Performing Without Conditions
Dear dancers and parents,
ENB's Julia Conway's post from two weeks ago (which I hope you enjoyed!) highlighted something beyond her advice about understudying: sometimes, even as a professional, you have to perform in less-than-ideal conditions.
I was reminded of this recently on a call with one of my professional dancers. She's been cast in a principal role in her company's Nutcracker but gets only one show. There are so many reasons to want more than one show, but she can't focus on any of them right now, because she gets one chance to do this role and that's it.
On our call last week, she was despairing because she probably won't get a run-through on stage, since she's lowest on the totem pole for the role. She was feeling really worried that she wouldn't be adequately prepared to perform and since she has only one shot at it, she wants it to go well.
So, I asked her what she'd like to have happen so that she can feel more prepared and she had a list of wants:
to have a full run-through onstage with her fellow divertissement dancers
to nail the hardest part of the choreography in that run-through
to do all this in front of her AD and have it go well
As reasonable as this list might seem at first glance, it's a problem. She has created a set of conditions that have to be met for her to feel ready for the performance. The problem is that she controls none of those conditions nor, as a corps de ballet dancer, can she insist they happen.
So, what if she doesn't get a run-through onstage?
Or, what if she does, but her AD isn't there to see it?
And what if the above two conditions are met, but she doesn't nail the hard parts? What then?
See the restrictions she created for her success? If any one of those conditions wasn't met, she had decided she wouldn't be ready.
On our call, I wanted her to see that it was time to adopt a different mindset that centers on what she can do all by herself to be ready for her performance.
We decided together that she should ask the rehearsal master if she could have a run-through with her fellow dancers, even without music, just to space it and feel more comfortable.
We also decided that if they can't grant her the run-through for whatever reason, she needs to start practicing it onstage every day until her performance. She can grab a corner of the stage and run it through on her own in that space (no mirror!).
Then she shifted her new "wants" to the difficult piece of choreography and what she wants to be thinking about leading up to it and while executing. She came up with cue words to remind herself of the two most effective corrections she's received so far and a series of mantras she's going to start practicing right away. Mostly, she knows she'll do her best if she's relaxed.
By the time we ended our coaching call, this dancer had shifted from an impossible set of conditions for a successful show to a series of actions she could control that would help her feel more prepared.
In case you've been wondering what practicing mental fitness looks like, there it is!
For all of you performing this season, remember: don't restrict your success to specific rigid conditions. Instead, prepare yourself to dance under any conditions by shifting your focus to what you can control and setting small actionable goals around those things.
And don't do it alone. I've been coaching for 12+ years now and can get most dancers to turn their mindsets around in a single call. It takes practice on their own afterward, but that's a pretty good use of 30 minutes! Give it a try and schedule your free Discovery Session here.
MERDE!!!
Elizabeth
