Outing Iii

How To Win At A Performing Arts Competition

This month the Sydney MacDonalds Performing Arts Challenge hits its stride with many of the most hotly-contested vocal sections running in July. Classical and contemporary performers in age-limited or open sections slug it out for prizes ranging from a medal (don’t knock the medals, they are nice and you can keep ‘em forever!) to $30,000. It’s an extremely challenging arena for performance. There are commonly thirty or more entrants from all over Australia competing in each event.

To place at Sydney, you really need to present immaculately from the first moment; to sing brilliantly and musically; and to demonstrate that you are au fait with the performance conventions appropriate to the material. And you need to be lucky: the adjudicator has to happen to agree with your reading of your song, and not be annoyed by your hairdo.

What makes a winner?

Winners are almost always “battle-hardened“: they are experienced competitors, ready to show everything they can do and command the room from the get-go, rather than warming into their work as they go, as the promising rookies tend to do. Although it costs up to $25 per section to enter, it is a great way for young performers to see how they are going compared to others in their cohort, and to get a detailed report from a highly-qualified judge on their performance.

My favourite section so far has been #59: Singer-Songwriter, held on Tuesday Night at Petersham RSL. You had to sing your own song and accompany yourself. There was one composer who was nine years old – she had written a creditable Avril Levigne-style ditty about how she has Passion for Everything she Does, and everyone sat there in shock thinking, “Nine! NINE!!“ as she belted her way through it with tremendous aplomb. There was quite a cluster of twelve- and thirteen- year old girls and their excellent output ranged from self-revelatory description set to an Alicia Keyes-esque accompaniment; through literary response in the form of a terrific song from the point of view of Shakespeare’s Juliet; to quite mad humour, with one girl singing about school, “Oh well…L-O-L…”. Someone older won it with a very accomplished country ballad that was less quirky but very well crafted and performed.

The place of learning and self-expression

I teach singing modules within Actors College of Theatre and Television’s renowned performing arts course ‘The CORE’ (Certificate III in Theatre and Screen Performance) and ACTT’s Diploma of Performance Practice. I’ve found that by including songwriting activity into the programme, it helps students to embrace the full extent of their creativity. So far I’ve been along to hear several former and current students from ACTT compete in the intermediate 17–25 age group, in the Lieder and the Italian Song sections, and they did very well in their first outing. In fact it was a night of excellent singing – the entrants sang much more robustly, expressively and precisely than those in, say, the Open Contemporary Song event.

There was a great supportive atmosphere, and the evening was serious fun and not at all plastic, perhaps because there were no pre-recorded backing tracks allowed (those feature heavily in all the Contemporary sections). Perhaps it was also because no-one alive could fail to respect the efforts of the kids, or the adults, who if the truth be told, had a more daunting job than the youngsters.

The importance of life-long education and practice

We licence children and teens to express themselves and try things and to be goofy and amateurish in our culture. By the time you are grown-up you are meant to be either a professional performer, or sitting quietly at home in front of TV doing your taxes and getting fat. But that’s mental. People aren’t finished learning things when they are eighteen. And the performing arts, singing and songwriting are things you can continually improve at till you are very old, if you keep working and sharing with whatever public you can access.

It’s a big task to acquire the music theory necessary to write down the accompaniment, or to big up your instrumental skills to perform the accompaniment yourself, but it is possible, and the practice is its own reward. The lesson to take away from hearing spectacularly young and proficient performers is not that there’s no point trying – rather, that we should emulate their adventurousness and their lack of inhibiting personal architecture just by choosing to sing our own songs, rather than to not.

Gorilla Playsets Outing III

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