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,” […]

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 […]

The range of emotions dancers feel during performances can run the gambit from calm transcendental elation to complete dread. If you’re the shaking and sweating sort, there’s good news for you: Those performance jitters don’t have to be a bad thing. Dr. John Raglin, a professor of kinesiology at Indiana University whose work examines the […]