Seven User-Friendly Ways of Healing Stage Fright
Playing music is the one thing which we as string players love the most. Yet we so often live in terrible fear of performing in front of our colleagues and beloved audiences! So how do we find our way out of the seemingly sticky web of anxiety which we appear to have so deeply associated with performing our most beloved art?
There are lots of ways to approach stage-fright, but the focus of this article is a holistic approach where I assist people to shift onto a healthier, more self-esteem and wellbeing orientated relationship with themselves and the world around them. It’s not about someone honing a narrow focus to "get rid of" stage-fright or anxiety. In this approach we’re not going to be concerned with narrowing our focus of performance to the exclusion of everything else, we’re not going to try to exclude thoughts or cut feelings off or block distractions out.
Here are some helpful tips from my masterclasses, with short-term ways you can holistically orientate yourself on stage. You will find my approaches are not about restricting your focus, or limiting your thoughts, or cutting off or excluding particular sensory inputs. Instead, here you are encouraged with very easy and holistic ways to expand your awareness to include way more than you currently do. Time and time again people following this approach give me feedback about how incredibly healing and relaxing that is, rather than the battle-between-good-and-evil kind of approach which a lot of players are stuck in, and which is also inadvertently what many of the popular sports-style coaching techniques are really are based on. So let's begin exploring ways into enjoying your performances again!
What Is It?
Quite the opposite of narrowing our focus down, we’re actually broadening our focus to be far more open. We include everything of our self, our concert environment, all the wonderful artistic sensitivity we have, and our great love of music and the wonder of sharing it with our audiences. These are exactly the things which have got excluded from awareness in the person who is caught up in anxiety. It’s a very different way of approaching it, as you will see in the exercises which follow here.
How Do We Do It?
Step One
We start with re-learning to play music as a listener. Give yourself space to play by listening and shaping the gorgeous sounds coming from your instrument, adjusting and shaping your sound with the bow and left hand into the tones which you really love. Spend time coaxing out the sound of each note and phrase in the music, until the emotion in the sound coming from your instrument is just how you love it to feel. Explore the tones on your instrument, try upper, middle and lower registers. Start with just some long notes, listening and feeling the emotion which each different tone of our instrument brings. Spend some time on this until you begin to feel more immersed and comfortable with your sound. You can then phrase four or five notes together, making the tone each time so delicious for your self, and then explore variations in the tone - from gentle and inward, to more bold and strong, to warm and passionate, to far away and quiet like a whisper. Again, spend some time on this. You can start exploring different rhythms, ways of phrasing the notes, and variations in articulation.
Step Two
Still listening! Now explore a few short passages from your repertoire. Take time to feel how listening to each variation in your tone while you play makes you feel, and how each colour of the tone changes for you emotionally, adjusting it to sound just how you love it to be for that passage from the work. Really let it sink in, and feel how those nuances of the tones, vibrato, position, string crossing and articulation make you feel.
Step Three
Spend now time really opening to enjoying how each of those sounds make you feel as you play the music. Play a few bars of a favourite movement from a sonata or concerto. Listen to the sounds. Just let yourself enjoy it! The emphasis here is on enjoying how the sounds make you feel, just as you would if you were sitting back as a listener, listening to the music. We all love listening to music and we just relish in that experience, so as a performer we can open to really enjoying and relishing in the sounds we are playing. After all, as the creator of the sounds, if you aren’t relishing in it and enjoying its every nuance, how can you expect the audience to?
Step Four
We now explore some very deliberate techniques to help us to be grounded and feeling more safe on stage. I have grounding and breathing exercises which help the entire central nervous system feel safe and be filled with safety messages. I go more into this in detail in the workshops and masterclasses, but in principle it is first - without your instrument - feeling a connection down through your feet, deep into the earth. Stay with that for a few minutes. You can also try another exercise, still without your instrument, with slower deeper breathing, which always helps bring some calm. Then explore while playing your instrument, feeling the flow of the music, and using these grounding and breathing exercises, one at a time, while you play. You can call on this as often as needed as a normal part of playing the instrument. Spend some time with this. How does it feel playing with the support of the grounding or the breathing, as opposed to just playing the notes? How is it affecting the ease and flow of your playing? How is it affecting the tone?
