Dance Something I Can Play To... Category: Music ..I was playing a little gig in a little Irish pub in Stuttgart back in 2003 and it was all going well for the first hour or so and everybody was warming to my songs, although my jokes were getting little or no response from the mostly German audience for whom English is, after all, a second or third or fourth or fifth language. See Stuttgart is about an hour from France, less than two hours from Switzerland, and it aint far to Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, Austria, the Czech Republic or even Poland. Denmark, which feels like it is on the other side of Europe is just 800km away... that´s like Lismore to Sydney... just a hop, really. So I finished my first set, took a break, sold a few CDs, chatted with folks, tried to think about what I might play in the second set. Then I got up and played again and the crowd was really great, having a great time, warming to every song I played. And then, just when I was thinking `Why can´t RSL club crowds in Australia be like this?´ all of a sudden two ladies got up and started sort of swaying in the middle of the floor. They were trying to dance but it just wasn´t happening. They were unfamiliar with their own sense of rhythm ... like boy scouts who march in their first parade but are so frozen with the stress of the public display that they swing their right arm forward with their right leg...and their left arm with their left leg... instead of relaxing with the rhythm, you know, and letting it happen naturally... it´s just walking, after-all. But these two ladies, they just couldn´t get the hang of it. Then after a few minutes they called out to me... `Play something we can dance to....` and I called back... `Just relax into it... you can dance if you just allow yourself... I´m playing a concert here.... you gotta figure out the dancing stuff yourselves...´At this there was an eruption of laughter from a bunch of dudes who were sitting up the back. The two ladies bid a hasty retreat and got back to the task of drinking Guinness. A conversation did eventually start up between them and the dudes and so, hopefully, the story had a mutually consensual conclusion.As I drove home later that night I realised it wasn´t that my jokes were hard to understand it was just that they weren´t that funny. There was a certain liberation in that sudden sense of clarity, though. And it made me work on the gags, the speaking bits, it made me feel confident to just talk as if people in a foreign country could understand what I was saying.It took until we moved back again to Germany at the end of 2008 (after four interim years in Australia) for me to really start to lean into my between-songs banter... but it´s made a world of difference. That little edge of confidence, of not caring really if anyone understands me or not, has now become an extra lane on the bridge that connects my audience and me and the stage I´m on and it is way cool.
Posted on: Mon, 01 Jul 2013 13:32:38 +0000
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