Performance and Creative Wellness
Performance Wellness Workshops for Artists and Creatives
Both workshops below are currently in development. Contact Erica to discuss timing, availability, or bringing custom training to your organization.
The Problem
The creative industry has a burnout problem. And it’s not individual failure.
It’s a culture.
Long hours, emotional intensity, financial instability, the constant vulnerability of putting your work in front of people. These aren’t edge cases. They’re the job. And most training programs never once teach you how to survive them.
That’s what these workshops are for.
Performance wellness training gives artists, actors, musicians, dancers, directors, and other creative professionals the nervous system tools to sustain creative work, not just get through the next production, but actually keep doing this over a lifetime.
This isn’t generic wellness content with an arts theme attached. It’s training built around what creative work actually asks of your body.
Your nervous system doesn’t know the difference between a character’s grief and your own.
When you spend hours embodying rage or terror or heartbreak, or holding space for others doing that work, your system is responding in real time. Without recovery practices built for that reality, what accumulates isn’t just tiredness. It’s chronic dysregulation. Compassion fatigue. The thing people call burnout that is really your system saying: I cannot keep doing this without more support.
Auditions, tech weeks, opening nights, workshopping vulnerable new material: these all activate your nervous system’s threat response. Some activation helps you perform. Too much and you shut down, panic, or go flat. Performance wellness training builds the capacity to regulate that activation so you can show up present and grounded instead of running on adrenaline and hoping it holds.
And the financial piece matters too. Inconsistent income, no benefits, project-by-project employment creates a low-level chronic stress most artists absorb and normalize. Sustainable creative practice has to account for all of it.
Nervous system education first. Then it gets practical.
Every workshop starts with nervous system education: polyvagal theory in plain language, what regulation actually means, what’s happening physiologically when the work gets hard.
Somatic regulation techniques
Practices you can actually use before a performance, in the middle of tech week, backstage, at home. Breathwork, grounding, movement-based tension release, orienting practices.
De-roling and transition practices
For performers who embody characters or emotional states. You need reliable ways to leave the work at work. These exist. We practice them.
Boundaries and sustainable scheduling
Knowing when to turn down work that will cost more than it pays, protecting recovery time, communicating your limits without apologizing for them, and cultivating a process that can actually last.
Two ways in.
Self-Care in Theatre
Originally developed as a university curriculum, now adapted for professional companies, independent artists, and anyone who has ever white-knuckled their way through tech week.
Covers physical care during intensive rehearsal, working with perfectionism and performance anxiety, navigating power dynamics inside theatre communities, building safer working environments, and reconnecting to the meaning that brought you to this work in the first place.
You leave with a digital resource packet and a personalized self-care framework built around your actual practice and nervous system, not a template.
Brainspotting for Performance
Brainspotting is an evidence-based neurobiological approach that uses focused attention and eye position to process what’s getting in the way: perfectionism, performance blocks, the anxiety that lives in your body before you even walk through the door.
In a group setting, I teach how Brainspotting works and why it matters for creative work. Then we use it: finding a resource spot to anchor in safety, finding a character or performance spot, working the material, and de-roling cleanly back to self.
Actors bring scenes or monologues. What emerges is often surprising, and usually more useful than a year of talking about the same block.
Anyone whose work asks them to feel a lot.
Actors at any stage, student to seasoned professional. Dancers, musicians, writers, directors, choreographers, stage managers, designers. Anyone whose work asks them to feel a lot, hold a lot, or show up for others’ creative processes while managing their own.
Theatre educators who want to integrate wellness into their teaching. Creative leaders who want to build cultures that don’t quietly destroy the people in them.
If you’ve ever finished a run and felt like you needed a month to recover from yourself, this is for you.
However it fits your schedule.
Intensives
Half-day or full-day.
Multi-session series
Typically four to eight sessions.
Short formats
One-hour rehearsal workshops, guest workshops for university classes, lunch-and-learns for theatre companies.
Conferences
Conference presentations and panels.
Currently offered virtually, with in-person options available depending on location and scope.
Bring this to your organization.
Organizational training is available for theatre companies, dance companies, conservatories, arts nonprofits, and creative institutions. We can work on scheduling practices, communication protocols, trauma-informed production approaches, and the harder cultural work of building an organization that actually structures for artist wellbeing, not just talks about it.
Sliding scale available.
Individual workshop fees vary by length and format. Financial instability is common in the arts and it shouldn’t be a barrier to this work.
Organizational training is scoped and priced based on your needs. If budget is a constraint, reach out anyway.