# The Art of Being in the Background: How to Shine Without Stealing the Spotlight
When your role is to be part of the background-less center stage, more scenery-it can sometimes feel like what you do onstage doesn’t matter all that much. But it’s actually an essential role: These dancers can set the tone,help move the story forward,and give the audience something rich and layered to look at. “Learning how to blend in, how to listen and respond, how to shape the space around you, embody the energy of the group-all of that’s equally as important as standing out,” says Kiyon Ross, associate artistic director of Pacific Northwest Ballet. Mastering these skills can help dancers learn how to build a character and interact with other performers authentically onstage, he adds, so that whether or not you’re in the spotlight, you can give the richest performance possible.
## Stay Engaged (but Contained)
Alberto Blanco, a faculty member at Sarasota Ballet School, suggests thinking about being engaged emotionally but restrained energetically when you’re part of the background. “You can be giving 100 percent to the character, but not overshadowing anybody,” Blanco says. Then, once you are dancing center stage again, you can dial your energy back up to 100 percent.Exactly how big you move, however, depends on what’s happening in the plot. “If someone falls down or there’s this big reveal moment, then maybe those reactions want to be larger and more expressive,” Ross says. “But if it’s a more intimate moment, your movements are a little smaller so as not to detract from what we want the focus to be.”
There are even moments where relative stillness is called for. “for example, in Giselle’s mad scene, there is very minimal movement in the background, as it’s a somber scene where the focus is meant to be fully placed on her,” says Boston Ballet II dancer Natalia Cardona. Yet the dancers never wholly stop moving: “Generally speaking, even dramatic scenes like this are meant to come off as natural and human, so we are never completely frozen,” she says.
don’t get so caught up in your own internal storyline that you forget where you are onstage. Blanco finds younger dancers in particular sometimes lack spatial awareness. “Kids don’t realize that they’re perhaps in a clump or hiding somebody else,” he says. He suggests practicing using your peripheral vision to fill the floor space in class so that it’s second nature once you’re performing.
## Only Connect
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