I organised a series of workshops in the conservatory I attended as a teenager in Vila do Conde, Portugal.
The initial idea was to have a weekly workshop every week for the minimum duration of 3 or 4 months. Upon realising that this might not be feasible, I decided to shorten the workshop's duration. I agreed with the conservatoire that it would be done within two weeks: three workshops on the first week and two on the second, plus the final concert.
The workshops were designed in the most simple way possible. Firstly, the students were given a questionnaire to evaluate their baseline levels of anxiety.
This questionnaire asked the students to rate, from 0 to 10, their levels of:
- General comfort playing for a public
- Comfort with the idea of making mistakes while performing live.
- Enthusiasm when presented with a performance opportunity.
- How well they can recover after a bad performance.
- Comfort with watching a recording of a bad performance.
- Anxiety when faced with an opportunity to play a familiar piece in a week's time.
The students would all play for one another and write about their experience. They were asked to describe their mental and physical state before, during, and after each performance, as well as a little reflection on why said things happened. That is all the journal asked of them.
All the performances were recorded and given to the students to add a wider angle of retrospection.
With each time they played, I asked them to answer a questionnaire specific to that performance.
This questionnaire was designed as follows:
Please rate, from 0 to 10, your:
- Perception of how successful this performance was.
- Comfort level during the performance.
- Anxiety before starting to play.
- Level of acceptance of mistakes during the performance.
- Level of acceptance of mistakes after the performance.
The sessions lasted around an hour. In the first 30 minutes they performed and listened to each other, the following 15 minutes were spent reflecting on their performances and writing in their journals. At the end of the workshops, I would initiate a discussion on performance with the students, where we would talk about important topics such as perfectionism, the “flow state,” or efficient practice.
With the baseline questionnaire, I intended to evaluate the anxiety levels of each student pre-intervention, whereas the performance-specific questionnaire was intended to track progress, or lack thereof. The reason I chose to come up with my own questions and questionnaires instead of, for example, using Dianna Kenny’s MPA inventory, was because I wanted to simplify their experience as much as possible, given they are still teenagers.
The attendance was voluntary and open to any student from the ages of 15 up to 18. There were in total 10 students who came throughout the 5 workshops. Sadly, half of the students were extremely inconsistent with their presence; therefore, I chose to focus on the students who were committed to being in all, or in most, of the workshops and the concert.
I will refer to these students by the initials of their first names (R, C, O, S, and M) to protect their identity, as they are all underage.
The following section will analyse the data gathered in the workshops.