When I was in Sydney, I saw the musical ‘Wicked!’ Yes, someone who investigates paranormal claims, superstitions and the 
scientific measurement of belief… watching witches? Well, it’s all part of further research – and a love of drama!
Earlier on, in a blog-post I wrote about sports, theatre (or theater!), dramatic arts and study superstitions in relation to psychology and traditions. It’s interesting to note when I tell people about what I want to look at, they more often than not act really resistant to my researching paranormal beliefs… but if I say it in conjunction with ‘sports‘ or ‘drama‘, they get really excited and / or interested!
‘Why yes, I’ve known an entire rowing team who did not wash their socks for the whole season, in order to make sure they kept their winning streak…’ said a physical education teacher from a boy’s school, when we were doing a 50 Mile Walk supervision. Thankfully the kids did change their ‘lucky’ socks on the walk because I seriously wouldn’t have liked to see / smell the state of their feet…
But then, there’s plenty of items in the news that crop up again and again yearly about sports superstitions – it’s pretty much commonplace in ‘quirky’ reports about teams and seasons, from hockey (no black cats indeed!), football (all sorts, including Aussie and even their fans!), soccer and volleyball, just athletes in general – even how gifts of knives and coins are a part of a NASCAR racer’s interactions. The familiar can be funny and not as worrisome, after all.
More recently there’s been a study into luck and charms that taps into some of the observations I’ve made from my research – a recent paper by Damisch et. al. shows some of the beneficial effects in regards to task performance (although I should point out that the phrasing of questions regarding gestures that can be interpreted different ways – such as what they studied, in regards to crossing fingers).
Activating a superstition boosts participants’ confidence in mastering upcoming tasks, which in turn improves performance.
Improved performance boiled down to not only persistence at the task, but an improvement in “self efficacy assessment”; if you’re making more of a concerned effort, it pays off. Is this an adaptation that may then pay off, rather than being the pejorative ‘silly habit’?
When it comes to traditions in the dramatic arts, people tend to get relaxed and kind of blase at times, saying ‘oh, break a leg, uh huh.’ But they’re not always positive, as discussed in the use of scary elements in Macbeth – a friend mentioned he was even yelled at for whistling onset whilst waiting for filming to start during his job as an extra in a production!
Some of the questions I’ve had about superstitions have resulted in a few investigations – for example, when can drawing upon superstitious beliefs of the audience be of use in directing a performance?
Audience belief is a very, very tricky thing. Actors know very well for example that those lines one audience found funny, the next night one doesn’t get a single laugh – and vice-versa, dark, scary sections seem to be relieved by laughter in the audience one night, and then come across as deathly serious and gloomy the next.
It is only really possibly to manipulate audience belief if one can be reasonably confident that almost everyone in an audience shares a particularly belief. When it comes to compensatory magic, incantations and charms, it is fair to say that hasn’t really been the case for many centuries – except to say that more audiences are sceptical of such things today than would not be sceptical. The Expressionists, Symbolists and others got away with some pretty way out, almost clairvoyant style performances partly because there was widespread interest – if not necessarily belief – in such ideas in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
What is certain though is that that oldest of all Romantic homilies – the “suspension of disbelief” – still lies at the heart of the vast majority of performance. Bertold Brecht famously wrote that treating stage action as though it were real, and identifying with the psychic and emotional journey of the characters, had the potential to reduce the critical faculties of the audience. He wanted a thinking audience, and he thought the best way to do that was to remind audiences all the time that what they are doing is watching a play, not ‘real’ people.
Even so, even in Brechtian performance, one is encouraged to allow oneself to ‘go with the flow’ to a certain degree. Strictly speaking, Brecht did not want to destroy illusion, but to create a self critical and divided audience member, who could both cry with the actor, and think to him or herself “That’s so annoying! I know how false and silly this all is, and yet I’m still crying!” I have to say that’s how I see performance myself today. When I was a kid, my father told me that he still cried while watching The Wizard of Oz, and I thought “That’s sooo stupid.” Now I do it myself after attending ‘Wicked‘ in Sydney – even while recognising that is IS ‘stupid’!
Anyway, the biggest superstition you cans still rely on in the theatre is that, in different ways and with different nuances of meaning or experience, we still all treat the theatre as a kind of collective magic; as a kind of glittering fabrication which we will into some KIND of life — even if it’s that of an overtly animated automaton — through this act of sitting together, usually in the dark and staring at a stage. No matter how old and cynical I become, I, like everyone else, am constantly amazed and enchanted by such small acts of beautiful magic and belief in the auditorium.
Can drawing on superstitions for auditions be of use to build up confidence? If it helps someone to audition, then by all means. I would however suggest to any young or relatively inexperienced performer who might be auditioning, that they should be prepared to have all of their most deeply held and cherished views, values and ideals challenged at some point or another over the course of their education. Not necessarily overturned, by any means, but certainly challenged. As that great Enlightenment figure Voltaire once said: “Doubt everything! It is only through doubt that we learn the truth.”
References:
Bleak, J., & Frederick, C. M. (1998). Superstitious behavior in sport: Levels of effectiveness and determinants of use in three collegiate sports. Journal of Sport Behavior, 21, 1-15.
Damisch L., Stoberock B., & Mussweiler T. (2010). Keep your fingers crossed!: how superstition improves performance. Psychological Science, 21(7).
Foster, D., Weigand, D., & Baines, D. (2006, June). The Effect of Removing Superstitious Behavior and Introducing a Pre-Performance Routine on Basketball Free-Throw Performance. Journal of Applied Sport Psychology, 18(2).
Schippers, M.C. & Van Lange, P. A. M. (2006) The Psychological Benefits of Superstitious Rituals in Top Sport: A Study Among Top Sportspersons. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 36 (10) , 2532?2553.
Vyse, S. A. (1997). Believing in magic: The psychology of superstition. New York: Oxford University Press.
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