I recently taught a workshop for young musicians and saw something fascinating.

At the end of the session I asked them to walk onto the stage again. It was amazing, just after teaching them a few choice short lessons, they told me they felt more confident. And I could see a big change in their stature. I could suddenly see each musician’s personality. They weren’t hiding what they thought we shouldn’t see anymore, and so we could see them. In all their individual glory.

How many of you leave part of yourselves backstage in every performance?

Stage Presence starts with your self image

There’s a beautiful Jewish proverb that when you marry someone, you accept the 70 Faces of your Beloved. Not all of them are beautiful, or kind. Some are the faces we don’t want to show anyone, but hide away. But when we love someone else we accept as many of those faces as we can. Most of us are not so good at doing that for ourselves. 

I’ve often heard that stage presence is something we add, an act, an aggrandisement of ourselves. But more and more, I think great stage presence is what happens when we stop hiding parts of ourselves, accept ourselves in our imperfection and take our whole self onstage.

Anxiety, or fear of judgement makes us smaller, more timid. We become self limiting, over careful or self conscious. So it’s fascinating to me that a few short Feldenkrais lessons can shift this. We don’t need to be perfect, but take our whole selves with us on or off stage.

That’s real presence.