Paul L Martin: Developing Cabaret Talent

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Paul L Martin

Developing Cabaret Talent

 By Fiona Coffey for Cabaret Scenes

July 29, 2015

Paul-L-Martin-Cabaret-Scenes-Magazine_300An award-winning international cabaret performer in his own right, Paul L Martin has been extraordinarily influential in shaping the London cabaret scene over the past fifteen years. As a producer, promoter and agent, he has developed cabaret spaces in locations as diverse as Leicester Square Theatre and the CellarDoor.
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His agency, Excess All Areas, has over 3,000 variety professionals on its books and hosts regular showcases for new cabaret talent. The Singers’ Cabaret Workshop, created by Martin with vocal coach and cabaret performer Jamie Anderson, is an eight-day summer intensive, the only one of its kind in the U.K., and creates a platform for artists to develop skills and launch their cabaret careers. Martin also created The London Cabaret Awards, which, in March 2015, celebrated its fourth year with its most successful and ambitious ceremony yet.

Through and alongside these activities, Martin has campaigned tirelessly for recognition of cabaret as a distinctive art form. Early in his career, he pitched his first workshops to the London-based Actors Centre under the banner Cabaret: A Genre In Itself. In subsequent years, his drive to find new ways of raising the profile of cabaret, particularly through the Cabaret Awards, has challenged others to think about what cabaret is and is not, and what excellence in London cabaret looks like.
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None of this has come without a degree of controversy, as Martin would be the first to acknowledge. But outside the public arena, his vision for cabaret also deeply informs his work as a developer of new cabaret talent, which appears to be playing an increasingly important and fulfilling role in his life.
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Cafe deParis Photo:PUMP Photography.com
Cafe deParis
Photo: PUMP Photography.com

At the time our first conversation took place, Martin was in a reflective mood, rediscovering an excitement about his own stage career. “Just as I thought I was never going to perform again, I seem to jumping back in with both feet” he said, expressing delight in his role as a personal mentor for emerging cabaret artists. “Until recently, I never consciously acknowledged that there’s are lot of valuable things that I know and can share with others who want and need to know, if they are interested in and mad enough to want to do what I’ve been doing for most of my adult life.”

So, who are the people drawn to cabaret, seeking Martin’s help? The analogy he chooses is the 1980s British children’s cartoon series The Raggy Dolls, in which dolls who are imperfect in some way live in a factory reject bin and come to life at night to have adventures. Martin laughs: “I think that that’s what the cabaret scene is. I think that we crawled out of some bin in a factory and found a clearing in a wood instead, somewhere we could celebrate the very reason why we may have been rejected in other places.
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” He contrasts this with musical theater. “One’s MT career is often about the height you are, weight you are, age you are, what you look like standing next to the person playing opposite you. None of that matters as far as cabaret is concerned. We are more often than not celebrating difference and diversity and just whoever that person is.”

However, not all would-be cabaret singers follow the traditional route from musical theater. “I work more and more with people who have come to cabaret at quite a late stage in their lives. I’m working with people who have had careers in PR, and there are some IT consultants who are trying their hands. Those people have appeared on my radar in the last three to five years.” As he acknowledges, this is partly a consequence of the zeitgeist around London cabaret, and the fact that it has become more widely recognized as an outlet for creative expression.

So how does Martin work successfully with both those who are following the traditional route from musical theater and those from other walks of life? “Often, when you’re working with someone who’s trained in musical theater, what you’re trying to do is help them unlearn everything they’ve just spent three years in drama school and multiple thousands of pounds learning, because you will often get a kind of ‘audition technique’ performance. There’s a formality to it, a rigidness, an insistence that you go in ‘in neutral’ as an actor. I don’t want that. I want you to come bursting in with your balls on the table and tell me who you are within the first minute. And if you’re doing that, then the fourth wall’s down straight away.

The most pressing need for people that have not had a performing arts training is to acquire stagecraft. “It’s understanding diction and how you have to open your mouth when you speak and how weird that is, compared to how people normally talk. Understanding your body, getting used to the idea of being neutral because you still have to know what it is in order to choose not to, and learning about yourself, learning who that person in the mirror is.”

Paul teaching one of his Singers Cabaret Workshop's.
Paul teaching one of his Singers Cabaret Workshop’s.

