Community.

I have always found many parallels between the physical things I do, such as karate and ballroom dancing. Both are graceful and include choreography and require intense focus and stamina. More surprising perhaps is that so many of the principles of karate are related to what I do every day. Trying to adopt the “karate-do”, a way of life exemplified by the principles of martial arts, has helped me immeasurably, not the least of which is in a reduction of stress. So many things that used to bother me simply don’t anymore, as I gradually learn to lose the tendency to judge other people or to worry about what might happen with a voice-over audition. I worry less about what other people are doing in their own karate training and their lives and focus on what I can do to improve my own karate, my own voice-over career, my own life. This results not so much in self-centeredness but in a centering of self. And with this comes enhanced ability to reach out to other people and to help them along their way if I can see a way to do it unobtrusively.

This is all greatly on my mind in the week following a remarkable gathering in our nation’s capital, the celebration of the 45th anniversary of Ueshiro Shorin-ryu Karate in the USA. Over 100 people representing 11 karate schools were in attendance, including 15 people from my own school.

I belong to many communities, formal and informal: of family members, of people in my neighborhood, of parents of school-aged kids, of voice-over professionals, of practitioners of Ueshiro Shorin-ryu karate, of the members of my local karate dojo. I’ve been training with these karate people for 6 ½ years now and have gotten to know some of them very well. We see each other on the deck several times a week, gathering for picnics and for outdoor training, and have stuck together through upheavals at our dojo and the formation and dissolution of personal relationships. Traveling 8 hours by car to celebrate with them for two days and support those who were testing for a new rank, and then the (alas, 12 hour) ride home made me focus as never before on how intense is the experience of being human. These communities are incredibly important and sustaining. This particular one, for me, serves the purpose of supporting mental, spiritual and physical health. I especially encourage anyone who spends their days sitting in front of a computer, even though they may belong to vibrant communities of online friends and professionals, not to neglect their own communities of real people. Cultivate them. Cherish them. Allow them to sustain you.

MCM and friends – photo courtesy Sensei Boris Grossman

Wait for the count.

Not Dracula. Not Godot. I’ve got more karate/voice-over parallels on my mind, so please indulge me. I’ll get right to the point and put the karate origins of this thought at the end, so you voice-over types can skip that part if you want to.

When you go to a studio for an audition or recording session with a new client, or if you do one live, from your own studio by phone patch or ISDN, do you immediately start chattering your head off about things of interest to you? Like what a bear it was getting to the studio because you didn’t sleep well and the kids overslept and missed the school bus and there wasn’t any bread so there was nothing for lunch and….? Of course not. You’re ready to work, aren’t you? You go in, exchange a few pleasantries perhaps to remind each other of your mutual humanity, and get down to business. Perhaps the engineer or director has something on his or her mind and feels like chatting with you about it, but your assumption should be that they too are there to work and would like to get at it expeditiously. So you get to the script and wait for direction. Keep your mouth shut except when it’s clear that it’s time to open it.

If you make a mistake in your read, you can either keep going or stop and ask, “where shall I pick up?” Skip the self deprecating comments, resist the temptation to joke about it, just pick up as directed and go on. Wait for instruction about the next take, ask questions if you need to, and stick to business. Make your thank-yous and skedaddle. Obviously, as you get to know a client you will judge for yourself what is an appropriate level of familiarity and talkativeness. But at first, assume that it’s your job to “shut up and talk”.

Out there in the world, this is also a good rule to live by. You encounter many people in the course of the day – bosses, co-workers, teachers, friends, maybe even law enforcement agents (e.g. if you get pulled over – oh dear). Maybe you didn’t complete an assignment on time or you forgot about a meeting or lunch date. Don’t make excuses. Maybe a close friend wants to hear just how bad your weekend was (although don’t make a habit of running on about such things), but you gotta assume that the average acquaintance or encounter does not want to hear your stuff. Apologise, explain briefly, if an explanation is appropriate, and move on. Really. You will get far more respect if you keep the excuses to yourself. When you hear the echoes of those excuses reverberating in the air, I think you’ll know what I mean. You’ll also respect yourself more if you just don’t say them.

So where does the karate connection come in? (oh, right - bye kids - see you later - thanks for stopping by the blog!)

In karate, we all take turns counting for kata or individual techniques performed as an exercise. In between counts, we wait. Breathe. We know what move comes next, but we don’t anticipate it, because In karate there is no first strike (Karate ni sente nashi). You don’t start a fight, you only use your art to defend yourself if someone attacks you. In class, performing kata, we are moving through a choreographed series of offensive and defensive moves against an imaginary opponent, and even though we know ahead of time what the moves are, we wait for the count. The count represents the opponent. The discipline we develop by waiting for the count prepares us for the discipline of a fight in which we wait for the opponent to strike first. There is no sense in blocking a punch that has not been thrown (just like there is no sense in making an excuse when nobody asked you why you were late or why the roast is overcooked or why you made that mistake in your read).

