Actors and Dancers

Inspired by my Loudpark 12 festival visit, I feel the need to theorize a bit about vocalists

In more or less every rock band the focal point is the singer. They basically come along in two types, those who play an instrument while singing and those who don’t.

Now, when you don’t sing while playing an instrument, but your “only” instrument is your voice, you have a unique situation at hand that none of your other band members face. You have spare time. You’re not singing for every note of the song. If you have no instrument to “hide behind” you must have a strategy for what to do with the time during which you are not singing.

There is only that much “firing up the audience” you can do. You will be left with spare time that needs to be filled, since many of the audience’s eyes remain on you.

Now what do you do with that time?

I think there are four basic categories, the dancers, the actors, the dancer/actors and those who don’t know what to do (yet).

One simple strategy for bridging the time between your lines of lyrics is: you “dance”. That can take various forms, real dancing, hopping around, bouncing around, running from one end of the stage to the other, headbanging and so forth.

The other strategy is to act, to be an entertainer, to go all dramatic when you have a pause in your lines, to act out the meanings of your songs, to interact with your fellow musicians on stage as far as that is possible and so forth.

There are many vocalists who do a combination of the two and act and “dance” a bit.

All those are viable strategies and the performance of the vocalist looks “whole”.

Now, of course there are bad and good actors among the vocalists and if you overdo the acting part, you risk looking silly on stage, which creates an awkward feeling in the audience.

The other problem is when you are neither an actor nor a dancer and look like you don’t know what to do with your spare time on stage. That makes the vocalist look lost and insecure and again creates an awkward feeling in the audience.

So, my advice to all vocalists is – look at your own performance videos and find out what type you are and for those who are neither actors nor dancers, decide on one and consciously go for it. In the worst case you can also take acting or dancing classes

I wonder whether all vocalists are aware of this spare time issue. I wasn’t for the four times I stood on a stage as a vocalist. Looking back now, I quite naturally and without thinking about it chose the acting/“dancing” (= headbanging) hybrid to spend the spare time, down to taking props with me on stage, (a flashing signal staff). It’s fun to realize that now, years after the performances. If I had the time, I’d love to sing in a band again and consciously cultivate that acting/headbanging hybrid more, but alas, the lack of time……