Wednesday, June 22, 2005

My Commitment, My Promise...

To take you down a road of performance that you have only imagined.

Each of us has our strengths and weakness in our organization. My strength is performance. Not just solid performance or good performance, but phenomenal performance. I am here to do one job in particular and that is to perform to the utmost of my ability. It is a performance intensity that is rivaled by few out there. An extreme hunger and desire for absolute perfection in every aspect of my gig. Not just from a technical standpoint. I have devoted many long hours of practice to become technically sound no matter what the conditions are. I have devoted those hours so that I don’t have to think about technique any longer. I am talking from a pure emotional state of performing from the mindset you have going in to the highs and lows of a show to the adrenaline you feel at the end.

Work hard on the technical things at home. Work hard on getting the show down under your fingers and under your feet. I can show you the ways of performance. There are others like me, who identify themselves the same way every weekend. We just flat out know everything cold, or at least we appear to. Even during the moments where we may not have something down 100% you can never tell because we make mistakes look intentional. Calculated mistakes? No, just very confident one’s! This too goes along with performance.

Now here is what separates the professionals from everyone else. This goes along with my last post. The ability to reevaluate each performance once you are done, this includes all of the little ones you do all day long during our rehearsal routine. Now most of us have this ability, however few of us are able to admit mistakes. Even fewer of us are able to actually think outside the box and either correct them or ask for help to correct them. I will relate to you my one experience teaching DCI.

In the summer of 2000 I was working with the Bluecoats contra line. There was roughly about 2 months of DCI division 1 experience between the 10 of them. My goal was to educate them. By August I was able to go up to each individual after a rep of something and ask them what they did wrong. Not only did they know what they did wrong , but they also knew exactly what needed to be done to correct it. My goal at that point is accomplished. I have successfully taught 10 inexperienced individuals how to evaluate every aspect of their performance, identify the errors, and identify a solution to fix those problems. Once they got that down, they put out one of the most emotional performances I have ever seen in my life at DCI quarterfinals. They were simply on fire, physically, mentally, and emotionally. Every one of those kids cried after that show, not because they knew or understood the magnitude of what they had done, but simply because they were caught up in the act of doing something really special.

10 inexperienced individuals. That is the difference between them and us. I am not saying throw out everything you have learned from your past experiences. Some of us aren’t willing to part with the fact that we are/were the best from our respective organizations. We were the one’s that were never wrong. In reality we were the one’s that were the least wrong. No one has EVER in the history of this competitive activity had a perfect show. In order to get there we are all going to have to change some things. It takes a great deal of time, it takes a great deal of commitment, and it takes a tremendous attitude to make these changes. If you can make them then you are in for the ride of a lifetime, and when the dust settle you might actually learn something about yourself and your will that you never knew was there.

The journey is made with progress. It is time to make some progress.

3 comments:

Christine Hingray said...

And Steve Tanner has all of my music parts. great.

Well i just wanted to revise 2 or 3 notes...

But i guess i'll just do what us contras do best... Make stuff up...

hehe!

Dawn Marie said...

Totally OT, but Ive realized a connection. Why do people with the last name Bently have the same mentality? (Steve & Todd) Hmm, strange.

Shawn C. said...

Everyone else I know with the last name Bently is the same way...LOL!