I wrote the following “Thought of the Week” 3 years ago for the Shorin Ryu Karate USA website :

In an orchestra the musicians are obliged to await their cues before playing their parts. Independence is counterproductive in such a setting, as it distracts the other performers, it is disrespectful to the conductor, and it causes the symphony to fall apart. When one is performing kata, independence is similarly pernicious. It may cause other karateka to lose focus, and it is discourteous to the person responsible for the count (the “conductor”). Each movement in a kata or kihon technique should be the only one that exists at that moment, and in between, no skeletal muscles should move except for those associated with respiration. The count represents the opponent’s move, and only when it comes can we know what move is required of us. To move too soon could be fatal. Wait for the count.

Wait for your cue.

Shut up and talk.

I did it.

I’ve been working up to this day for the last six years. Just like the nodes on a phylogenetic tree that indicate speciation events, however, being awarded a new belt in karate is just a punctuation mark in what I hope will be a long sentence, paragraph, page, book - in my life.

MCM 3 December 2006

Sensei Barnes (aka Marv from Life with Bonnie)

Group photo after the presentation of the belts

To everyone, no matter what you are striving to achieve: keep moving forward.

Taking Direction.

Karate thoughts again. It’s just so woven into my life. I went down to New York last weekend for an outdoor “system-wide” workout in Central Park. Hanshi Scaglione was up from Florida, and one of our Kyoshi and 6 Sensei were present. We could not have asked for a more perfect day to be out of doors, and I got a GREAT parking spot on 69th just off Madison Avenue (yeah, I grew up in New York. A good parking spot can make the difference between leaving Sunday night or going back home sometime on Monday or Tuesday). The workout lasted 4 ½ hours, which was enough time for a LOT of corrections to be suggested – in technique, stance, all kindsa stuff. And quite a few of the corrections went against what I had been taught, so there was a fair bit of discussion about that at the next class I attended back home, among those of us from our dojo who had attended this event in New York.

Basically, one needs to be able to take direction. On the deck or in the booth. If Hanshi or the client wants you to do it THIS way, then that’s what you do. Later, when you’ve sorted through it all and decide what advice you want to keep and what you don’t, you’ll arrive at your own style – well, not exactly style, but maybe your karate “happy place”, and hope that it doesn’t get you into trouble when you’re testing for black belt (for example). Maybe you can look like you’re doing it one way and actually do it another – like when they say, “speed up your read, but make it sound slower”. LOL.

Yeah. Anyway, it was a glorious, tiring day. Nice people, lots of exercise, no traffic on the trip down or back. And Kyoshi runs a production company in New York, so it was great to make that connection too :)

Central Park Workout September 2006 (photo courtesy of Sensei Michael Mackay)

Energy.

I’ve written here before about karate and voice-over. Both are physical and anyone who does physical activity and voice work on a regular basis can tell you that the parallels are numerous. But use of the voice in karate is what got me thinking about the relationship most recently. The subject of psychological and kinetic energy came up in Pat Fraley’s voice-over master class last weekend. One of our exercises was to read a number of lines using one or the other of these two energy types, and to mix up the two types within one line. One common choice for kinetic energy is volume – make it LOUDER. There are other ways of expressing kinetic energy and I was experimenting last night in karate class when my turn came around to count for whatever exercise it was that we were doing. The count is tremendously important in karate – it can motivate or it can depress one’s fellow students, and it is “spirit” – more precisely ENERGY - that makes the difference. I wanted to motivate with kinetic energy but not at great volume - to minimize the risk of hurting my voice (volume doesn't hurt if produced correctly, but I don't always multi-task well and wanted to focus on one thing), and without showing expression – because in karate you don’t want to your face to give away your emotional state.

In the booth, smiling is a huge help in adding energy to a read. It may be the single easiest way to change the feeling of your words. So trying to convey energy while counting for karate, without smiling or showing other expression, is a very challenging, interesting and fun exercise. The way I approached it was to “show” expression in my mind. To think it and try to get it into my voice but without showing the expression on my face. I believe that it worked pretty well. I don’t think it would work if one’s physical carriage were also removed from the equation – energy also serves as a sort of skeleton, a vertebral column of sorts, or maybe it’s the other way around – that one’s body provides the scaffolding for energy. Without good posture and a proud carriage, I don’t think the “show kinetic energy without showing facial expression at all” would work.

