Tag: audition

This is The Key to Winning the Audition + Booking to Role

In an audition, the more personally you invest in your decisions, the more specific the final result, and the more the people in the room know about what you, specifically, have to offer the role.

I write and teach extensively on how to be deeply specific in your intentions, your relationships, and your choices but today, I want to get even deeper and talk about the specificity of your connection to the other characters in a scene and, ultimately, to the reader or camera.

The first step in connecting in a meaningfully specific way is exploring all facets of the relationships. Now, I’m not talking about your ideas about the relationship—whether you think you love or hate the other person, etc., nor am I talking about a complicated backstory that puts you in your head and risks pulling you out of the moments of the scene. I’m talking about where the relationship lives in your body, how it feels.

When you explore the feelings in your body, be really specific as to where they live and how you’re physically affected. Get up, move around, put your hands on the parts of the body that are impacted, indulge in all of the sensations of the relationship.

The second step is the specific connection. The actual physical connection you make to another is the energetic manifestation of the feelings you discovered in exploring the relationship.

That being the case, we can safely say that energy follows emotion. If you decided you love the other character in a deeply passionate way and felt that passion in the pit of your stomach, where does that lead you energetically? Would it cause your body to lean in slightly at the waist? Would your breathing deepen or come quickly? Would you tighten or relax the stomach?

If you stay true to the feelings of the relationship in the audition, the energy will flow freely and create slight adjustments in your body. The emotions will then be expressed with the specific energy they need from your body. When this happens, the powerful, personal connection that results is undeniable.

You need to connect with that amount of strength because you’re connecting to a reader or camera that isn’t giving you a lot—or anything—to work with. But I guarantee when you connect with the energetic force of your emotions, the reader will start to read differently and you’ll jump through that camera and truly affect the people watching.

The difference in your auditions will be huge. While most actors think it’s enough to simply stare at the reader or into the camera in an effort to show they can listen, you’ll be connecting with the full force of your heart and your body. And this type of connection will allow the people in the room to positively answer one of the most important questions in the audition: Does this actor connect with the specificity that will ensure dynamic and compelling reaction shots?

At least half the time you’ll be on screen, the camera will be on you when you’re listening and reacting. If they don’t see the type of connection we’ve been talking about in the room or on the tape, your audition is over.

Specificity is the hallmark of greatness in acting and auditioning. But it doesn’t just apply to the specificity of what you’ve chosen to do, but also to the specificity of how you actually do it.

Practicing Presence

Pure Presence

We are pretty jumpy people these days, allowing ourselves to be pulled in 20 different directions and becoming increasingly unable to focus on what’s in front of us.

Some people are proud of this, claiming that they are geniuses at multi-tasking and get so much more done in a day than most other people.

“But how much did you actually experience today?” That’s the actor’s question. It’s the experiences of your life that add up to who you are and, ultimately, what you have to offer a role.

Which brings us to the subject of presence. The word gets thrown around quite a bit by actors and teachers as if it’s just one more thing to be ticked off on a list of positive attributes for an actor to have. “Now that I am about to go into the audition, I’ll be present.”
Not so fast. Presence is not a magic cape that you drape over yourself when you feel like it. Presence is a learned skill and it won’t show up in your work or in the room if you don’t practice it in your life.

How Being Present Affects Your Work

An audition is a series of moments. The actor with the brightest, truest, most connected moments gets the job. But how can you sustain a moment in your work if you don’t know the feeling of doing so in your life? If jumping from moment to moment is what you do 95 percent of the time, then that’s what you’ll do in the audition. Under pressure, the body goes to what it knows.

I see actors who get four pages of sides for, say, an argument scene. When I ask them about the emotions involved in the exchange, many can’t tell me, because they don’t stick around long enough in their real lives to find out. That’s where they get caught.
Walking away or checking out is not an option in a scene, and if you don’t know the feelings that occur from being present for an entire experience in your life, chances are your focus will wane and your presence will weaken before the end of the scene.

I have heard the refrain from casting so many times: “Why do actors find it so hard to stay present and involved? It’s only a 90-second scene!”
This may be a good time to ask yourself, when was the last time that you focused entirely on one thing/person in your life and were entirely present for a full 90 seconds?

Being Present in the Room

Your ability to be present in the room is inextricably tied to your ability to let your work go and simply be. Your ability to let the work go is dependent on having prepared in such a way that you have nothing to doubt and everything to be confident about.

If the piece isn’t living in your body and heart, your mind will become agitated and you’ll be policing your work and diluting your presence in the room. Being present means being free to focus totally on what is going on in front of you. But if even 10 percent of your brain is thinking about how the work is going to go when you walk into the room,
you’ll appear unfocused and fractured. And make no mistake, your inability to be totally present and connected to the people in the room will become an issue when it comes down to who books the job.

Presence also takes acceptance of your space. If you’ve prepared correctly, you know that your work will shine no matter what the environment, and you can now rest in the powerful knowledge that you are about to leave the room in better shape than that in which you found it.

