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Auditions

card reads "Don’t let forgetting your lines ruin your take"

Do you worry about forgetting your lines?

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This conversation came up in class because a student totally lost his line in the middle of a take. Does that happen to you?  How do you typically respond to forgetting your lines?

I get that the fear of forgetting your lines can create a ton of anxiety (especially when working live) but as we discuss in this clip, when it actually happens it’s often a sign that you’re deeply plugged into the moment and out of your head.

The story I share here from when I was pursuing acting is one a lot of actors can relate to:  we allow the forgetting of the line to become a mistake rather than let it be the gift that it is.

When you’re really dropped into the moment-to-moment of a scene, of course there will be moments when you don’t know what comes next.  That’s the whole goal, isn’t it?

I think in that moment when I stumbled, I let it mean that I can’t be trusted and that I don’t really know what I’m doing after all.  Instead, I could have let it be an opportunity to free fall which is when some of the best moments in acting tend to arrive.

So yeah, obviously you need to know your lines.  You have to know them well BUT THEN you learn to let go and trust yourself and fly.  If you are worrying about forgetting your lines it will keep you in your head.

What if you retrained yourself to believe deeply that every time you drop a line, it’s actually a sign that the magic is happening?  What if you let it be your nudge to lean in?  

This takes practice but I promise it can be done!

CLASS CLIP TRANSCRIPTION

Student: Maybe because I was so plugged in that I was just totally on what was going on in front of me, so then it kind of maybe evoked a different feeling, a different type of…

Sarah: You got out of your head!

Student: Yeah.

Sarah: You got out of your head. Those moments that you stumble are almost always pure gold on tape. And if you can stay with it, for you it’ll feel like fifteen minutes of you working to figure out what comes next, but it’s usually not so long in the moment.

Student: Right.

Sarah: You know, I remember a time when I auditioned for this big show, and I just remember that same thing happening to me, where I lost the line. And I just made it mean too much. I made it…the fact that I lost it, I felt like the whole rhythm of the whole scene went out the window when in fact probably, in reality on the tape it was probably a gift.

And it just totally derailed me and I just never forgot it because it was just…I was so right there, you know? But actors make it mean something that it doesn’t mean. And if you were to come up with something that even wasn’t the line, that would be fine.

Student: Right, right, right.

Sarah: Because those moments, you’re so plugged in, nine times out of ten, you know, you’re in such a great place when you lose your line.

card reads "how to use a character breakdown"

Beware of this character breakdown mistake in acting

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Here’s the situation: you get an audition and take a look at the character breakdown before you get started.  The description gives you a great sense of the role from an audience’s perspective but you see that it’s naturally loaded with adjectives.  Here’s the thing: those adjectives cannot be played—they need to be translated.  How do you do that?

Adjectives present a dilemma for actors.  They are helpful to get a sense of where you’re headed — but again, breakdowns often describe how the role should be perceived. Maybe they want the role to come across as snarky, daring, and confident.  Good to know.  But…for you the actor, just as in life, you’re not in control of how others perceive you. You do active things to get what you want which is ultimately what affects how you are perceived.

The key to breaking down breakdowns is to translate the language from perception, or result, to action.

It’s not so helpful to think about playing the quality of “daring”.  Instead, experiment with some transitive verbs a daring person might have in their action palette.  Depending on the scene, maybe they challenge, stun, demand, or provoke.  Maybe a confident person flattens, dazzles, or owns. These actions are the choices you make based on the information in the scene, breakdown and what’s in your gut. Actively trying to get the other person in the scene to think, feel or do something will give you nuance and specificity.  It will keep the scene active and prevent it from becoming moody.  In the end, you may very well convey the adjectives given, but they are simply a jumping off point.

Take a look at this conversation from class where a student had a breakdown with nine adjectives. Using this perspective shift from adjective to action is essential with a breakdown like that!

CLASS CLIP TRANSCRIPTION

Sarah: Let’s look at this character description again. “Innocent, naive, guileless, trusting, simple, and unaffected. Talkative, funny, charming.” That’s a LOT of descriptors! That’s a lot of words! So you sort of take that and then you kind of have to immediately translate some of that, because it’s hard not to play an idea of a person’s descriptions.

Student: Yes, yeah.

Sarah: Right, to translate that into, how does she behave? With her friends, you know, how does she, what does she do to them? Is she…what might her role be? It’s also, you know, there’s that first phase in the audition where…I was just talking about this with somebody in a coaching yesterday…where she kind of like immediately went to try to figure out how to give them what they wanted for that part. And there’s the beginning part which is, I want to get as much of that script analysis and figure out, okay what’s the style of this particular show? What information do I have?

