When I recollect the best performances I’ve seen, and my favourite dancers, the critical element is never technique.

I love the dancers who are not only smiling, but their smiles are present, relaxed and engaging. A vacuous smile won’t do. Neither will smiling past the audience. My favourite dancers are focused on the here and now. They put everything they have into their moves, no matter how simple the move, and that degree of focus is an irresistible draw to the audience. That focus makes the dancer so present in the moment, their smiles are fluid and reflect an emotional give and take with the audience.

Here are some quick thoughts on how to cultivate that ‘focused and present’ mindset in order to be a more engaging performer.

Accept the Present Moment

Sometimes we tune out our surroundings because they’re making us nervous and we worry that we’ll perform poorly if we’re distracted by all that stimulus. I find the opposite is true. When we’re nervous and trying to tune out our surroundings, we spend more energy on denial and have less energy for our performance. In zen terms, acceptance is your best tool for mastery.

When your mind is nervous, it will practice a hyper-awareness. In nature, this helps tremendously in a fight-or-flight situation. The more details you have, the better able you are to use them in planning your attack or escape.

Surrendering to your mind’s inclination to take it all in will give you a better spacial awareness while dancing, and will serve to calm the nerves.

Accept Your Present Move

Another trap that will make your performance seem emotionally empty is allowing yourself to start judging the adequacy of or  over-thinking your dance. Losing yourself in the dance that you’re performing will endow your performance with energy and emotion. But worrying instead about your next moves and second-guessing your last moves will sap the energy from your current moves. If you can’t give your full attention to this hip-work or that flourish, why should the audience?

So, when you feel your attention wander, try narrowing your focus to the present moment, the present move, the present beat. If, like me, you tend to obsess and plan, remind yourself that the purpose of your dance is to be directed by the music. Not the other way around. Planning the next three moves is not truly interpreting the music. Let go and let the music determine your moves. And whatever comes to you, accept it as good enough and give everything to it.

Accept Your Emotions

Fighting with fear will sap your focus. Try acknowledging the fear, and then everything that comes with it.

If you’re feeling anxious, it’s because the stakes are high and you’re worrying about what could go wrong.

But if the stakes are high, doesn’t that also mean that rather than going wrong, this performance could go very, very right?

Don’t hold your excitement in check, thinking you need to pay homage to fear first. Fear and excitement are inseparable. Your performance is a big opportunity to show them what you can do. It should be exciting. So let yourself be excited (and a little bit scared).

If you suffer from stage fright, when there’s a performance looming, you probably find yourself questioning why you even dance. Let alone, why you’re considering performing.

When there isn’t a performance in the mix, and you’re feeling unconflicted, the answer is easy. You dance because you love it. And you love it, because it allows you to express something innately true to yourself.

Putting aside for the moment, any stage fright issues, the answer to why you perform logically follows. Creative expression is toothless without an audience. You can certainly spend your life dancing only for yourself, if that’s your wish. But if you are truly expressing something, at some point, you will want to quit shouting into the void, and turn your expression into a meaningful dialogue with the world. The problem, for those of us with social anxieties is that as soon as there is an audience present, we can become so acutely aware of the audience and our own anxieties, that our expression is stunted. That kernel of truth that the dance lets you tap into becomes cut off, and you are dancing from an exposed, frightened place that has little to do with truth or expression.

Your passion for creative expression will not only fail to insulate you against performance anxiety, it leaves you with a cruel dilemma; your spirit urges you to seek outlets for your passion, while those outlets ultimately leave you too anxious to do your best performance.

The problem with social anxieties, is that they build on themselves. Once you are nervous, you fear that people will see how nervous you are. You fear that your fear will ruin everything. Eventually, you are more scared of your scared reactions than of the actual situation. What you need is new thinking to break yourself out of that cycle. Let’s address this with some facts that you can remember when you’re caught in the anxiety feedback loop.

• The audience doesn’t expect perfection. What they expect is a good time. So you don’t need to obsess about the technical aspects of your dance, you can give the audience exactly what they want by letting go and having fun.
• You are the expert in this situation. If you’re still waiting for the magical moment that will tell you that you’ve arrived as an authority on belly dancing, stop. This is the moment. The audience is spending their time, and possibly money for the sake of seeing you perform this dance. You may still be waiting to feel like an authority because you know how much you don’t know. That can be daunting. But this isn’t between you and the entire world of belly dancing, this is between you and the audience. They don’t know how much you don’t know, they only know that you know something they don’t. You don’t have to convince them that you’re an expert, their willingness to invest in seeing you has already established it.
• Everyone in the audience wants to see you succeed. Your audience is not a faceless judging mass. They are a collection of individuals, who, having invested in your performance (with their time and money), are already predisposed to see the performance as a success. This is human nature. They’re invested in your success, because when they go away saying “what a great performance,” it will reflect well on them, their ability to choose a performance and how they spend their time and money. That it reflects well on you is a secondary consideration to them.
• This performance is part of a process. Take a long view of your growth as a dancer. Whether this is your first or your thousandth performance, this isn’t THE performance, it is the first or the thousandth in a series of performances that are making you the dancer you want to be. Regardless of how well or poorly it goes, there will be elements that can be improved and there will be elements of inspiration.

If none of the above items help, consider working with a therapist or anxiety coach. The worse your anxiety gets, the harder it can be to deal with next time and it can be very difficult to break that cycle on your own. Since a part of the fear is the feeling that you can’t let your fear show, you may also find that admitting to the anxiety and asking for help can reduce its hold on you.