Rina Vergano is a Bristol-based playwright and dramaturg with a background in European theatre-making, specialising in new work for younger and family audiences. For twenty years she lived and worked in Amsterdam and has translated over seventy plays into English from Dutch and Flemish.Her own creative output has brought her into contact with many theatres and groups including egg theatre, Grid Iron, Tobacco Factory Theatre, Bristol Old Vic, Trestle Theatre Unmasked, Polka Theatre, Show of Strength, The Theatre Orchard, The Holland Festival, and Vitrage Women’s Theatre Company in Amsterdam. Rina believes in theatre for the people by the people, and in taking live theatre into non-theatre spaces. Rina is one of HotFest’s creative driving forces, bringing her many years of expertise to the planning, marketing and creative content of the festival. This is her blog, in which she addresses issues of stage fright, performance anxiety and the struggle to be truly present in the creative act.
I am not a natural performer. It’s something I’ve rolled into over the years, and in order to be able to do it I’ve had to get over some stuff that was seriously holding me back. Terror, mainly, coupled with self-consciousness and no confidence, and the belief that performing on stage was something that other people – special people – did. Even speaking up in a meeting or sharing circle would bring on a silent panic attack as my turn drew closer. I still made myself go on stage though, cruelly it seems to me now, mainly in community pantos or doing comedy turns in cabarets at singing camps and social events. Wanting to be part of that fun narrowly outweighed the terror it involved.
Then one day I heard about this thing called EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique), a tapping ritual that was supposed to get rid of phobias. Alongside my fear of performing I was also phobic about flying. So I went along to an EFT workshop and spent the weekend tapping my face and repeating phrases like “even though I’m terrified of performing/flying I still completely love and accept myself…”. I remember thinking, good job none of my friends can see me doing this because it’s clearly hippy bullshit and a waste of time. I went home and forgot all about it.
Hah.
Months later when I got on a plane – I’m a very occasional flyer – I was amazed to find that I felt absolutely nothing during take-off or landing, or the floaty bit in between. It was like sitting on a bus: a bit dull and not remotely scary. And a few months after that I was standing in the wings of a community panto waiting for my entrance as one of the ugly sisters (big wig and cozzie, lots of lines and a duet) when it dawned on me that I didn’t want to throw up, shit myself and faint all at the same time. The terror had completely disappeared, as if by magic.
What had also disappeared, I discovered, was my adrenalin. I could in principle have performed to an audience of 10,000 without a trace of nerves, but also with zero excitement. It’s still that way when I get up on stage – like having a cup of tea with an elderly relative on the adrenalin scale – but it’s a million times better than the paralysing fear of yore. I have a little ritual to manufacture the adrenalin before I go on, but please don’t ask me what because it involves a fantasy about a swimming pool and the shark from Jaws…
Some other helpful things came my way, once I’d cracked the terror. I did a short course in Meissner, an acting technique for being completely present on stage or in front of a camera. I found it quite maddening at first, working in pairs and staying in the moment by objectively observing my partner opposite while holding eye contact: “I see you moving your head slightly to one side and blinking slowly”. These exercises seemed as banal as the EFT script to start with, and then slowly it all began to make sense when we started to perform dialogues on stage. Taking all the attention off myself and putting it on the other actors on stage, being completely present with what they were doing, was the key. “As soon as you put your attention and focus on yourself, you’re lost”, said the trainer.
That turned out to be right, so when emceeing I put all my attention on the audience, and on the performers. It’s a wonderful feeling, a bit like surfing. And because I stay in the moment I can respond spontaneously in the moment: emceeing is never scripted, it all happens organically which suits me because I have quite a butterfly mind and enjoy blurting things out, in the moment, without much of a filter. Because I always wear a big wig, anything I say is always the wig’s fault, not mine.
Nowadays I also perform spoken word, poems and songs which I underscore with a shruti box or a small harmonium… a bit Ivor Cutler. But I particularly enjoy emceeing cabarets in a marquee in a muddy field (mainly on the singing camps I go to) or in a seedy old room above a pub. Because of the hyperfocus on the performers and their acts – and maybe on my big fake hairdo – it seems easier for the audience to be transported and to imagine themselves at Sunday Night at the London Palladium rather than their actual real surroundings. Also, the audience is often captive – I mean, what else is there to do in the dark in a damp field but to head for the cabaret tent? Something else I’ve noticed is that the audiences’ suspension of disbelief often extends to some of the things I say. Because cabaret – well, the way I run it anyway – provides an anarchic space which is held but where anything can happen, some audience members are prone to believing ‘fake news’ or spoof announcements or random factoids about the performers. They will come up to me the following day and ask things like “you said that this morning’s singing programme is being replaced by naked mud wrestling and dry-land synchronised swimming, so what time does it start?” I love it when that happens.
And finally, the mask in the form of a wig. Well, it does have to come off at some point, leaving me with squashed hair and looking like a shadow of my cabaret self: diminished, dull, much shorter and older. It’s a horrible shock all round and people tend to stare at me with a concern in their eyes which says: oh dear, that’s what you really look like is it? So lately I keep it on for the rest of the evening, until I get back to the privacy of my campervan or my bedroom. Because basically I hate to upset anyone, or crush their dreams.