Jury Duty (EN)

(Lee este artículo en español)


A friend of mine organizes a dance event every year. It is a contest for all ages and styles and it takes place in Bilbao. Some shows and performances run along with the competition throughout the entire event. My friend and her dance group always participate in them and this year I also took part in one of the numbers.

There is usually a theme that gives meaning to the event and a narrator tells a little story as a way of introducing each dance number. Last year I went to see the contest and the narrator did not show up. 30 minutes before the opening number my friend asked me to be the narrator, so I had to memorize the whole script as fast as lightning and perform it the best I could. It was fun. (Yes, for real, it was fun!)

This year the event took place on the 27^th of November and I was originally participating in one of the side performances in the competition. I was enjoying the fact that this year I did not have to do something I had not rehearsed previously when my friend asked me to replace one of the judges of the competition that did not show up (yay!). The thought of "I'll just perform and go home" did not last long. I know what you’re thinking; I’m like the joker card that can take any value. 

This is the first time that I am asked to evaluate someone’s dancing. And also this is the first time that I watch someone’s dancing so attentively since I started studying psychology. Due to the fact that I am now more trained to read body language, I would like to share with you some of my perceptions as a judge.

One of the things I could see very clearly was that some people were really having fun while others were having a hard time performing. A contest is an evaluating situation and some people have evaluation anxiety. That is something you can really see on their faces.

Why is that? Why are some people at ease with themselves and give a great performance while others distress your very soul and mind just by looking at them?

One thing one can notice is that people who do not show evaluation anxiety in the competition are usually the best dancers, while people with a worried look on their faces do not perform so well. This is not always the case as some people were dancing totally out of sync with their mates and still having a good time.

Before I get into the performance anxiety matter, I would like to talk about the teachers. Through a dancer's behavior you can also see his or her teacher; just like through choreography you can also perceive the choreographer, or when you see a child you can see his or her parents. Like father like son, like dancer like teacher.

There are two key elements to dance: the technical skill needed to perform the movements and the feeling of the artist and their ability to project this to their audience; to fill the entire theatre with their energy and presence. 

When a dancer is truly dancing from their heart, their body responds accordingly delivering precision, flow and mastery. This is truly the magic of dance. I wish teachers would encourage more this way of dancing.

A dancer must be able to know themselves and to be comfortable enough within themselves that they feel free to be themselves and to express themselves on stage. Such an artist will give their self over completely to their performance, without fear of failure or reprimand. 

On the contrary someone who is uncomfortable within themselves - who lacks confidence - will tend to hold back in their work and from their own true self-expression. 

If any dance teacher is reading this, I would like to stress the importance of their roles as educators. When we teach something, no matter how technical it is, we are also teaching values, maybe unconsciously, but we do. The opinions we express, the messages we give while teaching the class, our comments, are also transmitted to the students.

Some years ago during Christmas I took part in a zarzuela (a Spanish operetta). I showed up for the auditions and they hired me. At the try outs I came in contact with some dancers from Jon Beitia, a particularly tough ballet school here in Basque Country. From that moment on, I could tell whether a dancer was from that particular school by the way he talked and addressed other people. Spending 9 hours a day learning ballet with such a teacher forms quite a character!

I took dance classes during many years with a great teacher in La Bisagra dance school. She taught me to be humble and show respect for the work of others, as well as not to get intimidated by the work of others. I used to have performance anxiety, but I got over it, and so can anybody else.

If you are teacher, take care that you also teach your students techniques to improve stage presence and control performance anxiety. Remember that people start dancing for fun; it is something that is not only done with the body but also with the soul. We do it because it makes us feel alive.

Going up on a stage is a very courageous thing to do. All participants who performed on the dance contest should feel very proud because of that. There are many people who could not even do that; they would not even think of standing on a stage exposing themselves to an audience.

While I was sitting at the jury table watching the contestants, I sometimes felt like going up on stage and telling the dancers: “It’s ok. You’re doing great. There is nothing to worry about.”

There are two sides to performance anxiety. If we are good at something and we know it, we might feel very good about ourselves and would want to show what we can do to others, we want an audience to watch us. These dancers do what they love to do. Those people have less anxiety and because of that they use the stress of the competition to get more energy to perform better. A successful performance makes them feel good about themselves which in return increases their self-esteem.

An example of this was a group called “Sosas Caústicas” who performed the song “La Vida es una Tómbola”. Technically it was not the most skillful dance routine you could see in the competition, but performance wise you could not ask for more. They were enjoying what they were doing and they were great. They kept the audience engaged. And that is all what a performance is about: keeping the audience interested.

