AUDITION SEASON SANDBOX!
It’s that exciting time of year where theatres are announcing their seasons left and right. This time of year can offer a strange mix of emotions for actors ranging from: “OH AWESOME - I LOVE THAT SHOW, I’m full of creative inspiration in pursuing a collaborative relationship with that production!” to “OH CRAP - How did I go all year without getting a single piece ready for auditions! I’ll never be ready!”
Regardless of the brand of elevated energy that may charge an audition season, there’s a sort of magical “Christmas-morning-like” whimsy in fantasizing about creative opportunities at the outset of season announcements. It is possible for the high-pressure yearning to book a show or a role can preoccupy an actor so much that the opportunity to enjoy art-making in an audition can get overlooked. Here’s a post that champions how process can be your friend amidst auditions (INCLUDING the soon to be announced auditions for SOTP’s next season)!
Good ol’ Michael Chekhov flexed a clever expression: “There is art without joy.” Not to be confused that somehow every character and monologue is a litany of joyous expression, but rather that the act of composing a clear story in a fully realized character is something that inspires joy in an actor. At a minimum, lead your process of audition preparation with joyous creativity. The moment it starts to feel led by dread, fear, panic, or the like - take a step back. Acting by its nature is a playful activity, embrace that. Chase what feels fun and commit to that pursuit. You’ve got 90 seconds to 4 minutes to craft and create a clear and dynamic story - you might as well have a hell of a good time doing it.
A couple of psycho-physical tools that can be helpful when facing jitters and nerves:
Cross the threshold. When waiting for your audition, take a beat to find a solo spot in the waiting area. Standing, imagine that there’s a threshold in front of you - just beyond the tips of your toes. Imagine that beyond that threshold is everything you need for a successful audition: focus, fun, energy, playfulness, clarity, listening, whatever. Imagine the space beyond that threshold getting more and more concentrated with all of those wonderful qualities, and when you’re ready, step over that threshold and imagine yourself absorbing all of those things. Trusting your imagination to fuel your body with whatever you need to tell a clear story is a great way to get warmed up.
Staccato/Legato: This tool is a bit more flamboyant in action, but can be super helpful if you’ve got the space. This is an activity where you send your energy out to the playable space to the right, left, above, below, in front, and behind yourself. You do this six times: twice staccato (quickly/suddenly), twice legato (slowly/sustainedly), once more staccato, once more legato. This tool reminds the entire body that it is of use in clear storytelling (as opposed to acting from the waist up or enthusiastically with just the hands).
At SOTP, we do our best to let our auditions match the energy of our rehearsals. Auditions are always a two-way street: the company is showing you who they are and how they operate in the same way that you are introducing yourself and how you work. We know process-driven work is not for everyone and we want to be forthright about sharing how we work so that actors can determine whether they can enjoy collaborating in this way.
We try to keep our initial submission process as accessible as possible by offering in-person audition times and filmed audition submissions so that you can offer whatever suits you best. When it comes to callbacks, “play” is the name of the game. Much like our rehearsals, we don’t put a high value on being performance ready too soon. Rather, we take some time to play around with a scene in a bunch of different ways, trusting the energy of the room and the director to explore new opportunities in the text. In that playing around, we might invite opportunities to explore the scene in ways that are more expressionistic or abstract in order to dismiss or circumnavigate the stresses of being perfectly performance-level polished. It is an impossible pressure and expectation to immediately become a character that you think the director thinks is right. It’s far more valuable to the process to see how you interpret the energy of the character or a scene - does it have you bouncing around the space like an inexhaustible rubber ball or does it have you resolutely and delicately stationary like fungi sprouting on a log. (This is maybe a bit far-fetched as an example, but the gist is there.) We find that the sense of play in exploring less literal interpretations of characters and text can be a wonderful relief to the pressures of being “good.” Our goal in being process-driven and ensemble-based is to find the ways art-making can be joyous and deepening the artists’ tool-kits more than stacking a credit on a resume.
We’d love for you to join us, play in our sandbox, and find some community with shared passions. Subscribe to our newsletter by scrolling to the bottom of the page and be in the first wave of those notified when our auditions sign-ups go live.
Wishing you joyous art-making and an artistically-fulfilled audition season.
