Speaker 1Hey Rockstars, Reggie Dawson here, your host of the Being On Stage podcast. Thanks for tuning in and welcome back. Can I talk to you about performing in a group? Now listen, I'll tell you, I was a solo artist. I performed by myself most of the time and most of the other people that I knew performed by ourselves, but there came a lot of times when I would perform as a duet or with a group or sometimes it would be a large group like a production size group and there's certain things that are different when you're performing in a group. There's certain expectations. And there's certain things that, you know, truthfully, you should be doing out of respect for your fellow group members and respect for the art and the performance altogether. I mean, when performers come together in a group, it's, it's phenomenal, man. It's, it's creativity and performance art at its finest, and you will never find something more amazing than a creative process of a group of artists coming together. I'll tell you, and you can look this up. It is 100% factual. Cirque du Soleil, perfect example, perfect example. They have featured all sorts of performers, you know, circus acts, acrobats, contortionists, comedians, stuntmen, BMX bikers, singers, musicians, all types of performers. They, their creative process involves every single one of them. They encourage the creativity of all of their performers that are going to be part of the show. Working in a group is a completely different. Experience and performing by yourself. So, you know, performing by yourself, you make all the decisions. You may run a few ideas by some friends and take some opinions and ask some advice, but ultimately you make all the decisions. And when you're in a group, you may not necessarily be making all the decisions. So it takes, it takes a lot of openness and it takes a lot of trust and trust is the one thing that can tear any group or any group performance apart. I, uh, I actually had a group of performers that we, we rallied together and we formed a little, I don't really know what type of performance group we were, but I don't know. It was fun. We just, we performed a total of like three or four shows and what had happened was there, there began to have some trust issues and listen, I'll stand up and take part of the blame right now. I had some trust issues with people in the group. I had some control issues with letting go of some of the. Creative process, but you know what, that's, that's part of the growth, you know, you have experiences and you learn from them. So, you know, when I was part of this group, we were put together the first performance, you know, me and this other girl, we, we did primarily all of the choreography ourselves for at least two of the numbers, but we did incorporate other aspects of the group, people that wanted to contribute, people that wanted to create, got to create and people that wanted to learn, got to learn. And that's kind of what we did. You know, we, we shared in the creative process. We also all learned from each other and, you know, some people were part, wanted to be a part of the group for the sole purpose of learning to move better on stage and learning to perform better and, and kind of get over some stage fright. And that's, that's the amazing thing about performing in a group, really like it's really good if you're facing stage fright to have some other people up there with you, especially if you have that trust. So the first show went phenomenally. The second show, we started having some. Attendance issues with performance. One member completely just couldn't make any rehearsal at all, ever. Another one, just something always came up. And when he did make rehearsal, he wasn't really like all there. And so one, you know, when, when we talk about performing in a group that, that trust to make rehearsal, like you've got to make rehearsal your priority, especially if everyone's coming together, if you're rehearsing with someone else. You've got to make that a priority to be there. Like it is completely disrespectful to not show up for a rehearsal. I mean, listen, life happens, things happen by all means, you know, something happens to you, you're sick, someone's in the hospital, you have to take care of an urgent matter. I get it, but I mean, really, really push yourself to be at every rehearsal you possibly can be. So we started having the issues with him coming to rehearsals. We have one. One person just stopped showing up, started having issues with another one, making it intermittently and just kind of not really there. So that, that's actually my second point is when you're in, when you're in that group rehearsal, be in that group rehearsal, you know, try your absolute best to stay focused. Now we were all friends. So, you know, we would goof around, we would hang out. So it, you know, a two hour rehearsal easily turned into a three hour rehearsal, if you know what I mean, because yeah, you're going to lose focus. You're going to goof off. You're going to have fun. That's part of building the relationship. And honestly, that's part of building that trust because you're going to need that trust later when you're performing to know that this person's got it and you're going to have to just trust that to happen and having that relationship and having that fun with them in rehearsal, just, it just helps get you there. So when you're in rehearsal, as much as possible, be in rehearsal, like be present in rehearsal, show up, you know, and if you don't want to know what I mean by be present in rehearsal, it means pay