Get that all as deeply as you can and THEN, you kind of have to shift away from, especially for that particular role, they really didn’t give her a lot of information, we just knew the style of the show, so she was really trying to figure out what she thought this part should be. I was like, you get to make up what it is!

You get to decide, you get to take what’s in the script, and then really, it’s such a cliche, but it’s easy to forget and it’s hard to remember, we have to breathe our life into it. And let it come from us and our life and our experience and figure out how do we put our own spin on it? Rather than just trying to shape ourselves into this box that they gave us.

I don’t know if you were doing this, but I know it’s easy to have a description and then try to sort of embody the description, rather than embody what you’re doing to the other people.

Student: YES.

do you know how to rehearse well?

Let’s talk about how to rehearse for your auditions and scenes

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“Rehearse how you’re going to perform.”  I bet you’ve heard that one before.  But perhaps also rehearsal can be an opportunity to intentionally rehearse how you won’t ever perform. 

Here’s an example:

Say you’re stabbing the other character with your action, right?  What happens if you expand that action and stab them at a 10, impulse alive, with your whole body and voice engaged?  Maybe you would never actually do the scene that way, but when you explore how that feels, you can pop it back down to a 2 or a 3 and sometimes inside the impulse feels like a 10.

However you choose to rehearse, do get on your feet.  If all you do is sit, write and think, when the time comes to work, you may find that all that beautiful stuff you found got stuck on the page.

 

Sarah: When you’re rehearsing, are you sitting down and kind of in your head and writing stuff down, or are you—what are you doing?

Student: When I rehearse, I’m usually in this room right here, and I’m sitting down. I have everything all opened up, I have my book here, I have the scene here on the floor, I have, you know, my verbs right next to it, and I’m just like sitting. And I break down the beats, and I’m looking this over, so I’m constantly moving, not just standing. But it’s weird because I’ve definitely rehearsed before standing, but for some reason I just usually sit and stay seated, but I should stand.

Sarah: It doesn’t necessarily have to be —what I mostly mean is out loud.

Student: Okay.

Sarah: So that it’s not—I just did an Instagram post about this because it’s been coming up, where, you know, sometimes for too long the works stays internal, and in your head and writing stuff down and even writing backstory and things, which is helpful, it’s still really helpful, but you also at the same time, wanna be trying stuff out loud, because it’s literally a different part of your brain that processes speech that also processes writing. Those are two different parts of the brain. So sometimes what happens when you’re doing a lot of that headier, scholastic writing kind of prep, then when you go to work, sometimes you realize, like, oh, it’s not there. You know, where is it?

Student: Ahh, that’s true.

Sarah: It’s both, you know. And that’s part of why I’m excited for you to get to some of these other experiments that we’ve been doing, because a lot of it is about getting it in your body. And even going too big, like “too big,” but still connected to an impulse, a real impulse, so that you can see what it feels like in a really expanded form—using your body, actually on your feet—what happens if I’m really elbowing somebody with my verb, you know? And I expand it out as big as possible, and then I slowly bring it back to a tiny, where I’m really, the dial is turned way down. So I would encourage as you continue to kind of develop this process, and it sounds like you’re carving out some good time for you, because you’re 100% right, and I really do believe that there’s no way for you to learn how to do this by thinking about it, right? It’s 100% doing it, doing it, doing it, doing it, doing it, doing it, which is why I love…I used to not even offer the every other week option (and that was partially just a pandemic-related thing) but wanting people to just get in, because I do, I think that regular accountability every week of showing up and saying, I’m gonna keep on track, I’m gonna rehearse every day, I’m gonna put it in my body, so that you can really feel what that feels like to not only play an action, but to see what happens when you send it. Does it land? All my attention is on the other person, and i’m listening with my whole body, and I’ve also learned how to let go of all of that work, I’ve learned how to build a rich story about this person’s life and all the circumstances, and then to free fall and let it go and to play. And there’s no way to do that without—and it sounds like you know this—without just doing it and doing it and doing it and doing it and doing it and getting a ton of experience doing it.

does acting make you so nervous you want to puke?

Does acting make you so nervous you want to puke?

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It’s the morning of an audition and everything is going smoothly.  Your coffee was the perfect temperature, you hit every green light on the drive to the lot and your favorite audition shirt—the one you wore to the last two bookings—hasn’t a wrinkle in sight.  You’re filled with a glowing confidence (especially since it’s also a good hair day) and you aren’t the tiniest bit nervous.  With a morning like this, you’re bound to have a perfect audition.  Right…?

But what if you wake up late?  What if you check your email to find that your health insurance bill never got paid and you’re about to get canceled?  And what all of this causes you to spin out and now you’re feeling extra nervous and jittery and anxious…and maybe even a bit like you’re going to throw up? 

Are you screwed?  

Guess what!?  You can still have an incredible audition.

