If you’ve ever been to a slam, odds are that at least once someone stepped up to the mic and quietly said, So, this is some new shit.

At which point the whole room shouted, NEW SHIT!

And odds are, the energy shift was memorable.

I don’t know how far back that tradition goes or who gets credit — probably Mark Kelly Smith, founder of the slam genre and who I got to meet once at The Green Mill in Chicago. (So what?!) (#iykyk)

Whoever they are, I adore them for it.

The communal magic of call and response

Even though my own show, Tongue & Groove, isn’t a slam, the new shit tradition is very much A Thing.

And it’s not because your girl here was six years a soldier and love love LOVED singing cadence.

It’s because shouting NEW SHIT is instant open mic magic. In mere seconds, that two-word, two-syllable phrase accomplishes so many good things…

• It sends energy to the stage, letting the performer know the room is on their side.
• It wakes up anyone who’d lapsed into a fog of disassociation, lost in some social app or otherwise mentally checked out.
• It distracts anxious performers waiting their turn from their nerves.

Most importantly, it reminds everyone of our common enterprise — bringing us into the present, opening heads and hearts to what’s about to unfold.

For first-timers, it’s like learning a secret handshake — but without the awkward misses. Once you know it, you get that sweet sense of belonging.

For the open mic host, it takes near-zero effort to start — you don’t need to teach it. Just do it a couple times one night. Odd are, even if you forget at the next show, the audience will jump in all on their own.

Because, y’all, shouting new shit is FUN. It’s a just-add-water-easy and damn near surefire way to shift your show into a boisterous gear, just for a moment.

And a moment is all it takes to start building community.

The point for performers

You could argue that performing new work is almost synonymous with open mic.

To quote one of our regulars at Tongue & Groove, open mic is like a lab. Experimenting is the whole idea. But there’s an important, if subtle, twist here.

See, when you debut a poem or song or story at open mic, the point isn’t to see what the audience thinks of it. The point is to get a fresh take on what you think of it.

It’s like inviting guests into your home and suddenly you can see things you habitually pass over when it’s just you there. Sharing new shit gives you the gift of perspective. Of dishabituation.

When you share new work with a roomful of people, you are mystically endowed with the power to imagine what someone hearing it for the first time would notice.

Now, those imaginings may be wrong. They probably will be wrong.

You’ll fret about a missed chord or forgotten line. But they’ll be too busy tapping a foot or feeling some resonance with their own lived experience. They’ll be so moved just to have been welcomed into your personal space that they won’t pass judgement at all.

(No matter what anxiety or stage fright tell you, the truest, deepest desire of an open mic audience is to applaud. More on that here.)

Sharing new shit isn’t about accurately intuiting the audiences opinion of your work. It’s about refreshing your own eyes to see what you could no longer discern after days or weeks (or longer) of writing and rehearsing, so you can sense where it might need a little polish.

Not so the audience will like it better. So you will like it better.

Make it happen

My fellow hosts and organizers, the ask here is small and the payoff is legion. If your show doesn’t have it’s own way of honoring debut work, it’s never too late to start.

Pro move: Dedicate a whole night to debuts or — like the New Sh!t Show in Minneapolis (which, sadly, appears to no longer be running) — your whole damn show.

Once you do, your regulars will have an extra nudge to keep after their craft. To write fresh work so they can have the juicy delight of saying the magic phrase and hearing it echoed twenty-fold, in spontaneous and glorious unison.

And then everyone in the room will get an extra moment of anticipation before the mental unboxing.

And that, my friends, is gold.