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Oral Presentations as Theater other pages presentations vs webs this page producer | designer | writer | actor | director

Presentations are most effective when you give them the kind of thought and care appropriate to theatrical productions. Just as effective theater can be as extravagant as Phantom of the Opera or as simple as The Fantasticks, so can presentations. Both Phantoms and Fantasticks, however, need careful planning and attention to detail.

Rick Hilsabeck as the Phantom singing The Music of the Night with the 2nd National Company, Spring 2000	Paul Blankenship as The Narrator, Spring 2000

Think about oral presentations as you would think about putting on a play. You're wearing many hats: producer, designer, writer, actor, and director.

Not one of these many decisions you have to make while wearing these hats is crucial by itself. Thus, it's easy to consider them one by one and dismiss them. "Oh, that doesn't matter."

However, in the aggregate, these little decisions add up to a crucial overall impression. The content of your presentation may be in your head. But if you can't get it into our heads, you aren't going to do well at raise and promotion time.

tip | Use theatrical techniques appropriate to the situation.

Ask yourself about the presentations and lectures you've sat through, from preachers to teachers to sales reps. Are not boring and ineffective almost synonymous? The opposite of boring is lively and interesting.

As the producer ...

You have to think about all the things the production needs and get them there on time. Especially with computer-assisted presentations, lots and lots of things can go wrong. Assume that they will and prepare a back-up plan as well as a disaster plan.

tip | Don't depend on a live Internet connection.

As the designer ...

In my experience, a designer's feeling of command is the key to a relaxed presentation. You're not going to present well if you feel as though you're a guest in someone's bathroom (get up there and back off, don't touch anything that's not yours, and hope no one hears you). If you feel as though you are at home, as though you made the space, as though you know where everything is, as though you're free to speak your mind, then you'll have reduced one major source of stress.

Most presenters take the room as a given rather than as an opportunity. Change it.

tip | Take command of the space and make it your own.

Clearly, in a client's office or in a hotel ballroom, re-arranging the furniture is not always possible. There's not much you can do about the client's office, but you can usually go to the ballroom beforehand and get used to the room. Take command of it at least in your own mind.

Treat this opportunity like a dress rehearsal. Practice sitting, standing, speaking, and walking. Practice filling the room with your voice. When you finally get to the podium for the real thing, do something physical. Even something unnecessary like moving the microphone two inches can make you feel a little more as though it's your space.

Lots of gray areas and overlapping terminology here, so I'll make some arbitrary distinctions for the purposes of this discussion. As the designer, you have to make decisions about:

costume

What to wear and how to look in relation to how the other presenters look. Appropriate is the standard to use. You can and should use costumes to send unspoken messages.

If you wear it, it's a costume. If you take it off, it's a prop.

If it stays on the stage and doesn't move, it's scenery. If it moves, especially by human intervention and within sight of the audience, it's a prop.

Everything else is a prop: what you hold in your hand and what's on the stage.

scenery

What physical objects are in the room?

Immovable objects such as ceiling, floor, dais, steps, walls, and backdrops, especially projection screens.

Moveable objects such as furniture, especially tables or lectern and chairs and other flat surfaces.

Hard-to-see objects such as power cords, briefcases, and purses that can trip you.

Where are these physical objects in the room?

Distance from chairs to screen, chairs to presenters, and chairs to each other.

Sight lines, sound lines. Watch for dead walls, noisy walls, and fans.

Projector height, laptop screen angle, mouse.

Because I don't know where else to put it, I want to mention room temperature. Remember that as the presenter, you will experience the room as warmer than the audience. Remember also that warm, still rooms build CO2 and put people to sleep.

Positions of audience and presenters: at the front? along the side? in the middle? In the theater, these are called proscenium, thrust, and in the round stages.

tip | Avoid the proscenium stage that has a front where you must stand.

props

see below

sound

Your voice: How will it travel?

Check the ceiling for fans. In theory, they're great to keep the air circulating. However, if you and your audience are in a certain relationship to each other, the gentle motion in the air makes your voice sound wavery, as though you're very nervous. Two seats over, it won't sound that way at all. Solution: turn off the fans.

Background music: Should you use it only before and after the presenters or during their presentations? How loud should it be? Does the volume of the music change in relation to the volume of the presenters' voices? When and how do you change the volume or type of music?

lights

In the traditional theater, the stage is lit and the audience is in darkness. However, when we use a projector, the stage has to be dark. Too often, that puts the presenters in darkness. Then they might as well be on the telephone. Shy and unsure presenters may welcome that shroud onstage. Even though it is very common to present in the dark, it works against an effective presentation.

