Day Two: Workshop Stage Presentation Bobby Rootveld
This year the Workshop Stage Presentation was more small-scaled: two participants per group. The advantage is an individual approach, the disadvantage is the missing audience which is nice for practice.
For this workshop we returned to Crime Scene Theatre Hall. Fortunately Bobby wore his festival T-shirt, else I would have left empty-handed.
This time's subjects were a few things which bother you as a guitarist and musician, to be specific fear of failure and blackouts.
Fear of failure concerns more than the (public) performance of music alone. For this there are more general solutions like a course or a workshop in that field. I remembered The Inner Game of Music by Barry Green, which also covers this subject.
Blackouts are particularly annoying if you play by heart. You can consider a blackout as the simultaneous failure of a number of memorizing devices which cause your great performance to be bogged down. Memorizing devices with music e.g. are visual memory, movement memory and audile memory.
One of the original solutions was decoupling of the memorizing devices, so that you can use them side to side of each other. An example was watching TV while you are practicing a difficult set of measures, which distracts you from the fear of failure of this passage.
I did so myself, practicing Capricho Arabe while I was watching the beautiful Italian TV series Secret of the Sahara. Unfortunately the quality of practice did suffer a bit from it.
The practice of the workshop -arriving on stage- appeared to have improved quite a lot. Finally I take some time to concentrate after sitting down!