female dancer wearing all black in coupe hinging back

What You Should Know About Dancing With Generalized Anxiety Disorder

Before Hannah Emory was diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), she says that, despite her passion for dance, she felt like she just wasn’t cut out for it. After receiving her diagnosis and finding treatment that worked for her, Emory has connected with her dancing in a new way, and is now pursuing a dance degree at the University of Limerick in Ireland, in addition to performing with Ohr Dance Company and developing her own choreographic projects.

What Can You Do to Control Pre-Performance Nightmares?

Before every performance, Charlotte Ballet dancer Raven Barkley follows a preshow ritual to help manage her nerves: She stretches, reviews choreography, meditates and gets in the zone. However, preshow nerves aren’t always confined to waking hours. “I once had a dream that I was going to forget my choreography and lose where I was onstage,” […]

3 Tactile Self-Care Techniques to Help Manage Difficult Emotions

Most of the popular self-care practices we think of are passive: meditation, taking a bath, zoning out watching Netflix. But according to psychotherapist and former Royal Ballet dancer Terry Hyde, a more active, tactile approach can feel more natural for dancers. “What you see in rehearsals is a lot of dancers hugging and holding each […]

5 Self-Soothing Exercises You Can Do to Calm Your Anxiety

Physical stillness can be one of the hardest things to master in dance. But stillness in the bigger sense—like when your career and life are on hold—goes against every dancers’ natural instincts. “Dancers are less comfortable with stillness and change than most,” says TaraMarie Perri, founder and director of Perri Institute for Mind and Body […]

3 Ways Dancers Can Harness the Power of Dance/Movement Therapy

As dancers, we are experts on our bodies. We can identify the tiniest amount of tightness in a hip flexor or predict a head cold when our balance is off. But are we really in-tune with what our bodies are telling us when it comes to managing the mental challenges of performance? The growing field […]

How Hypnotherapy Saved My Dance Career

I am a dancer in a successful West End show and a year ago I nearly quit. My anxiety came suddenly and without warning. We were in the middle of a stressful cast change and tensions were high as everyone wanted to prove their value to the production. I felt as though someone flipped a […]

Feeling Crazy Stressed? Here Are 10 Ways to Find Your Chill

Along with the rewards of a dance career come numerous sources of stress, from the demands of a busy schedule to challenges in the studio. “We want to be perfect,” says Shuaib Elhassan, a dancer with Alonzo King LINES Ballet, “and we want to reach for the best we can do.” While occasional acute stress—like […]