Stage Presence

Is stage presence learnable? Is the X-factor possible to cultivate? Look at these singers' before and after videos, often within just a few minutes, of working with Robert Caldwell, author of The Performer Prepares: Lighting up an Audience and Becoming an Artist: Interpretation, performing, and a lifetime of singing.

In The Performer Prepares: Lighting up an Audience, author Robert Caldwell guides the reader on an inner adventure, exploring the performer’s inner world. “Like finding rare orchids or towering waterfalls, people have rich, unique qualities inside them to discover. They need to look for them, cultivate them, and weave them into their lives on stage—and stage presence naturally results.

A performer can occupy many states, Caldwell says: The difference is which one he brings on stage. “He might bring fear; he might bring pathos; he might bring humor: Developing, nurturing, enriching, refining the state he brings—all make the difference in stage presence.”

Research by such illuminaries as Herbert Benson from Harvard Medical School points the way. In those studies, Benson had his test subjects cultivate an inner state of a deep religious experience. Next he had them access this chosen state while performing an athletic activity, such as running. By wiring his subjects for many physiological indicators throughout their bodies, before and after the athletic activity, over many months of testing, he showed conclusively that his test subjects underwent profound physiological changes—and their athletic performance transformed profoundly. They didn’t even look like the same person running around the track.

Deep religious experiences are wonderful, Caldwell says, but the same process can guide other states as well, which will result in similar degrees of physiological transformations. These states make up the expressiveness of the performance, ultimately leading to stage presence.

For more information on how to develop and cultivate these states, and work them into a musical performance, see The Performer Prepares: Lighting up an Audience.

For more about information about how to work with the music, building interpretations, and preparations that lend themselves to heightened states for performance, also see Becoming an Artist: Interpretation, performing, and a lifetime of singing.

For further comments about performance anxiety and its role in stage presence, see Is it possible to transform performance anxiety into stage presence?