How to Maintain Stage Presence During A Performance

As a performer, there is nothing more exhilarating than stepping on the stage! Whetherit’s your first time or your one-hundredth time, facing the audience from the stage and getting ready to perform can put you through a rollercoaster of emotions. But most importantly, it puts you in an adrenaline rush that makes you want to go out there, face your audience and show off your hard work or just perform your heart out!

But despite that, not everyone can channel their adrenaline rush in a way that shows in that performance and reaches their audience – and this is what sets a musician apart from a performer. You can be a very talented musician, but you can’t be a good performer without the right stage presence!

Numerous good singers and musicians do great on albums and on the internet, but when it comes to live performances, they cannot get their audience hooked. Despite their talent, they lack keeping their audience entertained and engaged, and that’s what becomes the biggest loss for them.

If you are also a performer looking to keep your audience hooked, you will have to learn the trick to maintaining stage presence. Not sure what it really is and how this works? Don’t worry – here are four stage presence tips to help you out!

What is Stage Presence?

Stage presence is basically the charisma or the charms that any performer – be it a theater actor or a musician possesses, which help them draw in their audience and command their full attention. Some people call it the “star power” or the “X-factor,” but it’s really just your behavior, your confidence, and the appeal of your personality that you bring to the stage and convey to your audience that they can’t help but give you their undivided attention.

Stage presence is an underrated factor that can help turn a good performance into a great performance. Always remember, as a musician, how you make your audience feel is just as important as how you sound!

4 Stage Presence Tips

Now that you know what stage presence really is, it’s time to learn how to maintain that presence, so you can keep your audience hooked to your performance throughout the show. Here are a few tips to help you with it.

1. Find What Makes You Unique and Embrace It

This is one of the most important lessons for any performer – whether you are a singer or an actor, you need to find your own unique style, embrace it and bring it to the stage. We are all quirky human beings; not one of us is exactly the same as the other – and this is what you need to work on when you are performing. Because just like our facial features, our voice, and our behavior, our performing styles are also unique, and you need to grasp that uniqueness to give your audience something to remember you from.

If you have ever been to a concert, you will realize that if your favorite singer did what everyone else was doing, and then their performance had nothing special to bring to the table. Hence, as a performer, find what makes you unique and amplify it when you are on the stage. Copying another artist’s style is going to take you nowhere.

2. Keep the Energy Going

Just like when you step on the stage, you feel the adrenaline rush coming. Similarly, your audience is also well pumped up to see you – and that is the energy they want to keep going throughout the show. However, it’s humanly impossible to be energized at all times, and you will need to take extremely necessary breaks in between. It could be to take a sip from your water bottle or to just rest your feet after standing for so long – but you need to make those breaks count.

Use those breaks well, and don’t let the energy down. The more silence you let slip during your show, the more energy your audience will keep losing – and you don’t want that! For a killer show, you need to make full use of those bouts of pauses and turn it into another fun segment of your show – if you let it stay silent, it will break your entire show’s energy flow and will even make it hard for you to pick the show from there again.

3. Make Use of the Whole Stage

At an event with a large audience, you will need a large stage, too. But, you cannot appear as a tiny statue on that stage. Use your stage and its size to your advantage rather than making it a weak point for you. If you send your whole shoe behind the microphone or stand in one corner, you will bore the audience. Your audience has paid for a lot more than just listening to you sing – they can do that on their phones. What they want from your performance is an overall experience, and you have to make your show entrancing that way.

And one way to do that is to make use of the stage. Don’t forget, at a large venue, there is an audience surrounding your stage from every side, and you have to connect to each of them present over there. And you can only do that if you move around the stage and engage with every side of the seating arrangement. However, this can be a little difficult if you have an instrument holding you back, for example, the drums – in that case, get your other band members to move about the stage. And if you are alone, make sure that you design the stage and show so that it all seems utilized.

4. Don’t Take Your Outfit Lightly

We know there are many things to look after before starting your performance, so many artists don’t pay much attention to their outfits. This makes total sense because e they usually have designers for this performance aspect. Moreover, some even believe that the audience is there to listen to them, so whatever they wear shouldn’t be a problem. But that’s not true at all! Your outfit actually completes your performance.

If you want to make an impact on your audience, you have to be wearing the right outfit to do. Do you see how so many people remember some of the world’s most iconic artists and musicians by what they wore on their most hit shows? That’s because their outfits were also memorable – more than that, their outfits played a key role in making their shows hit. Go grand on your outfit, make it relevant to your performance, our audience, and your venue but also let your outfit showcase your personality and style to give your audience something extra to remember.

Learn to Maintain Stage Presence

If you think becoming a musician is hard, you should know that marinating the stage presence to become a successful performer is the real challenge. As an artist, you need to go the extra mile if you want to really make an impact in the industry, and that’s only possible if you give it your all when you are on the stage. Learn more about stage presence and how to maintain it at The Young Musician Music Institute (TYMMI), a music school at Al Raha Mall & Al Wahda Mall, Abu Dhabi, UAE.