No one knows more about how to be in the spotlight than a performer. The artist spends their entire life under the microscope of society magnified in the spotlight, constantly staring down every subtlety of movement, sound, light, and color - sculpting themselves into the perfect imperfection and reflection of life in motion. Performers reflect the past, present and future. For this reason, everyone can take a piece of the performer’s playbook to attract the attention, they want, need, and deserve.
Whether you are looking to be more in touch with how you project yourself to others; how to stand out in a crowd or steps you can take to embellish the attention you already receive, here are 5 principles performers use to succeed and remain in the spotlight.
- Give Face – AKA strike a pose, with your face. Your face has a life of its own. The first thing a person encounters is your face. Having an awareness of your face and how you project with your expression is everything and will ultimately dictate what type of people and what type of attention you will attract. The best example of this is Madonna’s Vogue video. The video is all about striking a pose and divas like Greta Garbo, Marilyn Monroe and Bette Davis who were known as legendary divas in their day. What makes these women stand out is that they accentuated their beauty. While beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, women like Garbo, Monroe and Davis were generally appealing across the board because they used their attitude and expressions to capture our attention. There is no way that an actress/performer can be that successful without having an awareness and command of how to use their presence to get attention. Actors and dancers constantly practice delivery of their art in the mirror.
Start looking at yourself in the mirror and develop a rapport with your physicality. Watch videos of yourself and study the way you move, your posture, most importantly your facial expressions. Would you want to pay attention to you? Study how people you admire carry themselves. Ask for feedback from friends that you know will be honest with you. Pay attention to people’s first impression of you. Often after you have known someone for a little while, they will remark on how they thought you would be a certain way and were surprised you were nothing like they pictured you to be or vice versa. This type of feedback can leave clues about how to upgrade your presence, how you project yourself to others and how to attract the attention you would like to receive. Become a master of using your body language and facial expressions and take command of your presence so you can attract more of the attention you seek.
- Take It Apart To Put It Together – Performers refer to this as breaking it down. Artists are their own teachers. In essence, an artist will take things apart over and over again to break them down and study the best sequences that are most effective to communicate the message they want to convey. Teachers do this for their students. They take a complex problem and simplify it so the student can digest it. A piece of art must make sense and must be digestible for its audience in order for the audience to respond to it and be affected by it. That is why it is so important for the artist to be in touch with their own physicality because they need to be able to master their tool whether it’s their bodies, voice, paint brush or instrument to clearly convey their message to their audience effectively. The hours an artist takes to deconstruct and reconstruct their art can be numerous. Once it is finished, performed, and seasoned, a great performer will make it look so effortless that the audience couldn’t conceive how much time and energy was put in to create the masterpiece.
Enjoy the art of the breakdown in your everyday life by taking a simple task and rearranging it to find new ways to do things. You may already naturally be doing this, for example, when you rearrange your furniture in a different way that looks even better than it looked before. Variety is the spice of life so take things apart and put them back together in a different way. Play around and have fun. Acting outside of your norm will draw new types of people and attention to you.
- Practice Makes Perfect – O-M-G! Performers practice SO much to master their craft. Most professional performers practice for 7 hours a day! Consider how competitive it is to be a top artist. There is no way around practicing if that is the goal. The arts are extremely competitive. As an artist, you must not only have a love and passion for what you do, but you must be dedicated to practicing every day. While most professionals go on a job interview once every five years, an actor and dancer may go on several auditions a week and face numerous rejections. If you want to succeed in the arts, you must be relentless and tenacious and you must consistently practice your craft. What makes it doable for the artist is that this isn’t just a job for them, their art is their life.
The takeaway here is that if you practice and repeat and continue to improve, people will start taking notice, eyebrows will be raised, single takes will turn to double takes and people’s attention will be piqued.
- No Matter What Happens Keep Going – Keep going is synonymous with performance. There is no way you will see a performer make a mistake on stage and just run off or stop the performance. Think of your life as a stage and keep going! You might have heard the phrase, “don’t give up,” that’s nice and all too often commonly overused. Instead of thinking of your life as several actions, consider your life as a movie or a performance. There is a different emotion attached to viewing your life as a performance instead of the drab thought of the everyday monotony - going in and out like a turnstile.
When a performer goes on stage, each performance is like a brand-new adventure. The performer realizes that this audience has never viewed or heard what they are about to present. It is not only their discipline, dedication, and love of what they do that keeps them going, it is the audience they are serving and the accolades they will receive once they complete a song or a dance. They might even receive a standing ovation at the end of the show. These are the key elements that drive them to keep going. In this case, it is the reverse of the last principle, in that they receive an instant positive gratification that other professionals don’t. You may not get the standing ovation at the end of each workday, like the performer but ultimately if you demonstrate the keep going tenacity and consider your performance like a show, you will approach your tasks with more enthusiasm and receive attention and recognition for doing so. You will also simultaneously build a record of experience and create better options for yourself. Recognition is a wonderful form of attention.
- Don’t Bring Attention to Your Mishaps – There is a difference between being responsible and owning your mistakes and putting trite mishaps on blast. One is a question of integrity; the other is a lack of self-worth and bashing yourself. Performers are professionals at covering sh*t up! We tell no lies as there is truth in art, however, we do not highlight our mishaps as performers. If part of our costume comes off, we smile bigger and subtly kick it to the side so no one can tell. We do not draw attention to it. If we forget a note or a line; we improvise. A performer will be damned if you are going to notice any slips or minor misses during a performance. Being able to recover and cover these trite mistakes is part of our training. People can be their own worst enemies sometimes, pointing out their flaws and errors without a thought of the poor attention this can bring them. This does not serve you and creates a cesspool of opportunity for people to pick up where you left off, pinpointing everything that is wrong with you. We all have imperfections and flaws the point is to disguise them, not highlight them. Consider thinking of it as dressing to accentuate your best features while downplaying your worse ones.
With these 5 Performer Principles, you are on your way to getting the attention you deserve, elevating your vibration and drawing the attention you want to receive. Whether you struggle to get in the spotlight, are looking to maintain the spotlight or can’t get enough of the spotlight, 46foryounger Merch works on presenting you with an array of bold merch to help you stand out. If you would like to receive more, In the Know Blogs, promos and sales, subscribe to 46foryounger.
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