Welcome to the green room

I was recently talking to someone and found myself using the green room as an analogy for a period of waiting. Green rooms came into being in the world of theatre; they are rooms backstage where performers hang out while they’re waiting to perform, sort of like a theatrical lounge room.

I used to be a performer and I have memories of those moments of waiting in a dressing room or green room, made up and costumed and ready to go on stage to do my thing. Depending on what I was performing and under what conditions, those waits in the green room could be marked by feelings of nervousness, excitement, fatigue, impatience, or determination. But every wait in a green room was marked by the sensation of holding oneself in readiness to take action when your turn came.

Lately this has made me consider the green room as an analogy for being in a liminal space. Liminality is a state of transition, of existing between certain stages of action or being. It is a space of becoming rather than starting or ending. Existing in liminality may be exciting, disorientating, unnerving, stressful, or a mixture of all of these. As I write this in late 2021, many people have been existing in a liminal state over the last year or two as Covid and its lockdowns have put our lives on hold, perhaps even sowing permanent seeds of disruption or change. People have been talking about a ‘new normal’ – a post lockdown life – and wondering how that will look for them. We are all waiting to see what will emerge.

I have found it has helped me to manage this odd time by telling myself that I am hanging out in a green room. I have done everything I could to bolster my resilience and to prepare myself for change, all the while not really knowing what that change could look like.

Waiting to go on stage as a performer is a strange experience, not awful but not relaxed either. So a green room is a place of waiting, of being poised to act but not taking action. Of readying yourself, of holding your energies in before projecting them out on stage. Of wondering what the adventure of being on stage is going to be like tonight (no matter how well rehearsed you are or how experienced a performer you are no two performances are the same).

Liminal space is often seen as being an empty space but it needn’t be. Ambiguity, transitioning, becoming are not nothing-spaces; just because you have not arrived at a state of taking positive action, of declaiming, of performing, of holding a stage does not mean that the state of being poised to do that was a place of nothing.

The dressing room and the green room are where performers prepare and wait to go on stage. They are spaces of not just putting on makeup, costumes, and checking props – of getting ready to ‘be’ someone – but they are also spaces of transitioning from what and who you were before you entered the theatre and the character – the life – you are about to inhabit.

In this transitioning, green rooms are liminal spaces and they are full of stuff: emotional, psychological, intuitive, imaginative, sometimes even spiritual (and sometimes superstitious) stuff. It’s in the dressing room and green room where performers shrug off the effects of their day: the row with their lovers, taking a sick cat to the vet, the ever-present anxieties about paying the rent. It’s where they discover some grounding humility: the audiences and critics have loved the show so far but you have to put that out of your mind in case your complacency makes this performance go flat or sloppy.

Green rooms and dressing rooms are where performers come to terms with their stage nerves, their excitement, their flatness and fatigue, and their insecurities. It’s where they temper their expectations and boost their confidence. It’s where they gather their focus and spike their adrenalin.

Part of the portfolio of creative skills that performers must accrue is how to deal with the liminal space of preparing to perform. Perhaps the creative mindset and life-skills that we all have to acquire right now is how to deal with being in a state of liminality while we get ready to move onto the next stage of our lives, even if we don’t know what that will look like.

How can we all come to terms with our past and present experiences, and process and parlay these into a state of becoming, transitioning. Of being poised to step out onto the next stage of our lives, into the light, and then giving it our all?

Author
Meredith Lewis draws on over 30 years’ experience in the arts, community, and university sectors in her work as a mentor, facilitator, and non-fiction writer. She helps people regain trust in their creative identities, as individuals and within groups. Her work focuses on helping people to find their creative identities, regain confidence in their creativity, and embed resilience into their creative practice. 

(Amended) Photo by Sam Moqadam on Unsplash