On the other hand, there are those who are not so confident about their dancing, who constantly judge themselves and therefore suffer from performance anxiety. Those are the ones you can hear say negative things about themselves: “I’m not good at this. I can’t do this pirouette. I always screw it up, etc.” Anxiety blocks them and when they go out on stage they perform poorly and then beat themselves up for the bad performance which lowers their self-esteem.

If you find yourself suffering from performance anxiety, there is something you can do about it. The only way to get over it is by going up on stage more often. A great and safe way to do this is by taking some acting classes. In the right acting group you will feel accepted and encouraged to work on exposing yourself and getting the best out of you.

If you are a teacher, there is also a lot you can do for your students. I will just mention something I learned from my acting teacher as well as from my psychology studies. The key factor is to understand that self-esteem is one of the most important assets a person has. Money, possessions and other material things come and go, so can social status, job position, etc., however we must carry our self-esteem for an entire lifetime. The work of an actor, a dancer, a singer or any performer is partly based on his self-esteem.

So when you need to comment something to your students be sure to take this into account, have tact, be nice. If your goal is to help your student improve, damaging their self-esteem will not work. That does not mean that we should not tell them what they do wrong. It is not what we must say, but how we say it what matters in relation to self-esteem. Unfortunately I have seen some ballet teachers to treat their students with a total lack of respect claiming that a ballet dancer must be tough (the former Euskadi ballet was a great example of this.)

Therefore when addressing your students make sure you take that into account. As a general rule, it is best to avoid evaluating or judging the dancer, and comment a concrete action instead. Evaluate the behavior, not the person. This is true even for those who are very good dancers, who can also suffer from performance anxiety. If you tell someone all the time that he is very good, you will end up putting a lot of pressure on him to keep up your expectations.

Instead of saying “what a great dancer you are” if we see someone, for example, performing perfect turns, it is best to be specific and say “it is great how you manage those turns”, or “I can see you have been working on your techniques, those turns you made were really good”. That way we put the emphasis on the action and not on the person. We encourage them to keep on working.

The same applies when making a negative comment. If someone needs to improve something, tell him how to do it, do not simple say: “that was bad or you can't turn”, show him the way to improve himself “do not use so much force when turning, place your weight a little bit more to the front", etc.

When I lived in Belgium, I had a great ballet teacher. I call her my magical teacher, because taking a few classes from her improved my dancing more than years of classes with other teachers. She taught me to be realistic, to work on what I could improve and forget about the things my body was not going to be able to accomplish.

As teachers we have the responsibility to make sure we do all that we can for our students to succeed.  If you have a negative student, you can give him things he can accomplish and be successful at, so he can experience feeling good about himself. That will increase his self-esteem before taking a step further into something more difficult. Before you say to a student ask yourself: "will this help the student or am I just venting what I'm thinking?", "does the student need to hear this or is it me who has the need to say it?"

I have always loved to dance and I always will. I am not longer in shape as I used to be and maybe that's why I drifted away from dancing and moved to other performing arts like acting. Nevertheless I believe dancers are quite extraordinary among other performing artists.

Before a show, musicians get the musical score, they practice and then, on show night, under the guidance of a conductor, they play their musical instruments with a printed copy of the music in front of them. Before a show, actors get the script and they read it. Then they take it home and read it over and over until they learn it by heart. For most of the rehearsal period they are even allowed to have their scripts with them. 

Dancers, on the other hand, have to learn thousands of subtle changes in body position simply by watching someone demonstrating those movements. They don't write the moves down, and they're not given a book with theirs and everyone else's moves written in. Imagine if actors or musicians had to learn their parts by heart simply by watching or listening to someone else. When dancers go home at the end of rehearsals they have to practice, but they don't have anything to remind them of the dance moves, other than their own fantastic memory.

Anyway, to wrap it up, I would like to say that it was hard for me to be a member of the jury. There were so many groups with so many creative ideas, and so much work and preparation on their performance, that it was very difficult to narrow it down to a few winners. In some American dance contests each judge records his comments on tape and that tape goes to the performers, so they can learn something from it. I wish I could have done something like that.

I tend not to like contests because whenever there is a winner there is also a loser and sometimes the difference between the two is very subjective. However a contest can also be a great growing experience. I just hope everybody who participated learned something from it and got motivated to keep on working on their dancing and performing skills and if you are not a dancer and you have read this post so far, I hope to have contributed to increase your appreciation for this art.

Two questions for you, in case you feel like commenting:

• Have you ever experienced stage fright or performance anxiety? 
• Do you think taking acting classes may help you overcome that fear?