Stage fright is not a problem to solve
When you feel stage fright, it is a good sign: it means that what you are about to do matters. Stage fright is the bodily form of the bond that will be formed that evening, with that audience, and which you do not control. The trouble begins when it is treated as a nuisance to be removed, because in seeking to reduce stage fright we may also be reducing, without meaning to, what makes a performance live.
A note from 2013 that the theatre refined
There is, in my working notebooks, a note dated 2013, just one line long: “when you feel stage fright, it is a good sign, it means that what you are about to do matters”. I had written it in a personal context, as I was preparing to expose something fragile and not yet secure. It applies to theatrical creation with a precision that took me years to gauge.
Stage fright is a signal, not a pathology, not a failure of preparation, not proof that one is not professional enough. It says that something real is at stake, that the encounter about to take place has not yet been neutralised, that what will happen this time, in this house, with this audience, is not entirely predictable, not even to oneself.
Stage fright is the bodily form of exposure, and exposure is the condition of live theatre. When an actor says they no longer feel stage fright after five years of touring the same show, they are saying that they know exactly what is going to happen, that they know how the audience will react, that they are in control. That control reassures them and makes the performance solid, but it produces the reproduction of a past encounter rather than an encounter.
What the sector does with stage fright
The subsidised theatre sector has developed, often with the best of intentions, a set of arrangements that reduce exposure, and therefore stage fright, at every stage of the process.
- Long creation residencies give the time needed to build solidly, and they also give the time to rehearse so much that the object becomes unassailable, to the point of ceasing, sometimes, to be alive once it has become so.
- Commissions and reading committees make it possible to validate the relevance of a project before it is exposed to the public, and they also lead to projects being conceived in response to the validation criteria, which produces shows that already know, at the moment of their conception, how they will be received by those who fund them.
- Protocols of capacity, duration and format reduce the variables to be managed and allow greater logistical control, while reducing in the same movement the unpredictable variables that make one evening able to differ from another.
None of these arrangements is bad in itself, each answers a real problem. Their accumulation produces an environment of creation in which stage fright becomes ever rarer, and therefore, perhaps, live theatre too.
I should make clear, as in the other texts in this series, that this observation is not ammunition for those who would cut culture funding. The economic and temporal security I am about to discuss in fact presupposes a sustained public effort. What I am questioning is the use we make of that security, not its existence.
Building security, or building comfort
There is a distinction I find useful, between comfort and security, and it is probably the core of what I am trying to share here.
- Security is what artists need in order to take risks. It is economic, being able to make a living from one’s work. It is relational, having trusted partners. It is temporal, having enough time for something to be truly built. Without it, artists do not take risks, they survive.
- Comfort is the environment in which one knows in advance how things will go. It is the programme note that tells the audience what to feel before the lights have even gone down. Comfort does not give artists the means to take risks, it spares them from doing so.
Security authorises risk, comfort makes it unnecessary. These are two different things, and the sector often confuses them because both have the appearance of kindness. The question that institutions, artistic teams and funders would do well to ask themselves regularly is whether they are building security or comfort, and, if it is comfort, for whose benefit. It is the same gesture as the one I describe elsewhere about the frame, which authorises risk-taking rather than containing it.
Why I defend risk
I defend risk because to take a risk is to enter into a bond, and the bond is what affects us in our own substance. If we do not place ourselves in the disposition to be transformed by the other, the encounter is weaker, and it is precisely because it can change us that it represents a risk. That risk is always there, because people are always different from one another and different from one evening to the next. There is no situation in which it would have disappeared. The only way to make it disappear is that comfortable situation where everything has been settled in advance, and in which, in a sense, the show is dead. There, people are focused on the show as an object rather than on the bond it was meant to host.
Neurobiology lends some support to this intuition, even though the field remains contested and proves nothing on its own. The neurons that produce oxytocin are not activated when one explores an inert environment, they are activated in interaction between individuals. Our nervous system also regulates its state according to the presence of the other, through the vagal brake that allows us to engage when we feel safe and that gives way to flight or defence responses when the threat is perceived as strong. In other words, being in a bond places us in a physiological state different from the one in which we act alone. One can perfectly well act without being in a bond, act within a fantasy of control, and the body knows it, since it does not then produce the same signals. Stage fright is one of those signals, the bodily form of an exposure to the other that has not yet taken place.
Peter Brook called the theatre an arena where a living confrontation can take place. He described the actor able to shed, on opening night, the most solid things their preparatory work had given them, because the encounter with the audience suddenly reveals their insufficiency. It is that encounter that is decisive, not the solidity of the preparation. Where there is a bond, there is live performance, and not dead performance.
Stage fright will come with talent
Stage fright does not spare the greatest, and it does not diminish with mastery. Jacques Brel was sick before every recital for seventeen or eighteen years, right up to the height of his fame, and he simply said that it was fear that made him vomit. Sarah Bernhardt, to a young actress who boasted of never feeling it, is said to have replied, not without mischief, that she should not worry, it would come with talent. The anecdote has passed from mouth to mouth for so long that one no longer quite knows whether it is true, but it says something accurate, that stage fright accompanies the awareness of having a real stake to carry, and that a performer who has none has perhaps not yet taken the measure of what is at play.
It is not, then, a matter of trying to suppress stage fright, nor of awaiting it as an ordeal to get through. It is hard to live with, and it is part of the path. If it is there, it is a good sign.
