Speaker 1Shut up, and sit down. Welcome to Being On Stage, the only podcast that gives you motivation, inspiration, and confidence to be better on stage. No matter how you entertain, sing, dance, band, comedian, public speaking, MC, drag, burlesque, performance art, or street performer, this is the show for you. Hey, rock stars. I'm Reggie Dawson, your host of the Being On Stage podcast. Welcome to episode 40. Thank you so much for tuning in. Whether it's your first time or your 40th time, thank you. I appreciate you being here. One thing you should know, I'm going to give it to you straight. Every time, all the time, you may not like what I have to say, but I believe that sometimes you need to hear things that you don't like in order to keep progressing. And this is probably one of those times. I need you to be honest with yourself right now, because I have a very important question. How many times have you performed in front of a small crowd, or a crowd that is much smaller than you anticipated? And how many times have you placed blame on the promoters and, you know, let it affect the level of showmanship that you provide to that small audience? If we're all honest with ourselves, I think it's going to be more often than we'd like to admit. We always let the size of the crowd impact how we perform, and that is not the way it should be. I spoke on the last couple episodes about giving your best and always being your best, and that includes in front of the smaller crowds. You have to keep delivering to your audience. A small crowd should be treated better than a larger crowd. That small crowd, those intimate performances that you get to do with a smaller audience, as you progress in your career and as you get more fans and even more fame, those are going to become more and more rare. And you're going to learn to appreciate. You're going to learn to appreciate them much more than you may appreciate them now. So if there's three or four people in the audience, you still need to go out there and be at the top of your game. You still need to go out there and deliver, just like you're performing in front of 100,000 people. You really never know what could be in that crowd. Some of my best performances have been in front of smaller crowds. As a matter of fact, there's only a few performances in which I've gotten to perform in front of more than 100 people. And that doesn't make me any less talented. That doesn't make you any less talented. It doesn't make you any less of a performer. And it doesn't make you any less entertaining. It does, however, make you human. And it enables you to have relationships with your fans that if you had thousands of people in that audience, you wouldn't get. Have you ever been backstage at a concert? Like, have you ever gotten one of the backstage passes and actually gotten to go backstage and quote-unquote hang out with the performer? It's not a grand entertaining time. I've been there. They're real quick hits. Hey, how's it going? Signs and autographs, takes a picture, and they're gone. I mean, they're being run by promoters and managers, and time is money. Time is money. When you have the ability to take time and spend time with your audience, whether before the show, during the show, after the show, you have that moment to take time to spend with your audience. That's powerful. That's how you get people to keep coming. That's how you get people to feel connected to you. I mean, I've. I've spoken about creating that connection while you're on stage, and when you're in front of a small crowd, you have the perfect opportunity to create a connection. When I was up and coming as a performer, we had a saying that a small crowd is a mighty crowd. Some of the smaller crowds that I've performed at, they've screamed the loudest. They've cheered the most. They've reacted the best. They've tipped the best. My industry is an industry of tipping. We spend so much time stressing about how many people are going to see us. How many people are in the crowd. We forget the whole point that we're performing is to share our gifts with the people that are out there. We're performing because we're passionate about what we do. We're artists. You don't see a painter or a sculptor stressing about how many people are going to see their sculpture, their painting. No, because it doesn't matter how many people see it. The point is it gets seen. The point is you put it out there. That's the point of a performance. That's the point of art. You put it out there. You put yourself out there. When you go through the creative process and you're creating your performance and you're bringing your vision to life, yes, you're thinking about the audience, but you're also putting yourself into your art. And by doing that, you've created the most important thing, and that is a visualization of your internal self. I know this sounds all spiritual and psychological and everything, and in a way it is. But I have to get it out there. I have to say it this way. I have to say it the way that I feel it. Just like when we perform, we have to perform the way we feel it, the way we see it in our head. I've spoken a lot of episodes back about some of the crowds I performed in front of. And there was a time when I performed out of town and I had gotten booked with me and one of the performers that I was mentoring. We had gotten booked out of town, probably like four hours away. It's in northern Florida, Jacksonville, Florida, if you're familiar. The performer that did the booking was, I mean, he was pretty up there. He'd won a couple of contests. I looked up to him. He'd won a couple of contests for a couple of years. We hadn't really worked together yet, but I made the reach out and I secured the booking and, you know, it was paid. It was great. Hotel included and everything. This is the first time I had a hotel included. So, you know, got the picture on the flyer. Flyer looks great. We're promoting it. He's promoting it to his people. We get to the bar. We walk in. We go to the dressing room. We do the whole getting dressed thing. We