The PUREformance Method
“Great performance is only possible when the heart is on fire…and the mind is on ice.”
— Arturo Toscanini
Optimize Your Performance Neurology
Whether you’re a musician, actor, dancer, athlete or speaker, every performer takes the same neurology into their performance medium. Understanding how to generate and maintain the optimum neurological performance profile will help you master your performances. While your individual experiences helps form your unique set of challenges, they can also form the solutions to them as well.
How do I know about those challenges?
Well besides the fact that I have over 50 years of professional performance experience as a musician, I spent 31 years coaching professional actors in over half a million high-pressure auditions as a film and television casting director. That’s a very unique set of circumstances to develop and field test what works and what doesn’t.
The methods I developed had to work before each actor left the room and the next one came in. So necessity required ideas and coaching techniques that were highly customized and immediately effective. AND they had to be available, on-demand. I began studying and researching the forces at play and the ones I developed over the past 35 years are backed by science.
Everyone has a free, authentic and passionate self that comes out in the right circumstances. Helping you easily find THAT place inside whenever you want, should be the ultimate goal of your coach…not to “train” you to look and sound like someone else.
Your audience knows when they’re getting the real you and you know it too.
An effective coach learns to remove the impediments that can keep a performer from being truly streamlined in their priority to be that most authentic self. Something that can only be generated from the inside. Yet almost every live performance coaching endeavor seeks to influence their client from the outside. Armed with faulty data about body language studies, they often try to superimpose a “preferred” posture over the one to which their client naturally gravitates when they are most comfortable. Or artificially animate facial expressions. Or modulate the voice more to sound more “interesting.”
Most of these instructions are read as, “don’t be static, don’t be monotoned or boring...."
This might seem like logical advice, but there was a landmark study done that proved that trying to NOT do something is a recipe for being far more prone to do the very thing they’re trying NOT to do! Yet most coaching invariably involves telling the client to omit things considered to be below their standard of excellence. Not the one the client exhibits in their most natural and passionately authentic state. Invariably, they set their performance client on the path of “doing” rather than “Being.” And having seen no shortage of actors “do” their peformances, I can tell you that watching someone in “Beingness,” is far more rare. And it becomes a profound experience for both performer and audience.
When you’re performing from a state of being, you’re completely free and autonomous. No one can give you anything you don’t already have, nor can they take anything from you. You’re in the most primary state to truly move not only your audience…but yourself.
This pure place inside is the birthplace of truly passionate performance. Coincidentally, it’s the same place from which you regularly created as a child.
After 35 years and literally hundreds of thousands of interactions with performers of all types, I’ve seen this process work over and over by now.
And as a professional performing musician, I live by them myself.
PUREformance works fast — and requires less coaching once the principles are embodied and understood. Kind of like learning to ride a bike! It would be my honor to help you re-discover them for yourself.