One solution is to have the presenters far enough away from the screen that they can be lit individually. Then it's hard for them to move far from that light without getting lost.

Another solution is to use emitted light from monitors or TVs instead of projected light onto a wall or screen. Then it's easy to see the monitor or TV in a fully lit room.

If you must have a darkened stage, experiment to see how lit you can leave the audience. Then if the area surrounding the screen is adequately dark, the presenters can move closer to the audience and thus into light. The presenter could even speak from among the audience while facing the screen with them.

visual aids

We've all seen clumsy use of PowerPoint slides. Even worse, we've seen the dutiful but uninspired use of overhead transparencies. Our colleges and universities and offices abound with them.

At the other extreme, the visual aid is compelling and informative. Any machines, especially computers, are unobtrusive, almost invisible, yet very effective.

The effective use of visual aids separates the slick, professional presentation from all the others.

tip | They're visual aids, not textual aids.

Treat each screen like a billboard. One large and bold message. Relevant, colorful, informative images are best. Use as few words as possible.

Movement is good. In PowerPoint, you can build screens item by item. On Web pages, you can use JavaScript and dynamic HTML. Both with PowerPoint and on the Web, you can use animations and videos and still images. You can use screen shots. You can use concept maps and other visualizations such as charts and graphs. You can make vivid comparisons. Avoid text.

audience participation

Breaking the fourth wall by getting the audience to do something can be very effective. No matter what the situation, I wouldn't present more than ten or fifteen minutes without getting the audience to at least raise their hands if not stand up and move.

A new situation is a networked room where every member of the audience has his or her own mouse. If they're at open Internet connections, you may never see them again. If they're restricted to seeing only what you have provided beforehand, then you have to work with this reality.

Clicking directions

Eye contact

They won't be watching you. Even when you're standing beside an interesting screen at the front of the room, they can see you. But when their eyes are on a small screen in front of them, you have to rely more on your voice and less on ... [ more to come ]

As the writer ...

You have to make decisions about:

What words to say and when to say them. Unless you're giving what everyone knows is a prepared speech, reading is bad. Reading from 3x5 cards is worse. Reading from cracking sheets of typing paper is the worst. We don't want to look at the top of your head. At most have one card, a short list of keywords, that stays out of sight, perhaps flat on the table or lectern. Instead, take your cues from the visual aids. If they're on your laptop in PowerPoint, too, you can add notes that won't appear projected onto the screen.

Next worse is memorizing, which feels canned and impersonal to the audience. Instead, speak extemporaneously -- prepare in advance but speak without notes or text. Especially in dialogue with other presenters or with audience members, you want to go with the flow like a talk show host. This sense of spontaneity and freshness flatters the audience and keeps them more interested in any topic.

What words to put on the visual aids. As few as possible.

The audience will remember very little of what you say. (If there's a test, they'll remember only that long). They will remember a lot about how you say it.

As the actor ...

As the actual presenter, you have a very hard job. If you appear to be "acting", you run the risk of being artificial and unconvincing. Yet a presentation is theater. There's no escaping that. You must act. However, you must act without appearing to be "acting". Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep are pretty good at that. What about the rest of us?

Do you really need acting skills to present effectively in a business setting? The Bistro is a good place to talk about it.

As the actor, you have to make decisions about:

character

Who are you going to be? It's easy to say, be yourself, but presenting is a highly artificial environment and we have many "selves" we switch in and out of all day long. Each has a voice or voices. You can't present without a self and a voice. To try to be neutral or objective or impartial is rarely successful and usually boring.

What emotions do you bring into the room with you? Are you excited about the ideas you're presenting? Do they trouble you? Don't characterize with words: "Look at this next amazing statistic." Instead, act amazed and say, "Look at this next statistic!"

What's your relationship to your audience? Are you their teacher? Their buddy? Are you telling them brand-new secrets? Are you filling them in on the latest about a familiar topic?

Do you stay in character? Do you react appropriately to other presenters and to the audience? Do you change in a convincing way?

voice

hard to hear and understand <----> loud and clearly enunciated

tip| Speak slowly and say the endz of your wordz.

Never ever under any circumstances have gum or candy or food in your mouth while you speak. It sends an aggressive, offensive message. It makes people angry. It makes you unlikable. An exception might be using it as a prop for a scripted demonstration or character study. In that rare case, do it as quickly as possible. At least the food you can swallow. If you are chewing gum, you have a problem. You cannot leave that gum in there. How are you going to get it out of your mouth? Where are you going to put it?

body

Emotion. You can't make a presentation with bringing an emotion into the room. If you're smart, you'll change the emotion a couple of times during your presentation.

