Sociological and Historical Perspectives — Weekly Assignment #13
April 14, 2025
Performance Anxiety: Reflecting with Kammy
There’s a stage in my classroom. Actually, the stage takes up about a third of my space: shiny hardwood floor, canvas flats, full lights and sound, thick royal blue curtains. It’s beautiful, and it’s terrifying. At least, it was terrifying to Kammy.
When I met Kammy, she was in first grade. Before I even really knew her, I had heard from multiple colleagues that she had severe stage fright. Kammy’s first performance was “Holiday K,” a traditional kindergarten concert with five songs, simple movements, and a few memorized lines. Kammy recalls that for this particular show, she was dressed as a Christmas zombie, but the audience didn’t have much of a chance to enjoy her costume; she spent the entire performance either hiding behind a classmate or sitting backstage. Her clearest memory of the event is that she had to tap a certain key on the piano, ostensibly for a starting pitch. This responsibility petrified her: “I was so afraid of, ‘what if I tap the wrong note?’”
Kammy’s second kindergarten show, she says, was more of the same. She spent most of that performance backstage. “My heart was racing,” she remembers. This racing heart was likely a somatic manifestation of cognitive anxiety. In general, Kammy says, she was afraid to forget things: lines, songs, dance moves, or other aspects of a performance. She was afraid that if she forgot something, she wouldn’t know what to do. Her anxiety wasn’t connected to audience perception, at least on the surface. “I was just scared,” she admits. Despite not being fully conscious or rational, her fear consumed her experiences onstage and prevented her from forming any positive associations with performance.
When I arrived at my current school, there was a precedent for polished shows. Every music program performance was either a short boxed musical—lines, songs, choreography, and costumes—or a concert in which students sang or played instruments all together, one song at a time, with a teacher at the front. I have continued with the tradition of musicals, but I quickly pivoted the other performances away from stand-and-sing concerts and towards more flexible, casual “showcases.” In my program, a showcase-style performance is whatever a given class needs it to be. We share what we’ve been working on in our Orff Schulwerk-based music classes, from folk dances and barred instrument pieces to canons and creative movement. Students have a great deal of agency and responsibility in these showcases. They plan out the forms of many pieces, make suggestions about show flow, give each other whispered reminders on and offstage, and move props and instruments around as needed. Thanks to the low-stress format of the showcase, these roles give students ownership over their performance rather than simply raising the stakes. Before every show, my students and I chant, “This show rocks, and I helped make it!” It’s the truth: in my shows we are collaborators, and students support each other and treat themselves with love.
For Kammy, things turned around last year. She had more opportunities to be onstage. She joined 4-H, where she learned to present her interests to an audience, and through which she has received multiple awards. Perhaps most importantly, she started therapy, which she credits as being the driving force behind her growing comfort with performance. At her fall showcase in first grade, she chose to present a short original song, but was unable to go through with it in the morning performance; still, she came back onstage to continue with the show shortly after, and she played her song successfully in the evening show. It was the spring musical about outer space that Kammy marks as the first time a performance really felt good to her. I also noticed a difference in Kammy in the moments before this performance, in that she wasn’t spiraling: she was running. She ran around the classroom and the green room, chattering loudly the whole time. She was experiencing the same nervous system arousal as she had when her heart raced during the kindergarten show, but this time, the association was positive rather than negative. She wasn’t anxious; she was excited out of her mind.
As I write this, Kammy has a show in two days. It’s a musical about environmentalism. She is the only second grader in this show responsible for a prop—not because I’m trying to reward her, but because she’s trustworthy, the best fit for the job. She stands in the front row downstage left, where she can sing and dance her heart out to an eager audience, but can also pause and take an unnoticed deep breath if she needs to. “I’m not scared,” she says of her upcoming performance. She’s confident and capable, and she knows it. Her only concern is that her youngest brother might attend the morning show and distract her.
I have a stage in my classroom, and stage fright naturally comes with it. I have never put on a performance that at least one student wasn’t nervous about. Kammy’s journey has shown me that performance anxiety can be overwhelming and debilitating, but also that it can be overcome, making the performances that follow all the more thrilling for that child. It is now a stated goal of my curriculum that my students learn to be comfortable onstage, no matter the time it takes. Kammy has two pieces of advice for people with performance anxiety, tips that I will pass along to students for years to come—cognitive therapy and exposure. Or, in her words: “Talk about it more! And get more experience, and just get it over with.”
(This reflection rocks, and Kammy helped make it. Thanks, Kammy!)