Ended the first week of the May Social Sprint and watched a group of badass performers trained to entertain audiences use those skills to build their social media. It was, predictably, wonderful.

These costumes for Midsummer are my absolute favorite. Thats all. Sorry not sorry for the millions of photos I’m about to post of them.

Midsummer is my last premiere this season and that also means…it’s my last premiere as a fest singer. New beginnings mean endings…and I have thoughts about it.

Some uncooked thoughts have been living in my head this week about the fallacy of potential - who sees it in us, what they do with it, what we do with ourselves while we’re waiting to ‘become’

The podcast is up- give it a listen and drop a comment with your thoughts

XOXO, Martha

Rehearsal Notes is a one-woman show completely supported by you- the audience. If you love it, consider being a paid subscriber

Let’s start with where you actually are right now. What’s the week been like?

Honestly? A blur. We are somewhere around week five of A Midsummer Night’s Dream rehearsals, and this is, without question, the hardest week of any production process. You’ve staged the whole thing - we’ve had the whole opera blocked for about a week now - and you’re just going back in and putting the details on. Which sounds civilized, but it’s actually the most exhausting part.

Everyone’s tired. You know what you’re supposed to be doing, but your body hasn’t fully caught up yet. There’s a lot of dancing in this show, so it’s a lot of: okay, we know the choreography, we just need the reps. Let the human failures happen, clean them up, polish. And we’re also sharing the stage with the Rosenkavalier mounting — which, yes, is as chaotic as it sounds.

You mentioned you haven’t been writing as much as you’d like. Does that bother you?

Yes and no. When I’m deep in the artistic process — really enmeshed in it with my colleagues in the rehearsal room — something has to give. Writing is the thing that gives. But I made myself a promise with Rehearsal Notes, so here I am on a Friday. Better late than never.

So: visibility. It’s been on your mind. Why now?

Partly because I’m preparing for the May Social Sprint — the second one I’ve ever hosted, starting this Monday — and as I go back through all the materials, the topic of visibility just keeps surfacing. But it’s also been alive for me in the rehearsal room.

Here’s the thing that I always find so interesting: the feeling of visibility changes depending on where you are in the artistic process. How much vulnerability you have the capacity for — how exposed you’re willing to be — shifts depending on whether you’re in week one or week five, whether the piece is new or familiar, whether you trust the room or not. That’s fascinating to me.

And performers don’t only deal with visibility in the obvious way — walking on stage. In the rehearsal process, your failures and your flaws are visible constantly. That’s the deal. You show up and you’re not finished yet, and everyone can see that.

You said something interesting — that opera singers in particular walk a specific line of visibility. What did you mean?

I called it being invisibly visible — which I think is unique to our world. We’re expected to fit a certain mold within the industry, while simultaneously constantly breaking out of it, surprising people, giving them a unique experience — but making it palatable. Especially in opera. You have to be simultaneously legible and surprising. BOth safe and edgy.

And I said something I genuinely believe: I think women are particularly well-equipped for this. We’ve been walking this exact line — be acceptable and be exceptional, be visible and know your place — most of our lives. It’s exhausting, but it’s also a skill. A finely-honed, deeply-practiced skill.

Let’s talk about the specific hang-ups people have around online visibility. What are you hearing?

The one that comes up the most — and I’ve collected a lot of these, I kind of informally track the fears people share with me — is the idea that sharing behind-the-scenes content, sharing your process, posting about the making of a performance rather than just the polished result, somehow erodes the magic.

Someone will say to me: “If you show people everything that goes into building an opera, they’ll lose the wonder of it.” And I actually think they are completely, fundamentally wrong.

When you bring people behind the scenes — when you show them what goes into learning an aria, building a technique, navigating a career, what a rehearsal room actually looks like — you’re not breaking the spell. You’re creating multiple access points for connection. Someone connects with you on a vocal technique level. Someone else connects on a mindset level. Someone else just connects with you as a human who’s trying really hard at something they love. You’re not replacing the live experience. You’re building the audience that will want to have it.