Keeping a zone of uncertainty
Recognising stage fright as a signal rather than a problem changes the way one prepares for a creation. It does not mean stepping on stage without preparation or inner security. It means deliberately keeping a zone of uncertainty in the work, something one has not entirely decided in advance and which may unfold differently depending on the house, the evening, the state of the actors and the audience. It is what I call elsewhere the open part of the score, the part one assumes as an element of the work rather than as a failure of mastery. A crack in mastery, through which something real can enter.
Stage fright is that crack, felt in the body before stepping on stage. It says: there, something truly matters. That is exactly where one must go.
Theatre is one of the oldest forms of sharing human experience, and it is perhaps because of that very depth that it deserves to be questioned with precision, and without complacency.
For years I have been working alongside companies, venues, cultural mediation teams, directors of arts organizations and funders, and what I observe there is that the subsidized performing arts carry within them a contradiction that is rarely faced head-on. Their proclaimed intentions (reaching all audiences, creating connection, emancipating) are often contradicted by their actual structures. The hierarchy between authors, directors, actors, technicians and spectators reproduces what these same structures claim to deconstruct, front-of-house arrangements theatricalize distrust instead of openness, and the texts presenting the shows assign the spectator a subordinate position when they could make them a partner.
These contradictions do not stem from bad intentions, but from structural mechanisms that can only be seen by agreeing to look at oneself with the clarity one ordinarily applies to the systems one criticizes. That is the work I try to do in the articles of this section.
I write them for actors who sense that something eludes them in their relationship with the audience, for stage directors who doubt the coherence between their forms and their intentions, for mediation teams looking for methods that start from people themselves, for directors of organizations who want to understand why their house does not look like their city, and for funders who wonder what they are really supporting.
I believe theatre can be a practice of democracy, and not merely a service of democratization. It can then create the conditions for a real encounter instead of organizing the reception of a work, and place its trust in actors, participants, residents and the unforeseen, as living matter. This path is demanding, and I propose to explore it here, with constructive, workable questions rather than ready-made answers.
-
Stage fright is not a problem to solve
What the fear of stepping on stage protects.
When you feel stage fright, it is a good sign: it means that what you are about to do matters. Stage fright is the bodily form of the bond that (…) -
You don’t prepare a creation, you prepare yourself for creation
The decisive work in a creative process is work on the people who create.
In a creative process, the decisive work is not first of all work on the object being made, but on the people who make it. By way of the (…) -
The Art of Hospitality
When does the theatre begin, and who is its author?
The performance begins well before the curtain rises, in the street, in the lobby, in the queue, in the text that announces it. Yet these moments (…) -
Training a company in participatory mediation
Staging the reality of the encounter, not only the performance.
Theatre and dance companies are now asked to do mediation work, and many artists experience it as a chore tacked on to their art. Drawing on the (…) -
Democratisation or cultural democracy: what these two words do to theatre
Why the houses of subsidised theatre do not look like their city, and what cultural rights make it possible to change.
Cultural democratisation and cultural democracy resemble each other and name two different projects. Retracing the history of the first with (…) -
Artistic Extractivism
A theatre that manufactures elsewhere and comes to consume places and people.
Building a show in a rehearsal room, transporting it and coming to play it in the homes of people of whom nothing has been retained follows a (…) -
What Professional Artists Can Learn from the Amateur Model
On the standard set on the process, the reciprocity between stage and house, and the confusion between artistic quality and domination.
We readily accept that amateurs have something to learn from professionals. The reverse seems less obvious, even slightly provocative. Drawing on (…) -
To Fictionalise or Not?
The Ethics of Documentary Theatre.
Documentary theatre puts real lives on stage, yet the sector rarely asks what it owes to the people whose words it gathers. Drawing on examples (…) -
A clear conscience as a system
When the cultural sector funds its own critique without changing its practices.
The most resilient structures of domination are sometimes the ones their beneficiaries believe they are fighting. The subsidised performing arts (…) -
The spectator’s score
Reflections on the programme note and the place it gives the audience.
The programme note, that document we read or don’t read, because it was handed to us as we entered the house and we are waiting for the show to (…) -
Preparing a Show the Way You Prepare a Meal
The enabling frame, from the rehearsal room to front-of-house.
With some shows, something happens between the stage and the people present; with others, just as carefully made, nothing does. That difference (…) -
Presence or execution
Why perfectly executed shows remain dead, and how to work on what makes a performance alive.
A show can be perfectly executed and meet no one. Rereading Peter Brook closely, and passing through Pippo Delbono, a short film that gets cinema (…)
-
Work or mastery ? Methodology of the productive action.
How do we achieve the best possible result in the work, in the construction? In my opinion, contrary to popular belief, it is not the search for (…) -
Presence in the Unexpected The art of grafting the unexpected.
Faced with the unexpected that thwarts the best-laid plans, should we resist or open ourselves? Perhaps the issue is not so much in this question. (…) -
Create your film about imaginary disasters - 2nd edition Creative prevention workshop at the eco-citizen house (Bordeaux).
The imaginary of disasters: creating together to better navigate uncertainty. Why imagining disasters makes us strongerNeuroscience shows us: (…) -
The Art of Hospitality When does the theatre begin, and who is its author?
The performance begins well before the curtain rises, in the street, in the lobby, in the queue, in the text that announces it. Yet these moments (…) -
Presence and Social Space The theatricality of everyday life or the art of being a spectator of the world.
At the Avignon Festival, every street becomes a stage, every encounter a performance. Between official theater and the theater of life unfolds a (…)
