the competing beat; but no one has authority to go behind the bar to see who is there.
At the end of the session I conclude that I am never going perform this song. It's too hard.
And perhaps that is no great loss; Australian audiences won't understand the lyrics, and French people will pour scorn upon my inept performance.
I had hoped to get some credit for effort in learning the lyrics, but I suppose I should let go of that need.
Days later, I review the video, and I see that he wasn't really that hard on me; that I did make progress. Maybe I should take it as a compliment that he gave me such a working-over.
Perhaps one day I will give it another go.
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