There’s also the deeper block, isn’t there? The one that’s less about strategy.

Yes. The visibility wound. Which I think is deeply intertwined with performance anxiety and perfectionism.

For me personally — and I’m being real here — it shows up as this: I don’t want to send my recordings to that agent. I don’t want to post my singing online. I don’t want to share my story publicly. Because how dare I? I haven’t hit X, Y, Z milestones yet.

Which is, when you look at it clearly, a way of saying: I need to have already succeeded before I’m allowed to be seen trying.

And underneath that, if I’m really honest, is something that goes even deeper. This sense that if I don’t meet a certain standard of excellence — not just for myself, but for the imagined external audience in my head — then I am not good enough to be loved. And if I lose connection to my community, I will die in isolation. That’s what my nervous system is actually telling me. Sounds dramatic…but mistake is not realizing how deep these aspects of performing can run.

And this is actually what performance anxiety really is, at its core. It’s not just nerves before a show. It goes all the way down to your sense of survival. And those same insecurities absolutely come with you when you decide whether or not to build an online presence.

So how do you work with that? What’s actually helped you?

Skill-building. I know that sounds almost too practical, but for me, the antidote to fear has always been competence. When I’m anxious about performing, I go work on my German diction, my technique, my preparation — because at the end of the day, my nervous system can go: okay. You’ve done the work. You actually are capable of this. It doesn’t eliminate the vulnerability, but it gives me something to stand on.

And it’s been exactly the same with social media. The more I’ve actually learned about how Instagram works — strategy, what performs well, why things fail — the less I run straight to my insecurities when something doesn’t land. I have information to work with instead of just shame.

That’s actually part of why I built the Social Sprint the way I did. Because skill acquisition — real, specific, practical skill acquisition — is one of the most effective antidotes to visibility anxiety I know.

Tell me about the Sprint.

It starts Monday, May 4th. It’s two weeks. It’s a small group this time — I opened doors quickly and didn’t have a big runway for promotion, which honestly I love because it means everyone in it gets a lot of individual attention.

It’s €275, or six monthly payments of €48.33. Live webinars Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday at 3pm CET — all recorded if you can’t make them live. By the end you’ll have a clean, optimised profile, a content strategy that actually makes sense for your career as a performer, a working content calendar, and the habit and confidence of having actually posted every single day for two weeks. With feedback. Real, specific, same-day feedback.

Because they didn’t have a class on this in Conservatory. And your career needs you to be findable.

Interested… more info HERE.

Last thought?

Just this: Brené Brown says vulnerability is having the courage to show up and be seen when you have no control over the outcome. And Austin Kleon says if your work isn’t online, it doesn’t exist.

Both of those things are true at the same time. It’s scary and it’s necessary. And you as an artist get to decide how you’ll take this challenge on.

If you want to join the May Social Sprint, there are still spots available. It starts Monday, May 4th. You can join the sprint HERE.

xoxo, Martha

I’m sharing some drama from our performance last night, what I’ve got going on in the coming weeks and… here’s a little sneak peak of the performance last night.

And of course a little behind the scenes of what the General Rehearsal is like:

Happy singing!xoxo,

Martha

I made a promise to myself that I’d send out either a newsletter or a deep dive every week. There’s something beautiful about forcing some consistency in your life… sometimes you end up trying out a format just to meet the challenge. And this week’s challenge came in the form of 5 operas and exhaustion. I sat down to write today between a 5 mile training run, a morning staging rehearsal of Pagliacci and a performance of Händel’s Rinaldo tonight…and i thought it would be delinquent for me to try to string any words together. So instead you get a much more entertaining dilerious blab. I hope you enjoy. Sorry for the language…. je suis total fertig and that’s when a colorful word or too-many tumble out of my mouth. Here are two videos I reference that you may want to listen to instead of me blabbing away:

#1: Can a reel change your whole life perspective? Is that really too much to ask for?

#2: despite the attention sucking headline, this is an interesting interview

I need comments and opinions about all of this. Also please send coffee.

xoxo the most, Mar

(send help)