Whether or not nerves come up is out of your control.  Whether or not you let those nerves you feel derail you, however, is up to you.  Read those last two sentences again.

When you decide that having nerves is a bad thing and wish them away, it’s the end of presence and that gorgeous spontaneity that makes scenes so exciting.  Include and allow your nerves.  Permit them.  Call them anything but bad–call them energy.  Call them moving particles.  Feel them and lean in.  

Take the pressure off yourself..  There’s no such thing as a “perfect” audition experience.  Experiment with letting the stuff your day throws you become little gifts you can use to help you tell your story as a real, breathing, thinking human who has weird s*hit happen to them on big days.  

Go get ‘em.

CLASS CLIP TRANSCRIPTION

This idea of having the perfect routine, the perfect morning ritual so that you can have the perfect audition, so that you can give the performance of a lifetime. And you’re going to have to do these sixteen things and feel a certain way and feel totally ready and released instead of how you might feel in your dressing-room, which is throwing up and like you can’t breathe. What happens when you’re in your dressing-room and you’re throwing up and you can’t breathe? You have to turn the focus on: I can’t breathe right now. What does that feel like? What is the feeling of not being able to breathe? I feel hot, my heart is racing, I just threw up. I taste that in my mouth.

Allowing—the most common thing that happens to actors that stops them in a big audition is that they get really nervous. Their body starts responding, you start having the atoms move around in a different way. It’s named as a negative experience, and then it’s pushed away. It’s pushed aside. And then the spinning out begins.

So, you know, the way in which we try to assign something to our experience of going through the world—and yes, sadness comes up and we should grieve and feel it fully—right, but I remember, what if you could truly go to the audition and get a flat tire, and spill your coffee all over yourself, and have the security be a dick to you as you drive through, and have it all be great. Have it all be IS. Guy was a dick! Cool. My heart’s racing, my palms are sweating: yes! Yes, and! Here we go! I can act through all of that. As long as I don’t try to push it away, cancel it out, you can redirect. You can reroute.

Card reads "How to be real in auditions"

Insanely easy way to way to be real in auditions

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It’s not just you.  Acting can be friggin’ hard.  

Okay, this happens to my students and it definitely used to happen to me too.   

A big audition finally comes through and you do all the work: You get off-book and do your prep, you break it down and understand the objectives and obstacles and actions, you build relationships to the PPOE, you find the rhythm and stakes, etc.  You even read it with your actor friend and get it on its feet.  But after all this, for some reason you still ain’t buying yourself in the role.  (And you can tell — your friend isn’t buying it either.)  

How can this be happening after all your training and hard work?

Panic.  Code red!  You go over your lines 8 million more times (even though you know them).  You rethink your choices.  Change your outfit.  You call your friend and cry.    

And let’s face it…the audition probably didn’t go how you wanted it to.  (again?)

The problem here is that you think the answer is more effort.  Unfortunately, the more you muscle your way through the scene (whether you realize it or not) the more you hold on to your work.  And as you probably know, holding on is death for an actor.  Plus, after a few of these auditions, the fear of repeating the last few horrible experiences kicks in and makes it ten times harder to drop in.  You start to question everything. You blame yourself…you blame the coast you live on…perhaps you even condemn your agent for “roles that aren’t even right for you”.  

What is going on and how can you make it stop?!  

You haven’t learned how to stop holding on so tight to your work so you can live the scene instead of act it.

I was working with an actor in class (let’s call him Paul) who was struggling with a scene from a one hour cop drama.  He had done his homework (which I do believe you must do!) and understood the scene very well.  I threw a few adjustments at him to try to see if he could start to play a little more.  The more I gave Paul to try, the more shut down he became.  I realized he needed to find a quick way out of his head and fear but he was so in there, he had no idea how much pushing he was doing.  His eyebrows were going up and down and he was using odd emphases on words that made no sense in the context of the scene…

Once we began a series of exercises to free Paul up and get him off himself and listening again, something kinda magical happened and he began to simply allow his work to be there (vs delivering with effort) and he started living the scene.  The class was riveted.  They couldn’t believe the shift Paul made in his scene using a few simple (and dare I say, insanely easy!) tools to get there.  

**Now for the important caveat:  You don’t really “forget your work”.  This is a misconception–or just gets explained poorly.  Your work simply fades into the background and you become no longer aware of it.  It becomes your silent partner.**  

While actors always have room to grow when it comes to technique, there are plenty of exercises to help you stop relying on more effort so you can get present in your auditions.  Finding your inquisitiveness will help you listen like your life depends on it and allow the all wonderful prep you have done to finally have your back.    

Summary?   Ditch the effort.  Work softly.  Use tools that get you listening.  Your auditions (and all your future work!) will thank you.