attention. Be focused, contribute, participate, be actively in the rehearsal as much as you possibly can. You got things on your mind. You got other things going on. I got news for you. We all do, but we have to be present when we're in rehearsal because it is a priority. We're performers. Rehearsal is a priority. So, you know, back to my little story I'm telling you. So as we're getting ready for the second show coming up and it's like, it's like a month between the first and second show. so the second show is coming up and you know we're rehearsing and we start to have a little bit of tension with other people wanting to start create like the people that were in it to just learn they now want to start stretching their creative muscle and me like in the state where i was at at the point i i was kind of resistant to giving up some of that creative control and there was kind of like a battle uh like a silent battle of who was actually in charge of the group and that's that's really important is listen i'm i'm all for everybody contribute and i'm all for participation but you've you do have to have a sort of chain of command uh with that in mind you know you have to have someone who is in charge of the group who runs the group and manages the group that period you have to have a group manager that being said that group manager also needs to be cognizant of the creativity and the needs of the people that are all that are in the group with them and that's something that i was lacking like i wasn't seeing their needs for more growth and i wasn't allowing it to happen so there started to be little tensions um and then i guess two girls that were with me but like i was supposed to supposedly in charge and then there was supposed to be a second in command but two different girls thought they were second in command and i did not have a second in command and i was supposed to be a second in command and i was supposed to have the heart or the intention to um actually decide who was second in command and make that known so i kind of i let both of them believe they were second in command uh hoping that they wouldn't talk about it to each other but it started to create some tensions because girl a would say something and kind of run something in rehearsal and then later on girl b would kind of complain to me about it meanwhile when girl b said something or ran something in rehearsal girl b would complain about it to me later so it it created a bit of a um push and pull uh for us so you know when you're in a group you really need to have that established chain of command as well and it needs to be spoken so if you're leading the group if you are the person in charge and even if you're not don't allow people to dispute around you you know if someone's got a problem with someone else don't be that person in the middle that they're both complaining to if someone's having issues with someone else in the group you gotta you just gotta hash it out like you gotta go to the person you gotta talk it out you gotta figure it out if it's an issue of who's in charge or who's second or third or fourth or fifth or tenth in command you have to make it known someone has to make that decision and everyone's got to be okay with it if it's got to come to a vote it's got to come to a vote but that has to be established and it has to be communicated because i'll tell you this created so much tension that after our second show we got invited to do kind of like a benefit for a friend uh that was going through some tough times and everything so we did lean on me uh by oh god don't quote me i don't know but we did lean on me everyone knows lean on me i hope we put this together rather quickly and at this point we had lost uh one more performer we started at seven and now we're down to four five i'm sorry we're down to five of us started at seven down to five the third show went off pretty good there were still some mild tensions between the two girls but they were kind of working it out like they just we just didn't talk about it period so after the the third show we decided we were going to do a bigger production show like a bigger longer like 30 minute showcase show and we were going to do like a journey through time and we're assigning decades and we're going through like what songs we're going to do and who's going to be in what and where the group numbers are going to be and there's going to be a girl's number and a guy's number and a couple's number and who's going to be in who else's show and who's going to be showcased and we're putting together all the shows and what was happening was we were rehearsing the group numbers we started rehearsing the opener what was supposed to happen was the boys were supposed to get together to rehearse the boys number the girls were to get together to rehearse the girls number and then everyone was supposed to also rehearse their individual numbers and when we came together for rehearsal at the beginning of rehearsals so the first thing i would do is i would say okay let's run through how we're going on our individual performances and it normally came down to there wasn't a whole lot of work done into them oh i thought about doing this and this is something i thought about doing and i figured this would be oh look at this picture i found and i'm no different i did the same thing you know it was all mental planning no action taken no real progress made and so that brings me to another point about working in groups when we talk about respect it's important that you rehearse your part as well as rehearsing the group part so rehearsal