Last evening, my wife and I went to the Opera Bastille in Paris, for the last public rehearsal of the 'Coppelia' ballet before its premiere today. Except for a tiny little problem with some mechanics at the end of Act II, everything worked fine - at least for novices like ourselves (we discussed with a couple of former dancers of the Opera de Paris during the break : they said the girls were running after the music, which was pretty invisible to the majority of the audience ;-).
Last Saturday, we went to the Winter Gala event of the Rhythmic Gymnastics club where our daughter spends 4 hours a week. All teams were present to perform at the show, from the 5-yo beginners to the 20-something athletes competing in national-wide events. It turned out to be a disaster, with the management completely lost, between hardware failure (CD player, speakers, etc.), last-minute changes in the agenda, and... the audience' disinterest. After the break, only half of the people were still there, most of them waiting for their own daughter(s) to be done with her own performance.
What is the connection between the two events ? Rehearsal. It is a given that the folks at the Opera de Paris do their homework before showing up on stage before a 1,000 something audience. We had the chance to meet with some guys of the crew : brief - execute - debrief, that is how they proceed since a month or so, each and every day, from 8:00AM to 11:00PM. When we went backstage after the show, I saw the director debriefing with his staff, including the top-dancers. That is how things have to be, if you want to get applauses and the people to come back next time. I am sure that the RG club never done a rehearsal at all. The word ' preparation ' is unknown to them. For one reason : the management don't care about the audience - who nevertheless are the people who pay them thru the club member fees. They are like a business owner who don't care about his customers, who nevertheless are the people who pay him at the end of the day.
When you care about your audience, who ever it is - the people coming to see your performance on stage at your theatre, the parents of children doing gymnastics at your club, or the customers of your company, doing rehearsal before any event is mandatory. That is a fundamental part of the presentation. It helps you to go through all the potential issues you may face during the event itself, from the stage and audience' room settings to all your materials - hardware, audio, video, paper, whatever - from the agenda to the content itself, etc. You fine tune every single detail, for the best possible performance during the event itself. That is something I have learned all along my six years with Agilent Technologies : at the beginning, we were not holding real rehearsal sessions for the training events or the customers seminars we were part of. So, we were just presenters as others. Once we decided to do better, in order to reach the #1 position, we became #1 presenters at each and every event we were doing. No kidding. Our method was crisp & clear : set the team, i.e. the owner of the event, the team leader, the presenter(s), and all the resources needed, each one with his own tasks list, each of us responsible for our own part and for the whole team. That was teamwork at its best expression : one for all (the team), all for one (the objective : the success of the event). We improved our method, doing at least three rehearsals for each event, repeating over and over again the whole stuff.
And more important - perhaps the most important thing about preparing an event in its very details : it's a matter of respect. Of your audience.
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