Performance Confidence - manage stage fright and performance nerves with Alexnader Technique
Mange stage fright or performance anxiety with Alexander Technique. Using Alexander Technique puts your attention and intention on things that build confidence and reduce the symptoms of performance nerves. Weather it is shaky knees, sweaty palms or butterflies in your stomach, Alexander Technique can teach musicians and performing artists to redirect nervous energy into inspired performance.
Performance Confidence
Create a healthy relationship between yourself, your instrument, your art and your audience.
Many of us have a love-hate relationship with public performance. Professionals or recreational musicians, whether they be children or adults are often conflicted because they have a love for music and a desire to play but find playing persistently painful, depressing or stressful.
Similar may be said of other performing arts and public speaking.
Performance is neither a sustainable profession nor a healthy recreation if is full of frustration and tension. Attaining more technical skills may not necessarily make your presentation joyful.
Stress in music is evident not only in performance but in home practice. Sometimes we unconsciously interfere with our ability to sit at home and enjoy playing just for the fun of it.
Creating a healthy relationship to your art or presentation topic and the audience is a skill with can be learnt. The pathway to joy in presenting inevitably is associated with improvement in self-confidence and self-discipline. It relates to clarifying what we want and how we can work towards it.
The balance of setting a goal for oneself, and acting on this 'in the moment' is both a process for effective and fun art making or presenting and for wellbeing in life.
Manage performance anxiety, stage fright, nerves or tension
Presenting a topic we are passionate about, or performing art inevitably has an associated emotional engagement. To develop a high level of skill in stagecraft also demands a passion for the content - artistic or otherwise - and discipline in practice.
Performance confidence is not just psychological - it is a whole body-mind state.
The skills one learns in Alexander Technique apply not only to movement, breath and poise, but are a framework for constructive thinking. It is a decidedly practical and embodied form of mindfulness which impacts on negative habits of mind and body.
Using principles of Alexander Technique may free us from any thought or movement patterns which interfere with our enjoyment of performing.
Jeremy Woolhouse became a confident performer through a long period of self-development supported by Alexander Technique, Zen meditation and contemporary psychology. He cites this development as central to his capacity for presenting engaging and fulfilling public performance.
Jeremy’s lessons draw on his personal journey, his experience in professional performance, the teaching of music and of Alexander Technique.
Anyone who makes public presentations or performs art at any age or stage of performance ability can benefit from support to:
improve self-confidence and confidence in performance
manage performance stress, anxiety, stage fright
maintain or renew inspiration and motivation
thrive under the pressures of performing
feel comfortable and relaxed when presenting
make public presentations or artistic performance joyful and healthy