So Far (Review)…
It is important that we don’t try to fight any feelings of anxiety which might arise. We don’t try to get rid of them or make them stop. We don’t try to push them out of our awareness or focus on playing instead of the feelings, or block out the audience, or condition ourselves into high performance mode instead of feeling anxiety. We don’t do any of that. We just happily let the feelings be there. Because as we cultivate this return to playing as a listener, bathing in the music and enjoying the beauty of each sound and tone, enjoying how it makes us feel, and through that just naturally sharing what we love about the music with our audience, musicians find that the anxiety slowly begins to fade away over time as the natural love and enjoyment of listening and feeling as we play returns, and it gradually and organically grows to become more and more the dominant experience we have of playing, naturally displacing the anxiety.
Step Five
We now explore when we are playing in front of an audience (so get yourself an audience, even if it’s in your living room) to just make it as a way of sharing what you love the most in the whole world - about each note, the tone colour, the way the phrasing, dynamics and articulation make you feel, and share this with your audience through your playing. The emphasis here is on sharing everything we love about the music with our audience. It is also important to let the audience into your field, to let them into your awareness. I call this letting down the bandit screens (the pop-up thick glass bandit screens in banks) - they are clear glass but they are still a screen between you and the audience. Lower that glass screen down. We are not just playing for ourselves anymore - we are actively and very consciously including and sharing each note with the audience. I often feel it as if I’m saying to them "Oh, I love this part of the sonata, just listen how the notes sound here!" and then play that gorgeous sounding sustained double-stop or flourish of notes. It is as much about coming on stage in the spirit of sharing and inclusiveness, and that shines through in your performance, people sense it.
Again, we’re actually broadening our focus, to take in the room - the sounds, the smell of hall, the faces in the audience, the chandeliers hanging from the ceiling, how we’re feeling, what we had for dinner..everything. Take it all in. Because it’s all the fighting and resisting of these things which causes the problems. So we are being in a more receptive space with ourselves, a letting-in type of space, and from this open place in our self we make our music happen, we let it flow through us. This broadening of focus includes more of the sensory input, includes more of the sound, feelings, the audience, and the special atmosphere of the music. It includes more of how you experience through your body, emotions, mind and spirit, and actually bringing it all online, not trying to take sections of it offline.
Note: It is important to remember that audiences come to us to heal or replenish something within themselves - they might be coming to hear you play on a Friday night when they are tired, stressed, busy, worried, lost, feeling alone or alienated. They can’t access what we bring them through our music anywhere else, otherwise they would just stay at home and find that healing or replenishment for themselves. So they are turned to us for answers - to help them feel more at peace again in themselves, to be reminded of the deep and rich feelings which they have accessed through listening to music before. That’s why they have come to our concert to hear us play. So in many ways they have come to us for some kind of care. Our "job" if you like is to bring nurture and care to their hearts and minds, much like being a healer or therapist. More on this later.
Step Six
This part is mostly to do with playing for fellow students or colleagues, music reviewers, audition panels and occasionally a hyper-critical audience member. Not everyone is going to like what you do and how you play. All you need to do is make it your best, most soulful, enjoyable and meaningful for you, and from there share that without reservation. Beyond that, it is out of your control. So when you see that reviewer, or the frowning arms-crossed audience member, or snickering colleague, remember this: what anyone else thinks about your playing is none of your business. If they don’t enjoy it, and you are enjoying it, then that’s just how it is that day. You just bring your finest gold and silver, and then let them deal with it.
But most people most of the time will enjoy your music for all the reasons I have already mentioned, and it is good to remember that if on occasions they don’t like you, that you don’t need to sink down with them and their opinions. And for us as musical colleagues, after all, it is quite rude and mean to project negatively at a performer who has come to share their music with you, no matter who they are, even if they are struggling, or uneasy within themselves, or simply playing in a way which you don’t like. There is no excuse for bringing less than appreciation and encouragement at the very least when you attend a concert, or listen to a recital by a colleague or fellow student. Something for the social culture of our classical music academies to consider.