socialize, have a drink. Turns out it's a beer and wine bar. I didn't expect that. This is the first time I've ever been to a bar that didn't serve liquor and I don't need liquor to perform. But I do. But I think that because of that, it led to a decreased crowd. There was probably 20 people in the crowd, maybe. And I went out and I really performed like I gave it everything I had. And because the person that I trained was with me, he did the same thing. He gave it every single piece that he had to that crowd. We were able to have drinks with them afterwards. We were able to talk to people afterwards. We got so many compliments. It was incredibly fun because. It enables you to joke around with the crowd. It enables the crowd to participate in the show as well. There's not that pressure on them to be the odd one out. You know, everybody's involved. You have that intimacy in the crowd to walk up to someone and shake their hand and hug them in the middle of your show. You have that intimacy that when you're on the microphone in between numbers, you can joke around with somebody and they can kind of give it back to you and you can give back to them. And you have those moments when you're able to walk through and actually learn people. People's names and speak to them after the show and, you know, apologize for, you know, maybe doing something inappropriate to them on stage. You have these moments that you can capture with individual people that makes them feel a part of the show and you gain fans and more than that, loyal fans. I mean, people that are going to follow you and want you to succeed because they feel like they know you. So when you're faced with a small crowd, use that to get to know your audience. Use that to get. To know your fans, because once you know your fans and more importantly, when your fans feel like they know you, you're able to use that relationship to better your performances in the future. When your fans feel like they know you, they have no problem sharing themselves with you in the same way that you've shared with them through doing this. I've learned a lot about a lot of different people. I've made a lot of different friends. I have people still following me on Facebook that I've met one time at a show and they just happened to be one of those. 20 people in the crowd and we still talk a small crowd is your ticket to audience connection. If you're looking to create that connection and you feel like maybe there's just something missing from your shows, maybe you need to get in front of a smaller crowd because I'll tell you the smallest crowd I've ever performed in front of was four people and two of them came with me. I traveled about an hour down south and I've talked about this story before, but I traveled about an hour down south to West Palm Beach and I performed at this club a few times. And they usually do 50 to 60 people a night. That's fairly well. It's a small, small little bar. So I usually get about 50 to 60 people a night and I walk in and there is nobody. There's the door girl. There's the bartender and there's the owner. Nobody else. I thought it was a little odd, but I usually get to the gigs a little early. I go next door. The dressing room was next door. So I go next door to the dressing room. I start getting ready. I got there probably like two hours before the show. So I start getting ready. It takes me about. About 45 minutes to get ready. And then I head back over to the bar and I walk in and there's still nobody. I mean, music's playing. Lights are going. You know, the bar is lit up. Everything looks great. There's still nobody there. So I walk in. I talk to the door girl because we're friends and everything. I talk to the bartender because we're also friends. And as I'm talking to the bartender, I'm hearing that there's this huge event in downtown West Palm Beach. When I say huge, I mean, there's this huge music festival in West Palm Beach every year called Sunfest. It's like 50 bands. It goes on for a whole week and it turns out this was the night that one of the bigger bands was playing and this wasn't the only club that was dead. This just happened to be probably the only club that booked entertainment on a night during Sunfest. Nobody showed up. It was the door girl, the bartender, the owner, and the two people I brought with me. I could have walked away, you know, I could have not performed. I could have shut the door and said, you know what? I'm not performing for nobody. Pay me my money for being here. I'm out. I'm not doing this. I could have done that. That would have been so easy to just walk away because truthfully, I ended up quitting. quitting this bar anyways. It was already in my head that I wasn't going to stay there very long and perform there very long, but it was so, it would have been so easy to just turn around and walk away. It would have been so easy to just refuse to perform. I mean, there's no attendees at the bar. This was all people that work there and people that I brought with me, but I took the opportunity. I said, you know what? I'm going to perform. If nothing else, I have a good time performing, even if it's just for, just for my friends. I have a great time performing for a small crowd. It's that intimacy that I like and that interaction that I like, because when you have that smaller crowd, you can actually interact with an individual for longer than just eye contact and actually see their reaction to what you're doing. That feeling of being right there in front of somebody and seeing their reaction to what you're doing in front of them. That's an amazing feeling. And you don't get that in larger crowds. I don't get that when I perform in front of 50 people. I only get that when I perform in front of, less than 20. I love performing for 20 people or less. And people may say, oh, that's not a show. That's not. And you know what? Bullshit. A show is a show. Anytime you step on stage in front of people, it's a performance. It's a show. So I step on stage in front of these four people, five people, and I deliver. And truthfully, it was