But beyond these basic skills, all cabaret performers need, in Martin’s terms, to “find their clown.” For him this is a subject of fascination, and is important for both professional and mental health reasons. “If people come on stage and deliver truth and something of themselves to an audience, you have to be making sure that they are given some sort of armor, so that they are safe and protected.” And here is where the different backgrounds of aspiring performers present different challenges. “The people who used to work in IT, they can quite quickly become very interesting and witty without being comedians because they are just naturally riffing about who they are; their kookiness and their natural personality gets them through. Whereas somebody who’s out of MT training doesn’t quite know how to be his or her self because they’ve spent three years-plus being other people and saying other people’s lines. But the IT people can get into a dangerous place where they’ve suddenly put themselves out on stage and don’t quite know how to handle it when they get off stage and go home.” Martin teaches them how to put that “clown” or stage persona back in the box.

Another fascination for Martin is working with much older people, those coming into cabaret in their sixties, seventies and even eighties. “What I find fabulous about them is there’s just no filter. They’re very happy to be foolish and play the clown. But also, they’ve just got more to say because they’ve been around longer, experienced more and had longer to think about things and what their takes on it are.” Their challenge is often self-doubt. “There’s often a sense that they shouldn’t be there, shouldn’t be doing it or they’re too old, or that it’s a young person’s game.” Sometimes it’s just stamina. “A 90-minute show, just you and a pianist, is a lot to take on if you’re in your seventies or eighties. And that’s coming from them, not from me.”

In contrast, the work with much younger artists, perhaps coming straight out of drama school, is to “enable them to get mouthy and opinionated, to prove to them that what they want to say has worth. It isn’t because they haven’t got an opinion, it’s that they don’t think their opinion is worth anything and they don’t know how to articulate it.”

Although we have talked in terms of the various types of people who come to the cabaret “clearing in the wood,” Martin, with typical outspokenness, is keen to emphasize each person’s individuality. “I try very hard, because of my own experience of drama school to not just go ‘oh, they’re one of those’ or ‘I’ve seen this before, I know what they need,’ because that is so damaging. I had that done to me. And I would say that my three years at drama school could have been a much better and different experience if I hadn’t just been treated the same as the last overweight gay they’d had.”

What comes across is Martin’s commitment to helping others realize and experience cabaret as a highly personal art form, where the common thread for all aspiring performers is the need to share something of themselves, and the aim for audiences is to go home having met the performers and learned something about them. This is true of both mainstream and alternative forms of cabaret. For him, “cabaret” does not constitute a type of song, nor is it a sung concert, even in an intimate venue. It is about the absence of a “fourth wall” and the intimacy and sharing that takes place between performer and audience in that venue.

Martin increasingly sees his role as creating and facilitating a safe space for performers to explore their craft and realize their potential within the unique properties of cabaret. The vast majority of cabaret artists are solo performers, and therefore opportunities to learn, hone their craft and gain feedback within this particular genre are limited. The Singers’ Cabaret Workshop, taking place in London from August 24 – September 4, is a focal point for cabaret artists’ development in the U.K. One can see that it has the potential to develop an international presence if the future of the Yale Cabaret Conference, following the loss of Erv Raible, remains uncertain. This is something that Martin is keen to foster through collaboration and partnership and learning from those who have been involved in the Yale training.
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“We know it was a tremendous thing. If it isn’t going to happen anymore, it would be lovely to do something to honor its memory.” And experience suggests that when an idea forms, and the right people come together, Paul L Martin’s energy and vision can make things happen very quickly indeed.

Editor’s Note:
For more information, please isit www.paullmartin.com
and www.singerscabaretworkshop.co.uk

Fiona Coffey

Fiona Coffey joins our review team as a cabaret enthusiast and jazz singer, just as she makes her sell-out debut on the London cabaret scene with a self-devised tribute to her alter-ego Mrs. Robinson. She has hosted jazz evenings and performed at a number of venues including The Crazy Coqs, The Pheasantry, and 606 Club. In her day job she is a leadership development coach, travelling around the globe, working with a hugely diverse population of executives, as they grapple with the challenges of leadership and organizational change. Having recently expended most of her writing energies on her doctoral thesis, she welcomes the opportunity to entertain and inform a different audience through Cabaret Scenes.