Performing comes with joys and some jitters

Lately, I’ve been pondering how marvelous and challenging live and in-person human performance can be. Of course, machines perform as well, by design. But machines don’t have feelings and/or unique intelligence that can be mobilized to enhance expression. We also may enjoy products that convey or reflect on expression, such as films, recordings, books and magazines.

But nothing can be as marvelous as live human expression offered up to others.

A week ago, while in New York City, I attended a new Broadway musical, “Kimberley Akimbo,” a family comedy about a group of teenagers. Accompanied by live music (with musicians visible in an alcove above the stage), a small group of teenagers struggle with illness, dysfunctional family members, their dreams of years to come, and some possibly dangerous schemes to raise money over the course of several acts.

The following day, my daughter-in-law, Kat, who works in Manhattan teaching teenagers how to act and write their own plays, and I decided to go to the Museum of Broadway. We’d never been there, and we were charmed. Musicals reaching far back into the 1930s and 1940s were on display, many including sound clips and videos of film clips. A final expansive room offered film clips of famous Broadway musicals, plus recordings of speech coaches, and teachers of song and musical instruments, explaining their techniques in working with directors and actors.

Just coming off of months of piano accompaniment for our Cromwell-Wright choral students, I am quite familiar with stage fright. I love the dozen-plus scores that Cromwell-Wright music teacher MaryRose Varo chooses for singers’ solos, duets and combos. And though I have a lovely baby grand piano at home — kept well-tuned by Duluth’s Dennis Berryhill — I am not gifted with long fingers. So I make mistakes. And, worse, I get nervous before performances because I want to do well. The jitters, I can confirm, do not improve the results.

Most of us have chosen to perform at times in our lives. Many do it for a living. Especially when we are newcomers to work or an art form, we want to do a great job. I remember that when I was in high school, my piano teacher wanted me to go to the University of Minnesota to enter a piano competition. I was so nervous that I had to start over three times. The audience was kind and patient. But I felt incompetent. Since then, at least until the last couple of years, I made sure I had a piano wherever I lived. I never played for the public, but for pleasure and hoping to improve.

One year, I went to interview for a professorship at University of California Berkeley. A college friend, Tom Stehling, who hailed from Milwaukee, insisted that I stay with him. The evening before the interview, he proposed that we sit at his baby grand and work on a Brahms piano duet. It was an elixir. We didn’t mess it up much, and at the end of a piece, we erupted with laughter. I was offered, and accepted, the job.

I don’t have much good advice for those of you who may also experience performance anxiety. If you are playing or singing in front of a live audience, you can try focusing on those who are smiling at you and/or are your family or friends. It is just something you have to work through. Listening to recordings can help.

During a year I spent in Glasgow, Scotland, as a Fulbright visiting professor, I was tutored by an acting coach who was the partner of our dean. She taught me that you have to look at your audience. “Choose one person in the middle front, and after a few minutes, switch your gaze to someone on the other side of the room. People will hear and remember what you say, and you will feel the connection with them and their delight, or displeasure, with your message.” I’ve never forgotten this technique, even if I don’t always remember to employ it.

Columnist Ann Markusen is an economist and professor emerita at University of Minnesota. One of the five owners of the Pine Knot News, she lives in Red Clover Township north of Cromwell with her husband, Rod Walli.