At the Celebration of Student Writing, there was one project that really stood out to me. This project was called “Effective Strategies for Performance Anxiety.” As a singer, I have to perform in front of people quite often, but I still am not fully comfortable with it. Early today I performed and I tried to compare what happened to me before the performance and while I was on stage. This research project belonged to Yujin Woo, a graduate student studying piano performance. Yujin’s project was presented as a poster and she was exploring performance anxiety and looking for a way to help ease those pressures. This was a cool topic that I could easily relate to, so Yujin and I had a long talk about music, performing, and what happens to her when she plays the piano in recitals or juries. She said that the most common thing is that her hands sweat, her knees shake, and her arms get stiff. Her research concluded that this is typical for performers, but some may differ. When I performed today, my hands didn’t circulate blood like they normally do, my knees shook, and my arms got stiff. Through surveys around the music building, although I had never seen the survey or Yujin before, she compiled what kinds of anxiety performers feel and causes to why they feel anxious about performing. The biggest finding showed that performers don’t feel adequate to perform their music, making them feel nervous and tense. When I was telling her about my performance anxiety today, she was telling me that I am a great musician and that there is no need to be anxious when there is beautiful music to be sung. This struck me as surprising because although I have heard that I should be focusing on the great music, this praise and motivation was coming from someone I had met 5 minutes prior. Yujin also told me about the Alexander technique. The Alexander technique teaches people to get rid of muscle tension, which in music, will allow the musician to focus on the music and not how tense and anxious they are. Yujin had a couple diagrams on her board about what stretches help her as a pianist and I will be giving them a try since I need to perform a piano jury at the end of the semester for the piano professors. This is a cool way to calm the nerves that I didn’t know about before the CSW, and I will be sure to give it a try for when I have to sing as well. One of the last things that I noticed was a chart about the amount of time someone practiced their music and how anxious they were when they performed. Although the people who practice more are less anxious, they still show signs of anxiety in their performance like people who practice less. It was cool to see her responses from her survey put into graphs and charts in her CSW project.
The CSW is a massive gathering of people with a wide variety of research interests. Poster boards acted as the walls in the maze that was the student center ballroom. Every person who participated in the CSW was genuinely interested in their research and was more than happy to explain and show off their findings. It was a great experience and it showed how diverse our ideas are at this university. Some research topics were more attractive than others, but it still sparked interest in those viewing their poster longer than two seconds. It was a cool experience to see so many topics explored, even if the temperature wasn’t as cool.