Piano Guidance
Piano Guidance
Photo: cottonbro studio
Stagefright has been aptly described as “self-poisoning by adrenaline.” In response to stress, the adrenal glands pump the hormone epinephrine (adrenaline) into the bloodstream, causing the body to shift into a state of high arousal.
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Read More »The key thought accompanying the physical response seems to be a feeling of exposure. Illustration by Nishant Choksi Sara Solovitch, in “Playing Scared: A History and Memoir of Stage Fright” (Bloomsbury), says that while she was a good pianist as a child, she fell apart—sweating, trembling—when she had to play for an audience. She got through the Eastman School of Music’s preparatory program. Then she quit studying piano, grew up, got married, had children, and became a journalist. In her late forties, though, she drifted back to the piano, taking a course at a community college. By this point, she had no professional ambitions. Surely, she thought, she would now be able to perform calmly. But when her teacher asked her, one night, to play in front of the class, her hands began shaking so hard that she could barely strike the keyboard: “I gazed down at myself from a distance high above the keys, watching a body that was no longer in charge. My fear was at the controls, like an independent organism emerging from inside me, my own Rosemary’s baby.” Stagefright has not been heavily studied, which is strange because, as Solovitch tells us, it is common not only among those who make their living on the stage but among the rest of us, too. In 2012, two researchers at the University of Nebraska-Omaha, Karen Dwyer and Marlina Davidson, administered a survey to eight hundred and fifteen college students, asking them to select their three greatest fears from a list that included, among other things, heights, flying, financial problems, deep water, death, and “speaking before a group.” Speaking before a group beat out all the others, even death. Stagefright has been aptly described as “self-poisoning by adrenaline.” In response to stress, the adrenal glands pump the hormone epinephrine (adrenaline) into the bloodstream, causing the body to shift into a state of high arousal. The person’s muscles tense, he sweats and shakes, his heart pounds, his mouth goes dry, he has trouble breathing, he may become nauseated or dizzy, and his throat constricts, making his voice rise in pitch. This is the so-called “fight or flight” response, which our species is thought to have developed because it helped prepare the body for forceful action in response to a threat. But what Cro-Magnon man needed upon finding a bear in his cave is not what a modern person needs in order to play King Lear. Without the release of abrupt action, the hyperactivation becomes, basically, a panic attack. As for the thoughts accompanying the physical response, the most important seems to be a feeling of exposure. The English theatre scholar Nicholas Ridout, in his excellent book “Stage Fright, Animals, and Other Theatrical Problems” (2006), compares the situation to that of a snail having its shell ripped off. His countryman Stephen Fry, who, one day in 1995, left London—indeed, England—to avoid appearing in the play he was scheduled to perform in, says that, when stagefright hits, the audience sees “the shrivelled penis in your head.” And, in the typical case, the performer can do nothing to change the spectators’ minds, because he feels utterly empty. In 1989, Daniel Day-Lewis, playing the title role in Richard Eyre’s production of “Hamlet” at London’s National Theatre, turned on his heel in the middle of the show and walked off the stage, never to return. (In the twenty-six years since then, he has acted only in movies.) “I had nothing in me, nothing to say, nothing to give,” he said. Others stay, but only by force of sheer, grinding will. In a number of ways, stagefright doesn’t make sense. Laurence Olivier, when he was in his late fifties, was visited by a spell that lasted, intermittently, for five years, causing him great anguish. At the time, he was the most celebrated stage actor in England. How could he be frightened of failing? Ditto Mikhail Baryshnikov. In the nineteen-seventies and eighties, Baryshnikov was the most famous ballet dancer in the world, and he probably still is, though he ceased classical dancing some twenty-five years ago. Since then, he has built a successful career in modern dance and theatre. But he experiences terrible stagefright, and says that it has only got worse over the years. This is another mystery of stagefright—that, in so many cases, it doesn’t let up with time. If the artist repeatedly goes onstage fearing failure, and instead has a success, shouldn’t the fear eventually extinguish? “I am onstage more than fifty years,” Baryshnikov says. “Sometimes I do shows every night for weeks. Still, it never doesn’t come. Starts four hours before. I don’t even try to fight it anymore. I know it will always be there.”
