TEMPE, Arizona MAY 9, 2007—Every musician, vocalist, actor, dancer, and public speaker knows the feeling: the sweating palms, the fluttering stomach, and the hammering heartbeat that accompany a high-stakes performance. But not everyone has known how to combat it—until now. With a new website, Juilliard professor and Olympic sports psychologist Don Greene, Ph.D., offers performing artists an entire arsenal of strategies proven to win auditions.
"What Don teaches is incredibly important," says Jennifer Montone, 28, a former student who is now Principal Horn with the Philadelphia Orchestra. "He showed me how my emotion was a power I could harness, that I could channel into my music so that I really stood out. That's a huge part of winning auditions."
The core strategy Greene teaches is Centering, a technique from martial arts that transforms performance anxiety into potent energy. However, the program available on his website, dongreene.com, features Centering among 10 "success strategies" he's developed and refined in his nine years teaching master classes at The Juilliard School, the New World Symphony, and the New School Music Theater Intensive Program. His strategies address such key performance issues as improving self-confidence, building courage, focusing past distraction, recovering from mistakes, and becoming mentally tough. Performing artists who take Greene's signature profiling tool, the Performance Skills Inventory, receive his recommendations on which strategies will help them most.
To sign up for Dr. Greene's Performance Mastery Training program or to download the audio version of his Centering instructions, go to http://www.dongreene.com.