with the group should not be the only time that you are rehearsing you should be rehearsing on your own you should be rehearsing your part another piece of this story i forgot to mention about the very first show we did so one of the people that were having difficulty getting to rehearsal they decided that they wanted to be a part of a certain number of the group and they wanted to be part of a certain number of the group and so we had to like really quickly run try and teach them the choreography and all the movements and everything and it ended up kind of taking away from the show because you could tell that there was a little delay and a little follow the leader if you know what i mean when it came to the choreography if you come together in your group and you only have you know two hours together and you have three numbers to get through that's barely enough time to get through what you have to get through as a group let alone if the group is has to stop slow down wait for you to go over your part because you didn't rehearse it before you came so you didn't come prepared and when you don't come prepared it it's super hard to see the progress of the show when everyone else is rehearsing and they have to slow down and wait for you to catch up and know your part and you know we had to do that with choreography a couple of times so people would miss rehearsal uh and that's the other thing you know when you miss rehearsal the time it takes for the for for the rest of the group to go over what you missed is valuable time that could have been spent working on something new think about that you could have been working on something new instead of going over what was missed at the last rehearsal again life happens urgent matters aside missing rehearsal is you know it's a detriment to the performance it hurts the time that you have together so in an effort to keep this incredibly long story short which i'm hailing at miserably by the way uh as we're preparing for this long production show um more and more people stop showing up for rehearsal uh eventually i'm the only person that shows up for rehearsal i call people no one answers um and that that's another point i did a podcast about this a long long time ago but just to repeat it one more time um if you're interested in dropping out of a group just say something like don't just go silent don't just stop showing up like communicate tell people what's going on with you maybe they can help maybe they can't maybe it's not the time for you to be in this group right now and that's something that you're just going to have to be okay with but going silent and and avoiding rehearsal and and just stop showing up it's not really it's not really an option it's not really you know what it's rude it's disrespectful i'm just gonna say it it's freaking disrespectful so eventually and this was probably one of my biggest mistakes um i i stopped calling rehearsal uh i just i just stopped i stopped texting people i stopped calling people i stopped sending reminders and after about two weeks uh three two or three weeks of me showing up and being the only person that showed up um i stopped showing up and that was probably around the middle of october uh and i don't i don't remember the year it was like 2013 or something but the middle of october and i think in january or february of the following year uh one of the members uh messaged me on facebook and asked whatever happened to the group we you know whatever happened with rehearsal you know i stopped getting notified and i mean at first i was really freaking angry but what i what i said i said well you know i i stopped calling rehearsal because i was the only person showing up and that was in october so what does that tell you and i got no response and actually i got unfriended for about five years he just requested me back last summer so yeah the group fell apart and all of it was due to a lack of trust lack of respect and a lack of priorities and you know what listen again i'm gonna take part of the blame on this and say that you know if i had given up some control and if i had been a little more supportive of my group members instead of uh resistant and controlling that you know we may still be rocking it today for all i know and be like a huge huge you know performance company so moral of the story when you're working in a group you know it is all about respect it is all about being there for each other developing that trust and just having that fun together with the people that you call your friends trust each other have the difficult conversations and move forward together and give an amazing show i'm going to share some more stuff for groups uh later on hit me up if you like this kind of stuff let me know you can send me a dm on instagram i'm at being on stage or you can shoot me an email reggie at being on stage.com i respond both ways just saying as always you can join our free facebook group by going to being on stage.com slash group i see you in there every monday wednesday and i believe i'm going to be adding fridays here very very soon uh just to get in there and do some more uh coaching into using the stage and and improving the performance and how the audience views you and things like that i do a motivational monday uh video music share and i also do a wednesday deeper dive into the motivation and pushing yourself as a performer so you'll definitely want to get in the group to check that out look forward to seeing you in there hit me up rock stars and as always keep on shining
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