Some dance students are natural performers, born ready to pour their hearts into their steps before a live audience, but most need a teacher’s insightful coaching along the way. 

Read on for tips from experts on how to help your students translate their hard work in rehearsals to a glittering presentation onstage. 

Ask and Encourage Questions

Marlana Doyle, artistic director of Houston Contemporary Dance Company, often has just one or two weeks with a visiting choreographer to set work on her dancers. “Once the dance is set, our job is to step in and artistically refine the emotion, the softness or the hardness of the work, the dynamics, as well as the technical elements.” To help her dancers layer artistry into their technique, Doyle first does her own homework. She has in-depth conversations with the choreographer to make sure she can faithfully pass along each detail, from the transition steps to the emotional drivers behind a piece. 

In turn, she encourages her dancers to ask questions throughout the process. “There might be something that doesn’t feel great or maybe doesn’t make sense to them.” She would rather address issues and uncertainties head-on than have the problem grow bigger in the dark. A question that a dancer is unclear on during rehearsal has the potential to balloon into a real distraction—for them and the audience—onstage. 

Imbue Steps With Intent

Amit Shah, founder and artistic director of Indian cultural dance school and professional touring company AATMA Performing Arts, does not think of setting steps “first” and having artistry come later. In commercial Indian dance, he says, “there’s always a storyline intertwined.” To train this narrative sense, he will give his students four counts of choreography and have them execute the steps to different music and with different feelings associated—first with a sense of manipulating someone, for example, and then with a feeling of sadness or loss. Even young students who have never experienced heartbreak can tap into a memory of something they love being taken away. In attaching emotional intent to the steps in rehearsal, that emotive quality will come more naturally onstage.  

Oregon Ballet Theatre principal dancer Eva Burton agrees that it’s never too early to start thinking about artistry. She trains not just her muscle memory but also her “emotional memory” by listening repeatedly to a piece’s music before rehearsals even begin. She thinks about the music’s mood and tone and, on repeated listening, allows those feelings to ebb and flow inside her. Then, when she hears the music in the studio and later onstage, where distractions abound, she can zone back in. “It’s almost like a Pavlovian response,” she says. “I can hear the music and it happens naturally. The emotion comes to the surface.”

Preparation Is Key

Doyle has seen young dancers hold back in rehearsal, thinking they will save their energy and full expression for a performance, only to fall over when they’re asking their bodies to do something new in front of a live audience. “Or it’s so large and so big that the next day they’re hurting, and I say, ‘Well, we’re not properly training now, are we?’ ”

Shah, who tours his showstopping Bollywood production Mystic India all over the world, prepares his dancers to adapt to any situation. After all, unlike in rehearsal, you can’t stop the music and start again during a show. A full dress rehearsal with costume and stage makeup is crucial. If he knows that they will be performing in a big space, he books a basketball court to rehearse in so that his dancers always know how to always find their mark. His students even learn how to sew, in case a costume rips. 

The experience and pressure of performing in front of a live audience may be one thing you can never fully replicate in rehearsal. But you can ease your students in. Shah invites increasingly large groups of people to watch rehearsals. First, it’s just the teacher watching. Then he will bring parents in, then have his students perform their pieces in front of the whole school. “Eventually, you build up to a big stage, and now you’ve gone through these motions already and can control adrenaline versus the adrenaline taking over you.”

Cultivate Connection and Play

Sometimes there is a long lead-up to a single performance. Other times require your students to keep things fresh after a premiere when they have gotten comfortable onstage. During a seven-performance run of a very classical piece, Burton’s artistic director gave her a note to approach the piece like a contemporary dancer during the next show. “It just gave me a new vision of this piece that we had performed so many times and rehearsed for so long. It really inspired me to try things that I wouldn’t normally do.” 

Sometimes, your job as a teacher and coach is to remind the students that while they should work hard on their individualized performance in rehearsal, an audience is watching a whole that should be greater than the sum of its parts. “As a group, you need to work on chemistry,” says Shah.“These are the portions where you can breathe together, these are the portions where we need to see a lot more energy for it to read to the audience.”

Ultimately, those moments of connection and play can make a performance better. Burton tells her school and adult students: “Sometimes we forget that it feels so good to move our bodies, because we’re worried about doing the steps correctly or we have this idea of how they should be. If you can just go out there and enjoy what you’re doing, then you can have some magical moments.”