So how can this help in the booth? Maybe this is just a long-winded, B.S. Zen way of saying, watch yer posture and if you have to do a narration on a subject for which a smile is not appropriate, there are other ways to put energy into your read. You can be sure I’ll be experimenting with it further.

Discipline

Since beginning my study of karate over 5 years ago, I have had occasion to think about discipline in new ways. I’ve always chafed under authority, and here I am practising an art that requires something along the lines of obedience. Respect and courtesy are hugely important in Japanese culture, whereas Americans are known for being free spirited, possibly even rude and boorish. I have found that, just as I benefit physically from the exercise karate offers, my mind has benefited in many ways, not the least of which is that I can go onto the deck and try to turn off the part of my mind that questions authority- ideally, performing the choreographed series of offensive and defensive moves that make up the kata of karate is a form of “moving meditation”, and we can focus on it so completely that kata takes over and we in essence “become” the kata..

It isn’t that I accept everything I’m taught in karate without questioning it – it’s important to know what the moves are for and sometimes one is told to do things a certain way for a certain reason, but the moves and the reasoning are sometimes open to interpretation. But one of the challenges in karate, as well as in life, is to know when to let go and focus on one’s own training, not on what other people might be doing on the deck, how other people might be choosing to interpret kata, or courtesy, or focus, or any of the other components of the art or of life. Who is being asked to test for their next rank? Does that person deserve it? Have they been training as often as the rest of us? Is their technique good enough?

Whenever my mind starts going in that direction, I have to pull it back and remind myself that I really don’t “get it” when I allow myself those thoughts, and that part of the discipline and focus of this art is to turn inward and do the best I can to improve my practise of it, to help other people when it’s appropriate (e.g., if I’m conducting the class), and to otherwise ignore what other people are doing. A friend of mine who is now a second-degree black belt told me that although she used to get worked up about some of these things, she now tries not even to have the negative thoughts. That made a big impression on me. It’s a good aspiration for karate and for what happens to you every day on the street. It’s also helpful for voice-over and any kind of art or life work that requires you to offer your work up for criticism and rejection. Every day you send out emails or make telephone calls and attend auditions or record auditions at your own studio. All too often you get no response at all, and if your mind is overly active and you have a tendency to analyse everything to the hilt, you can overindulge in speculating about why. Why did that producer contact me personally for a custom read ASAP and then never even acknowledge my response, let alone hire me? Would I get more answers to my marketing queries if I timed them differently? Maybe I should have interpreted the copy differently. Maybe I was slightly too emotional when I should have gone for calm authority. Maybe I would have gotten the gig if I hadn’t had that cup of cocoa for breakfast. Maybe...

Enough already. Let it go. No, it isn’t easy, but it’s essential if one is to keep one’s balance and achieve a life of serenity and happiness. Clear negative thoughts from one’s mind so that the good thoughts have more room to grow. Keep them out of conversations with other people. Okay, maybe I’ll have to rush into a closet and shriek for a minute every so often to get it out of my system, but maybe after a while I won’t even need that. I want to be happy and I want the people around me to be happy too. Negative thoughts bring civilisation down. Can’t have that. I would like to have the discipline to do my life’s work to the best of my ability, to take direction where appropriate, and to move on when my goals don’t match those of the people on intersecting paths.

I'll report back in a few months, if I'm not too embarrassed about it.

Artwork by Christine O'Hara

Karate and Voice-over

No, I’m not talking about voicing an episode of Jackie Chan. I’m talking about using the voice in karate. I was thinking about that during class this evening, as my mind sometimes wanders (telling me I am ipso facto insufficiently focussed on the art which is like OMG so totally not karatedo). That one needs to use the voice in karate to motivate the listener. We all get our turn to count for the class – counting kata, counting kihon techniques, and we carry a lot of responsibility when we do. An unconvincing count can suck the spirit out of the whole place – just as an unconvincing VO in a commercial fails to sell the product. I sometimes train with people who count as if they were singing a lullaby and I just want to lie down and take a nap. Or like – you know how newscasters talk, ending every sentence with a peculiar emphasis and on a minor key or something? It’s particularly weird-sounding when the newscaster is British, because the fashion in Britain seems to be to sort of slide down the scale on the last word. I dare say American newscasters drive the Brits nuts. So back to karate – my studied opinion is that the count should be strong and clear and energetic enough to lift people up, but not so in-your-face that one’s fellow karateka are distracted by it. Been there, seen that. Annoying. Who woulda thought a count could be annoying? Maybe I’m just a grump.