My 5 Tips To Improve Stage Presence

Stage Presence is one of my favorite topics and one that I have studied a lot during all my years of passionate love for Oriental Dance. I have studied the stage presence of top dancers live on stage and structured the results so I could improve on myself as a dancer and pass that knowledge to my students.

So here go 5 tips of mine that I teach to all my students, so they are able to fill the stage and the audience with their energy.

1. Use the whole stage, all its corners, but most importantly, use the whole FRONT OF THE STAGE where you can be really close to the audience. A lot of dancers don’t use the front corners of the stage but it’s essential for deep communication and interaction with the audience and for feeling’s expression. Next time you perform on stage, try to go to the front right and left, the furthest you can, until you have no more space.

2. Feel the music and let yourself go. So that the audience feels your energy, you need to feel it in yourself, deep in you, in your organs, and to project that energy / feeling to the audience. The only way you can do this is through intentional breathing and conection to the floor. You need first to push against the floor so you can grow (“Root to Rise”) and your energy grows within you, and then you need to let it go expanding your chest and arms towards the audience so to give them that energy. My advice to you to improve on this matter is to work on inverse camel: try to do it with your whole body, breathing deep, pushing the floor through the use of your legs and canalizing that energy through your chest and arms and out of yourself.

3. Facial Expression is key for an outstanding stage presence. I always tell my students: “Dance with your face”. When we are dancing, everything dances, and so must our face: head position, eyebrows, mouth. Think of all the facial expressions you do during the day to express different feelings, you can do the same in dancing. If you know what message you want to pass in some part of the music and if you are conscient that you also dance with your face, then your expressiveness will easily come to live, just like when you are talking with a person.

4. Related to facial expression, there is a key feature for stage presence: the eyes, or better say, the look. Looking at the audience must be intentional, like your eyes alone are passing a message to the audience. For that you need to put energy in your eyes as well, like if you wanted to penetrate the audience with your eyes. Besides, you should look at every part of the audience, making everyone there feel you are dancing to them individually. However, be careful so you are not always changing your gaze direction (it shows lack of self-confidence, just like staring at the floor or the horizon where there is no audience). Your gaze switch should be intentional, part of the dance: some parts of the music you should hold your stare intentionally at the audience only stopping when the music asks for it.

5. Finally, another way of having great stage presence and great communication with the audience, is, of course, a creative, intentional and expressive use of arms and hands. When we speak, our arms and hands they are never still, they help us express ourselves, so the same happens when we are dancing. The more we use our arms and hands towards the audience using different positions and energies, the more the audience will feel our energy and understand our message.

Hope these tips help you feel more and give more on stage, like they have helped me and my students.