Your decisions are 1) which emotions? and 2) how will your emotions relate to the audience's emotions? Ideally, establish a stimulus / response relationship where each emotion, yours and theirs, is both appropriate response and appropriate stimulus. This is known as "having the audience with you." If you can do that, you're 90% of the way to making an effective presentation.

While much of this emotional communication is done with voice, most of it is done with facial expression, posture, and gesture.

tip | You're visible on stage even when someone else is speaking.

Look at a videotape of the presentation before you go live with it. Look at tapes of yourself in a variety of speaking situations. Then listen to your grandmother: stand taller, stand straighter, smile more.

While you're speaking from a stage or front area, don't ever turn your shoulder or, heaven forbid, your back to any part of the audience. If the audience is spread around you, keep turning slowly so that you are facing all of them at least part of the time.

If possible, stand. Don't speak while you're sitting unless you have good reason to. If you need to sit, try to sit on something other than a chair.

props

Stage props are moveable objects on the stage that have been touched or otherwise acknowledged by the presenter. (Or by the audience, such as a loaded shotgun mounted on the wall during an argument.)

Hand props are anything that the presenters pick up.

pointers, pens, sticks, and lasers
product samples
documents (service samples; deliverables)
handouts
microphone

The worst prop is a sheaf of 8 1/2 by 11 sheets of paper that you read from. That's not a prop; it's a crutch. I've been on crutches several times, and I was never a fully functioning human being.

back-up plan

What are you going to do when things go differently than planned?

Note I didn't say "if things go wrong." With that attitude, you're sunk. It's not "if", it's "when". It's not "wrong", which is a threat. It's "different", which is an opportunity.

The Stem in the Ashes

When I was, uh, younger, I worked as a stagehand for the musical Applause with Lauren Bacall in London. That's high-level professional theater, and it was a little different every night. It wasn't a question of whether something would happen differently. It was a question of what the actors were going to do about it. Ignore it? Play off it? My most vivid memories of that production are the half-dozen times things went very differently than planned.

Toward the end of the second act, one of the half-dozen characters on stage hurled a wine glass into the huge fireplace and later picked the glass stem out of the ashes. Now you can't have glass shards flying around, so in fact he threw a plastic glass while someone backstage timed the sound effect. A broken stem, of course, had been planted in the ashes before the scene started. The whole trick was timing the sound effect.

One night the actor missed the fireplace. The plastic glass bounced off the mantle and across the stage where it rolled into the orchestra pit. The backstage guy hesitated and the crashing tinkling sound came while the plastic glass was rolling.

It was a serious and dramatic scene, but the audience started tittering, then laughing politely. I was watching from the wings and it was a very suspenseful moment: One of the half-dozen actors on that stage had to do something. What? When? How would the others play off it?

What would you have done next? What would you have done when it was time to pick the stem out of the ashes?

As the director ...

This is the toughest role because it is so hard to separate from yourself as the actor. People who present a lot in undemanding situations -- college professors, for example -- often have very inaccurate impressions of how they come across. They'll look your checklist of advice and agree with them all. Then you watch them present and wonder what asteroid of the planet Denial they live on.

As the director, you have to be the critic, the editor, the truth-teller, the mirror. You have to look at all the parts: the design, the words, the presenters. You have to be everybody's hardest grader. And you have to do it all beforehand. After the lights go up and the presentation starts, you might as well go out into the lobby and pace. Better yet, make a videotape that the presenters can watch later.

Too often, student presentations in school are hastily produced and are given only once. In a real-world marketing department, what passes as a student presentation would be the first read-through. If the department was large enough, it would be the audition.

The presentation would be repeated many times, editing the script and visuals, adding humor, letting go of notes, practicing stage movements. They would be videotaped and analyzed. Only then would they be tried out before a live audience in-house. Finally, the presentations would be given for real clients. By then the whole production would be honed, the back-up plans would be ready, the understudies would be waiting, and the disaster plans would at least have been rehearsed.

As director, you have to make decisions about staging:

Where should the presenters stand? When should they move? Where should the move to? Why?

Where are their eyes looking? What do they put into their hands? What do they do with what is in their hands? Whom do the actors touch? Why?

Can the audience see and hear the actors? When do the actors break the fourth wall by addressing the audience and by walking into the audience?

When more than one presenter is onstage, be very careful about upstaging.

Most audiences start out neutral if not receptive. Not even unreceptive audiences want to be bored.

tip | Even unreceptive audiences want to be entertained.

A final grab-bag of advice

A very effective way to break the fourth wall is with humor. Show-of-hands polls can help you gauge your audience's mood and prior knowledge. Handouts and things for the audience do and touch and pass to each other are effective. Be careful about open-ended questions unless you're prepared to respond to most anything.