Lower The Stakes

My ideal ensemble environment is high expectations but low stakes.

How do you, as a director, lower the stakes of a performance?

“Stakes Too High” is a common cause of lowered performance. Performers do worse when they’re particularly anxious, and it’s essential that a director find ways to lower the stakes so that performers can perform their best.

(To be clear, we want to retain high expectations. The point isn’t to lower our expectations, but to raise our chances of meeting them!) Here are some of the things I do to lower stakes.

  • Have more performances. The jitters and sense that “this moment is high stakes” diminish with lots of opportunities to perform.
  • Visualize the performance in advance. If you can talk, slowly and calmly, through the logistics of a performance, it can reduce the stress performers might have.
  • Be very open about your own sense of the stakes vs. the expectations. Differentiate them in your speaking and in the performers’ minds.
  • Assign performers to truly listen to and accept compliments after their performances.
  • Make sure that reflection post-performance focuses on the good things as much as the things you can improve.

We will work together to do our best, but we will plan to fail along the way and we will do our best to take in that failure as an opportunity to grow and move ahead.