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Read More »A final mystery of stagefright is just how many otherwise capable people suffer from it. A few writers on the subject have suggested that it is a modern phenomenon, born of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But Scott Stossel, in his recent book “My Age of Anxiety,” quotes Cicero, ancient Rome’s acclaimed orator, saying, “I turn pale at the outset of a speech and quake in every limb.” After Cicero, examples in the literature thin out until the eighteenth century. Then, however, we get some impressive ones, including Thomas Jefferson, who is said to have been mortally afraid of public speaking. As President, he gave only two speeches, his two inaugural addresses. Gandhi was terrified of having to speak to a group: his vision would fog over; he would fall mute. As for performers, Barbra Streisand, singing in front of more than a hundred thousand people in Central Park, one night in 1967, repeatedly forgot her lyrics. For twenty-seven years thereafter, she refused to perform live except at charity concerts. Adele told British Vogue, “I puke quite a lot before going on stage, though never actually on the stage.” Jay Z told Terry Gross, on “Fresh Air,” that performance anxiety is the reason rappers often grab their crotches when performing. Many of them, he said, are not accustomed to live performance. “You get up there, you feel naked,” Jay Z said. “So when you feel naked what’s the first thing you do? You cover yourself.” But singers don’t have to perform live; they can fall back on recording. The two most famous stagefright victims among concert pianists also took that route. Vladimir Horowitz, probably the most acclaimed piano virtuoso of the late twentieth century, retired from public performing four times, for long periods. (One lasted twelve years.) But he didn’t stay home. Some of his finest recordings were made during those sabbaticals. An even more notorious withdrawal, because it was permanent, was that of the Canadian master Glenn Gould. From the beginning of his concertizing career, when he was in his teens, Gould feared and hated the audience. He felt that the spectators wanted him to fail; he was sure that, in any case, he would get germs from them. He retired from the stage at the age of thirty-one and devoted the rest of his short life—he died at fifty—to experimental recordings. In a parallel manner, actors like Daniel Day-Lewis who have found that they can’t bear the stage have switched over to film. There they needn’t fear a muffed scene so much; they can always ask for a retake. These examples, numerous as they are, are just the ones that appealed to me. There are many, many more: Ella Fitzgerald, Luciano Pavarotti, Mel Gibson. And those are only the people who have been willing to talk about the problem, or whom others have talked about. Performers are often reluctant to discuss stagefright. They think it’s bad luck. (Likewise, most baseball players do not want to discuss the yips.) Also, the stories that one hears are usually about the very bad cases, whereas stagefright is not a single condition but a spectrum, stretching from those who may vomit in their dressing rooms but then go onstage, blazingly, to those who are forced to stop performing. In between is a large intermediate group of people whose careers have been not ended but simply diminished by anxiety. Two years ago, before undertaking a one-woman show on Broadway, Bette Midler told Patrick Healy, of the Times, that she had wanted to be a serious dramatic actress but had faltered for lack of courage. “I have that terror,” she said. “Will people like you? Will they ask you back? Did I make the cut? That’s always on my mind.” To hear the brash, funny, commanding (as far as we knew) Midler tell of worrying whether people would like her is painful. But, in every group of artists, the insiders can tell you who, among them, should have had a bigger career but, for some reason, was held back. Forces in the culture may help breed stagefright, by making avoidance of the stage seem a reasonable artistic choice. Twentieth-century avant-garde theatre had a strong anti-theatrical bias, the idea being that to care about the people in the audience—to want to entertain them or even to make oneself understood by them—was a forfeiture of artistic status, a lowering of one’s sights. In 1958, the serial composer Milton Babbitt published an essay entitled “Who Cares If You Listen?,” and, though he later said that the title was invented by an editor, its wording sums up the essay pretty accurately. (In music, the twentieth-century artist’s divorce from the general public was probably more bitter than in any other art.)
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Read More »The popularity, in the nineteen-sixties and seventies, of the writings of the communications theorist Marshall McLuhan no doubt increased the estrangement between the audience and performers who were trained to the live stage. According to McLuhan, what mattered in a work of art—or, at least, what the audience responded to—was not so much the intended content as the medium through which it was conveyed: whether it was live or broadcast, and, if broadcast, on radio or television, and with what amplification, what splices and inserts, and so on. Glenn Gould was a devotee of McLuhan, and to be a McLuhanite meant that you could abandon live performance without any shame, any talk of fright. You were just doing the up-to-date thing. But, in any discussion of the relationship between technology and stagefright, splices and inserts are a small matter. The crux, of course, was the invention of sound recording and then of film, in the late nineteenth century. These things did not create stagefright, but they fostered it, by enabling performers to do their work without having to appear in front of an audience. Nicholas Ridout says that stagefright may also have social and political underpinnings. Before the twentieth century, and certainly before the nineteenth, many people onstage were there at the behest not of the public but of private patrons—for example, the king. Such performers could, of course, lose their patrons’ favor, but success and failure were not as coldly calculated as they came to be via the box office. Once that switch occurred, paychecks were at risk, not just esteem and self-esteem. Around the same time, the social class of actors began to merge with that of their characters. With the advent of realism, plays were no longer about the rich or the royal; they were about Uncle Vanya or Hedda Gabler. Meanwhile, with the decline in the power of the Church, a stage career became less stigmatized socially. Actors rose into the middle class. In the words of Ridout, “This means that the ‘actual life’ the actor is required to simulate is close enough to her own life for her own to become a private resource for public display.”
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