Step Seven
This is about embracing your role as a kind of community music-therapist to the people whenever you perform. Musicians are all really in the role of being music therapists in the true sense. We bring some deeper peace and elevation to the soul of the listeners, and in this way audiences are coming to us for help because they can’t find their way into that space without us. We are if you like the skilled healing practitioner whom they have come to for help. So we begin to see that playing music is actually akin to the healing arts, a part of the caring professions - just like doctors, nurses, psychologists, therapists, social workers, carers, masseurs, etc.
Summary
In approaching being on stage in these more expanded-awareness ways, we are able to restore a focus that is so broad that we just can’t help loving what we do when we’re playing our music. And that contrasts so dramatically with the sports type focus-and-exclusion type training, and of course differs radically from the stream of taking drugs to eliminate whole pathways in the brain and the nervous system, which effectively shut them down or at least temporarily turn them off. This way of a more expanded awareness approach assists musicians to gradually make peace with themselves in all the places which are not at peace, those unrestful places which come and visit us when we’re on stage and bother us. So it’s helping us as musicians to a healthier place in relationship with ourselves and the world around us, and it’s really as a side effect of that, that we are gradually healing our stage-fright and anxiety.
The Role of Meditation & Relaxation
I also teach a series of little meditative relaxation exercises which you can do on-the-fly, whether you are on or off stage, which help enormously with becoming proficient in regulating your own internal emotional landscape and being able to bring much more of a sense of safety and feeling at home with everything you do, and which naturally includes your music and life on-stage. As I’ve said already, having new, more relaxed and enjoyable experiences on stage is not about staying the same as you ever did in the ways you approach performing, and then trying to surgically excise the stage-fright. We have stage-fright because of our already ingrained less-than-helpful attitudes and approaches and the way we have habitually focused ourselves when we go on stage, and what we’re doing here is that we’re broadening that out into a really aware, more holistic, relaxed and wellbeing-based approach to performance.
I hope you can see how different all this is to just focusing on playing and then wanting to simply root out any anxiety when you are on stage. Getting better at our own self-care is a deeply enriching and wonderful journey which will positively affect everything in both your musical and life experience. I invite you to try out these ideas and steps, and hopefully also come and experience this for yourself in one of my in-person masterclass series.
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Rupert presented a keynote Masterclass in "Self-Esteem, Wellbeing & Healing Stage-Fright" at the European String Teachers Association (ESTA) 52nd International Conference in Portugal earlier this year, supported by Culture & The Arts, WA. Find his website here.
You might also like:
- Are Warm Up Exercises Necessary?
- De-Escalating Stage Fright
- Performance Anxiety: Learning from Theater Improv's 'Freedom to Fail'
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Replies
Yes - an extremely helpful and detailed discussion. To me, there is one dominant conceptual technique that dominates this discussion thread. I believe this will be helpful to keep in mind as one reads through this detailed and excellent discussion.
And that concept is - your self-control over your focus of attention.
What you choose to focus your attention on at any moment, and how you focus that attention, is I believe the key to making the best use of what is presented here.
I hope that helps.
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August 15, 2024 at 09:42 PM · Very helpful. The emphasis on listening is so important. We have to remember that, however, what we hear in our own playing can be just as subjective as what a member of the audience (or a critic) hears. I recently attended a marvelous performance of a world class violinist. It was full of great energy, sound, and nuance. He told me a few days ago that on listening to the recording of his performance, he was disappointed in the low energy level. When I asked him how he was feeling physically when he listened to it, he told me he was sick in bed. So it’s just like you said: it’s the listener’s problem how he or she perceives our transmission. And we can be affected differently by our own playing, too. Your advice is very freeing: cast those sound waves into the atmosphere and let everyone receive at whatever level they can in that moment — once they have left our instruments, it’s no longer our responsibility. Thanks.