From Stage Fright to Stage Fire

Nobody gets less nervous. They just get better at being nervous

Every term, somewhere around week nine, a student tells me they are going to sit out the showcase. The reason is always phrased as logistics — work, family, a wedding — and it is almost never logistics.Here is the thing nobody tells beginners: the fear does not go away. I have performed for eleven years and I still shake in the wings. What changes is the relationship. Fear stops being a signal to stop and becomes a signal that something matters.

Rehearse the failure, not the success

Most performers rehearse the perfect run. Then something goes wrong on the night — a missed count, a slipped shoe — and they have no plan, because they never practised recovering.So we break things on purpose. In the final two weeks we will stop the music mid-phrase, cut the lights, or deliberately have one dancer start on the wrong count. The batch learns that the piece survives all of it. Once you know the piece survives, your body stops bracing for catastrophe.

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Narrow the audience to one

A room of two hundred people is unbearable to think about. One person is fine. So we assign everyone a single point in the room — a friend, a family member, a fixed spot on the back wall — and the piece is performed to that.

Confidence is not the absence of fear. It is having rehearsed the thing you are afraid of until it is boring.

Get on stage in smaller doses

A room of two hundred people is unbearable to think about. One person is fine. So we assign everyone a single point in the room — a friend, a family member, a fixed spot on the back wall — and the piece is performed to that.