The first time I performed in front of people who did not know me — I mean really performed, not showed a trick to a colleague who happened to be in the right place — I was terrified in a way I had not been terrified since childhood.
This surprised me. I was in my late thirties. I had given corporate presentations. I had run workshops for senior executives. I had stood in front of rooms of people and said things into a microphone without significant anxiety. I knew what it felt like to be a competent person standing in front of an audience, and I had assumed that magic performance would feel approximately like that with some added technical demands.
It did not feel anything like that.
What Stage Fright Actually Is
The stage fright that comes with magic performance is qualitatively different from the anxiety of public speaking, and understanding the difference took me some time.
In public speaking, the worst case is that you say something poorly. The content might be wrong, the structure might fail, the delivery might be flat. These are recoverable. Audiences for presentations are somewhat forgiving — they came expecting information, and if the information is reasonable, the delivery can be suboptimal.
In magic performance, the worst case is much more specific: the thing does not work. Not “you explained it poorly” but “the impossible thing you claimed would happen did not happen.” The failure is visible. It is unambiguous. And because the whole promise of a magic performance is that something impossible will occur, a failure to deliver is not just disappointing — it is embarrassing in a distinct way. You claimed something that did not happen.
This creates a specific quality of fear. The dread is not “will they think I am boring” but “will I fail visibly in a way that cannot be recovered.” It is the fear of concrete public failure, which is a different category than the anxiety of mediocre performance.
I felt this very clearly in the period before my first real show. It was not nerves. It was something more physical, more animal. Something that said: this might go very wrong in front of real people.
Rilke’s Line
Rainer Maria Rilke wrote a sentence to the young poet Kappus that I have returned to more times than almost anything else I have read.
“Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, once, with beauty and courage.”
He was making an argument about difficulty and resistance. The things that terrify us, the things that seem to be blocking our path, are not necessarily hostile forces to be defeated. They may be something that requires a different approach — not conquest but engagement, not elimination but transformation.
I read this line during a period when I was preparing for a performance and the stage fright was at its worst. And I sat with it for a while because it demanded sitting with.
The Dragon Reframe
The default response to stage fright is one of three things: suppression, avoidance, or management. You try to get rid of it, or you avoid the situations that produce it, or you develop techniques to reduce it to a tolerable level.
Rilke’s framing suggests a fourth option: treat the fear as information rather than obstacle.
The stage fright that precedes a magic performance is telling you something accurate and important. It is telling you that what you are about to attempt genuinely matters to you. That the stakes are real. That the possibility of failure is real and visible and meaningful.
This is not irrational information. This is correct information.
A person who felt no stage fright before a performance would not be calmer than someone who felt it — they would be less calibrated. They would be underestimating either the difficulty of what they were about to attempt or the extent to which failure would matter.
The fear is the realistic response to a genuinely uncertain situation. The dragon is not lying about being a dragon. It is just waiting to see whether you will engage with it properly.
What Beauty and Courage Actually Mean
Rilke’s “beauty and courage” is not a call to suppress the fear or pretend it does not exist. It is a description of how to be in relation to the fear.
Beauty, in this context, means doing the thing fully — not half-heartedly, not with one foot out the door, not hedging against the possibility of failure by refusing to fully commit. The beautiful approach to a difficult thing is the fully committed approach. You do it completely, which requires both the technical preparation and the willingness to be present in the moment of performance.
Courage means going forward in the presence of the fear rather than after it has been resolved. Not waiting until the stage fright is gone before performing. Performing in the presence of the stage fright, and discovering in the doing that the fear was not the obstacle it appeared to be.
The two things together: full commitment and forward movement despite the fear. That is how you encounter Rilke’s princesses. Not by eliminating the dragons but by engaging with them properly.
What the Fear Reveals
Here is what I have discovered over the years of performance: the stage fright scales with how much I care about what I am about to do.
On the occasions when I have felt very little anxiety before a performance — lighter material, lower stakes, an audience that I am confident is sympathetic — the performance tends to be technically adequate but emotionally thin. I am not fully present because nothing about the situation requires me to be fully present.
On the occasions when the anxiety is high — more demanding material, higher stakes, an audience I genuinely want to reach — the performances tend to be more alive. Not necessarily technically cleaner. The anxiety does not improve my technique. But there is a quality of aliveness in the performance that the low-anxiety performances often lack.
The anxiety, it turns out, is correlated with the things that make a performance matter. And the things that make a performance matter are the things that produce the best outcomes when they work.
The dragon is not separate from the princess. The dragon is what the princess looks like before you engage with it properly.
The Blank Moment
Every performer I have spoken to about this knows the blank moment: the split second, at the beginning of a performance or at a crucial moment within it, when the mind empties and the body knows what is next and the rational mind does not. The technique takes over. The prepared material does what it was trained to do.
The blank moment is terrifying before you have experienced it enough times to trust it. It feels like the gap before catastrophic failure. The mind goes quiet and the fear says: this is when it all falls apart.
But the blank moment, experienced often enough, reveals itself as something different. It is the moment when all the preparation that was done in solitude — in the hotel rooms, in the practice sessions, in the hundred repetitions of each thing — becomes available. The rational mind steps back and the craft steps forward.
The dragon is the blank moment. The princess is the craft that the blank moment reveals.
You cannot get to the princess without going through the dragon. The fear is not separable from the discovery. It is the gateway to it.
Practical Relationship With the Fear
I do not try to eliminate stage fright anymore. I have come to believe that trying to eliminate it is the wrong goal, and that the attempts to eliminate it create a secondary layer of anxiety — the anxiety about feeling anxious — that is more obstructive than the original fear.
What I do instead is try to maintain an honest relationship with it. The fear before a significant performance is information about what the performance means to me. It is calibration data. If it is absent, I should be asking why.
I arrive to significant performances with the fear present and do not spend energy trying to make it go away. I let it be there. I acknowledge it without either dismissing it or being consumed by it. And when the performance begins, I find that the doing of the thing tends to be more accessible than the anticipation of the thing.
This is what Rilke meant, I think. The dragon is not defeated by confronting it with superior force. It is transformed by engaging with it with beauty and courage — by showing up fully and moving forward despite the fear.
The stage fright I feel before a performance that matters is not my enemy. It is, in Rilke’s sense, waiting to see what I will do.
I try to give it an answer worth waiting for.