Congratulations on your debut, Mirko!
I can certainly understand what you say about second-night blahs. I
have experienced them and I daresay others on the list have, too.
The first time I did a role with multiple performances, I was on top
of the world the first night -- truly felt like I'd come home to my
self -- and then felt not-right the second night. It took me a few
jobs before I learned to pace myself on opening night (mainly with
the celebration afterward, not the performing itself).
Another big issue for me was learning to let each performance be its
own thing. Some nights you will feel superhuman, some nights you
will feel blah, some nights you will feel like a great actor who
can't sing, some nights you will feel like a great singer who has no
energy, etc. The temptation can be to try to hit the marks you hit
the night before (or on whatever night felt really good) but it's
important to learn to live and perform in the moment. That's all you
have, really, and your technique is what gets you through. With
experience, you start to amass a toolbox of things you can do to take
the truth of where you are in any given moment and work with it to
produce a performance you can be proud of. It takes time, and it's
something that's always in progress. I only really started to learn
about this when I did a show that ran over several weeks.
A piece of wisdom that I got from the pianist Martin Katz is that
your best by definition only happens once. What we work toward for
the rest of our lives is getting our second-best to a higher and
higher level so that we can be satisfied with that.
Some practical suggestions that have worked for me:
I have a tape that I made of music that always gets my energy up. I
always bring it in my gig bag so I can pop it into my Walkman if I
find myself feeling blah.
I make notecards that remind me of positive experiences in my life
(performing or otherwise) -- things that make me feel more alive when
I think about them. These, too, go in my gig bag.
If I am very tired on a performance day, I take my nap EARLY so that
there is time to recover from it. I go to the theatre early and
spend some time with my tiredness in the theatre. Rather than trying
to paste it over, I make friends with it. This helps me take the
pressure off. Sometimes a low-energy performance (or what feels like
it to me) is effective in other ways that I hadn't anticipated.
And of course on low voice energy days, it's imperative to warm up
slowly, patiently, and with lots of love. Drink a ton of water, and
get some light exercise to get the blood moving.
I hope this helps!
Naomi
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