After 13 years away, the lure of the lights has grabbed me again.

Why Skydive When You Can Perform on Stage?

By Mollie Fager, 4-24-06

It’s opening night for Danelle Helander’s new show, “Yams: A Chance Encounter” at The Dairy Center for the Arts in Boulder, Colorado. I am so pumped with adrenaline that the director has serious fears I’m going to rocket out of the atmosphere before the show even starts. You see it’s been 13 years since I’ve been in front of an audience and now here I am ready to go out and strut my stuff in front of peers, colleagues, board members and strangers alike. Did I have a momentary lapse of reason when I said yes to being in this show? A long time ago I would have had the confidence and routine of regular performing to carry me. The normal pre-performance jitters only sharpened my performance. However this time I am more than out of shape for dancing, I can barely memorize my own cell phone number much less a monologue and I’m performing in front of a gaggle of professional artists, critics and directors who know me only as an all-business, occasionally goofy, but mostly serious and stressed arts administrator. For the opening scene I’m wearing an orange and brown hippy skirt, my hair is in a sprout-like topknot and I’m banging on a drum chanting “yam, yam, yam not a yam, not a yam”. The plot is way too off the charts to detail here but let’s just say it revolves around a fateful encounter with another shopper while buying yams at a grocery store.

At some point I did imagine myself throwing up on stage or suffering from an anxiety-induced heart attack, but I got through it. In fact, at one point in the evening I realized I was having a blast. It all came rushing back to me why performing is so addictive and why artists of all talent abilities continue to perform year after year despite the long rehearsal hours, funky personalities and lack of pay. In a few short months you spend more time with a group of people than your immediate family (or it seems that way), you creatively express yourself—a luxury that many people never experience, you fight, love and bond with your cast and lastly you offer to the world what you’ve worked so hard for. The energy that goes with performing is like no other. The more your audience engages with you, laughs at jokes, cries at the right moment then the more the energy builds. I had forgotten what a rush it was.

I’m uncertain whether I will do it again. My own internal critic got much more in the way than she did when I was 20 years old and full of myself. I worried a lot this time around about what others might be thinking. I wasn’t sure if I would be “on” or not and I stressed incessantly about making mistakes. However, I walked away believing that all my worrying was for nothing. In the end I tried my best, pulled off a performance I felt good about and didn’t pretend to be anything other than what I was. I felt lucky and grateful to be given the opportunity to perform again and I think it’s in the cards for me to keep doing it. Not as a dancer and actress (I’ll spare the Boulder community from that scenario) but as a writer. I’ve been trying my hand at poetry which has it’s own performance angle during a public reading. Performing in the Helander show was just the spark I needed to light the fire on my own creative endeavors. So for all the artists out there, I’m holding my lighter up for you, myself & the audience yelling one more time!

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