Cleverly using some of the suggestions kindly offered by filkers about how to get a turn singing in an open filk circle, Grizelda starts performing. As she does, however, she notices several people getting up from the circle and leaving the room. After she finishes performing, she is also disappointed by the polite but unenthusiastic response.

"What can I do to make people -want- to stay and listen to me perform?" Grizelda wonders.

There are all kinds of reasons why filkers might be leaving the circle that have nothing to do with Grizelda: They needed to stretch after sitting for so long, for example. They have to use the bathroom. They want to greet a friend who has just arrived at the convention. They were overcome by a sudden craving for chocolate or Tully. Yes, it kind of sucks re: timing that they happened to choose Grizelda's performance slot in which to leave, but chances are good they actually do regret having to leave.

That's why I added the last bit to Grizelda's situation. If she still gets an enthusiastic response to her song/piece, then it's very likely the reasons for the audience members leaving had nothing to do with her at all. BUT if she notices a trend of people always leaving as well as consistent unenthusiastic response to her performing, I can't blame her for looking for a solution.

If you have other suggestions for Grizelda, please post them using the comment form at the bottom of this page. Also see the many useful suggestions at the end of this Dandelion Report LJ entry.

Related FAQ entries:
Bill Sutton's performance tips
Spoken word performance tips.

Practice.

It's a horrible word, I know, and there are folks who will disagree with me, and claim that the attraction for them of filk is that you don't have to be good.

No-one says you have to be good to any absolute standard. But (in my perhaps not-so-humble opinion) you surely owe it to yourself and your audience to be as good as you can be. And that means practice.

If you're looking for popularity and easy criteria (though I'm not saying you should), songs are more likely to attract and keep audiences if they ...
are short (as performed),
have a clear melodic line (as performed),
are rhythmically interesting (as performed),
weren't performed 50 times in the last year, and
are performed with some flair.
Having said that, there are all sorts of ways to break those patterns and have an audience on the edge of its seats. But they're logical places to begin questions.
How long was the performance? There's nothing wrong with cutting verses from a song, even if you think there's a canonical version!
Could the audience recognize the song? If your voice is like Arlo Guthrie's, there's nothing wrong with briefly telling the rest of the circle what the song is (if familiar) or asking for instrumental help. (The instrumentalist has to help make the music recognizable!)
Could you add something rhythmically to the performance, either yourself or by asking for help?
Is is possible that the song is overused?
Was the song performed with some energy in some way? You can add to a performance in a variety of ways, by a step even as simple as standing up. (Guitarists who curl over their instrument while sitting down do awful things to their ability to project while singing.)

You have to ask yourself what are the criteria that make people stay and listen to anyone? And in filk, I think it's pretty easy. There are two main things that make people stay and listen - 1) performance level and 2) popularity of the performer. Usually the way to get to 1 is through 2, although not always.

This is just the cold hard fact of filk... if you are unknown and have a lower performance ability, you are bound to get polite applause and experience people leaving and talking and so on.

The only thing Grizelda can actually DO, is work on her performance level, and the advice given by others in this forum is a good start.

Filk is becoming more and more performance-level oriented. Meaning that those of lesser performance levels are going to be struggling more and more for notice. As long as you are a shy, timid, inexperienced, low performance level filker, you are going to experience less than stellar responses a lot of the time. But part of improving yourself is being able to deal with these situations, and give the best performance you can anyway.

The trouble is, of course, that Filk is becoming more about performance and performers, and less about sharing. I mean in general, because of course you can find wonderful sharing circles at many cons.

Scott missed something: In addition to performance skill, there is choice-of-song skill. I've heard someone who was a skilled performer launch into a song that was simply so far outside anything people wanted to listen to that she lost her audience almost instantly.

One of the odd things about Filk is that a mediocre performance of a really good song may actually please the listeners more than a really good performance of a mediocre song. Filk is very much a storytelling/ideas medium; a song which has lyrics worth paying attention to is likely to grab us, and one which doesn't... well, if you're lucky, folks will try to appreciate it as an instrumental.

In my experience, "popularity" in our community is affected by performance skill and song-choice skill... and by skill in playing the circle games so folks don't feel you're filkhogging or ignoring _their_ performances... and by willingness to help and encourage other filkers, or just plain help keep the event running smoothly (they also filk who sit in the lobby and sell memberships). And taking time to get to know folks. All of those actually *are* things one can "work on" if so inclined.

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