probably one of my better shows that I delivered. I really delivered. I went out there. I gave it all my energy. I, you know, I interacted with my, my girlfriend at the time, our roommate. I interacted with the door girl, I even went over and messed with the owner a little bit. That's probably one of the reasons he doesn't like me. And you know what I got out of it? Fun. I got paid. Yeah, I got paid for being there, which basically covered my gas, but I did it for, I did it for fun. I didn't gain another booking. I didn't gain more fans. These people already liked me. They were already my friends, but I had fun. I still went out there. I delivered a show and I had fun. And that is really all we can ask for as performers is the opportunity to do what we love, have fun, and interact with great people. And I think that's really, really important. When you're faced with a smaller crowd, take the opportunity, take the opportunity to shine, take the opportunity to interact. And more so when you're faced with a small crowd, hang out with them, spend time with the people that are there to support you. I went to a festival. It was a small festivals, like for the lionfish or something. I don't know. If you don't live in Florida, you may not even know what a lionfish is. We had a lionfish festival and we went, we thought, we tried to go to all the festivals that are on the river by where we live because I mean, they're free. There's something to do. And we have a 13 year old. So we're always looking for free stuff to do with our kid. And so we always try to go to all the festivals. And so we thought, well, this is a new one. This is interesting. Let's go to the lionfish festival. So we went up there and I mean, it was kind of sad. It was like 12 vendors. Some of them had already packed up and left and it was like halfway through the day. And they had a small little stage. And when I got there, a guy with guitar was on the stage. I always joke about guy with guitar. I don't know if you've heard of it. I don't know because this is most often what you see when you go to restaurants and you have entertainment. You have a guy standing there playing a guitar, singing a song that you probably know, but it's the acoustic version and you're there to eat. And it's just kind of like background music. And unfortunately, entertainers let themselves get that mindset of them, just background music as well. But this guy with a guitar was up on stage. He was playing along and we got there towards the end of his set. I think we heard like two of his songs, but when he was finishing his set, he was singing a song and I didn't know it at the time. I went over by where the stage was and I sat. I'm a talent coach. There's a guy performing on stage. There's probably like six people sitting in front of the stage watching the performance and he's doing his thing, singing a song. I think, I don't even remember what his last song was, but after he got off stage, you know, he talked to the sound guy. He unplugged his amp. He took his stuff, packed it up and he, he booked it. He walked all the way back to his car and nobody saw him again. I don't even know his name. He didn't even announce his name when he finished. He said, oh, thank you very much. And walked off stage, packed up his guitar, took his microphone and just walked off stage and didn't hang out with anybody. Didn't hang out at the festival, didn't do anything. And I hate when performers do that. I absolutely hate it when you get all butthurt because the crowd was small and there was three people that clapped for you and then you just leave. You don't know who those three people are, by the way, and you're just going to book it. You're not even going to say anything to anybody except for the sound guy. He didn't even talk to the promoters. I don't even know if he got paid. That is the most annoying and unprofessional thing that you can do after a performance. I don't care how big the crowd is. I don't care how many people clap for you. I don't care if you literally perform to an empty field. After your show or before your show, I mean, maybe you're at the end, but before or after your show, if the event or the night is still going on, you need to take at least 15, 20 minutes and hang with your people. Have those intimate moments. Gain those followers. Maybe people did show up for the end of your show and they have no idea who they are, but they want to because they like what they heard. If you don't even say your name, I don't even know how to find this guy. He was entertaining. I liked him, but I don't know how to find this guy. Don't be the person that nobody knows how to find because you didn't spend time with your audience because you didn't tell them who you are. I spent a lot of time on this topic. I'm very passionate about our crowds. I'm very passionate about the audience, and it sucks when performers abuse their audience just because they're not happy with the size. Before I sign off here, please head over to our free Facebook group, the Being On Stage group. You can get there going to beingonstage.com slash group, G-R-O-U-P. A lot of performers in there networking, sharing themselves, and supporting each other, by the way, supporting each other and encouraging each other no matter what they do on stage. I got singers. I got dancers. I got drag queens. I got burlesques. I got actors. I got all sorts of stuff, aerial acrobats. Come in and join us. We'd love to have you, and make sure you're signed up for the Rockstar Lounge at Being On Stage, so you get your tips and your tools to help you with performing, so you'll want to get signed up for that. And if I could ask you for one small teensy-weensy favor, head over to iTunes, if you could. Can you rate my podcast and leave a comment? It helps other people find the show. Thanks for tuning in again. This is episode 40. Keep performing. Keep pushing yourself, and for God's sakes, give everything, even when the crowd is small. A small crowd still came for a big show. So keep on shining.
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