Confidence exercises, affirmations, etc., are nothing but empty bravado if your work isn’t at a job-getting level.
True confidence is resting in the moment just as it is and knowing that everything you need is inside you and that you and your work belongs in that room and in that project.
And from this confidence comes the ability to be entirely present: nothing to do, nowhere to go, nothing to be—just present.

An Exercise to Be More Present in Life

During the course of your day, take at least two minutes between one activity and the next. If you’re arriving home from work, don’t run into the house. Sit in the car and complete your drive before you get out so that when you enter your home, you are present for what is in front of you. Be aware of the feeling of ending one thing and beginning the next.

We know that living fully in transitions is essential in your work. So it is in life. Fully completing one activity ensures that you show up fully for the next. If you slow down and practice with this enough, you can, on a cellular level, change your default setting from scattered to calm, from weak to strong, and from absent to present.

Another essential component for presence grounding the body and steadying the wild mind.

A grounded body and steady mind are your foundation. It doesn’t matter how amazing your technique is or how great an actor you are, if your foundation isn’t strong, it won’t sustain your work and it all will come tumbling down.

To begin with, the mind is not your enemy. It has jobs to do and it wants to do them. The issue is that some of its jobs aren’t very beneficial to the creative process. That’s OK. The wonderful thing about the mind is that it’s pliable—you can train it to behave in ways that support you as an artist.

One of the primary functions of the mind is to protect you and to keep you safe. Good. You’re still alive, so thank the mind for that. One of the ways it protects you is with the fight, flight, or freeze mechanisms located in the reptilian chamber—the oldest part of the brain. Auditioning, because you are in a new environment and in front of strangers, seems dangerous to the reptilian brain and the flight mechanism can kick in big time.

In order to be free to let go and share the amazing work that is stored in your body and heart, the mind needs to know that it can release control. Here are a couple of ways to help you do that:

Breath/Mantra

The first thing you need to do is steady the mind. A good way to begin is with the breath. The mind is tremendously receptive to the messages that it receives from the breath. Breathe shallow and the mind will sense danger; breathe deeply and the mind begins to release its grip.

Breathing in a way that is specific to your needs will send the message even faster: Breaths emanating from the stomach help with feeling large and expansive; chest breaths help you relax; focusing the breath on the solar plexus opens the heart; and concentrating on how the breath feels traveling in and out of the nostrils increases focus. I went into greater detail about these breath types in the meditation blog post.

You can increase the power of the message to your brain by attaching a mantra to the breath. I think it’s a great idea for all actors to have a creative mantra—one word that describes you as an artist and what you aspire to become. Take your time finding it and if you want have a couple, go ahead. You never know how you may feel and what your needs will be.

Inhale deeply from your chosen body area, gathering the mantra into your mind/body. At the top of the inhale, say your mantra and then exhale it out into the world. The action of breathing your mantra into your body will steady the frantic and overly vigilant mind, letting it know that all is well, you are safe in your creative space, and it can take a break from guard duty so you can be free to feel, to create, and to fly.

Intent

Now that the mind is steady, it needs know what to focus on and nothing focuses the primal monkey mind more than a clear intent.

Energy follows attention — it’s that simple.

If you are unclear as to what you’re paying
attention to, the mind will become agitated and spray energy all over the place. This is one of the primary reasons for being nervous.
Intent acts as your director through the audition process. Have a conscious intent for every moment leading up to the audition. Make your intents strong and also kind to yourself (you don’t need to put yourself under more pressure than you may already be feeling).

Make intentions to have fun, to create, to share, to connect, to surprise. Make an intent for your time in the waiting room so that your attention doesn’t get hijacked and so that you stay focused and positive. Make an intent for the person/people in the room, and make it generous—“to make their day better, to lift their spirits, etc.” This sends a message to the mind that there is no threat, and that there is no one it needs to keep you safe from because you are in charge and watch it loosen its protective
grip.

I assume that you have an intent for your work, so commit to that during the reading and then make an intent for how you leave the room as well. Working in this very conscious way keeps your mind focused on the immediate job at hand so that all of your energy flows forward in support of that job/intent. Conscious intent will also make you appear clear, strong, and on purpose through each phase of the process— qualities that are essential to you getting the job.

You can try this conscious intent exercise in your daily life and see how it works. Start before you even get out of bed and see how many you can establish during the day.
Your mind is establishing the intents that it wants you to have without you even knowing it, so why not establish them consciously so that they benefit and enrich your life the way you truly want them to? You’ll also get 10 times more accomplished and have so much more energy, if you always know why you’re doing what you’re doing.

Your intents determine not only the course of your days and the outcome of your work, but the direction of your life as well.
Over a life time of auditioning you’ll make hundreds of different creative decisions and hopefully bring numerous rich colors to your work. The one constant through all of your audition experiences will be your mind and body. They will always be where the decisions and colors will originate and be housed. Only when the mind is steady and
the body is grounded will the effect of those decisions be profoundly felt and the colors be vividly seen.

Here’s another way to practice presence and get your listening and observing muscles in shape at the same time. Take a one day vacation from speaking.
For that day, speak only when you feel you absolutely need to. The rest of the time, listen. Just listen.

Feel what it’s like in your body to truly absorb what is being said to you through the three sense doors: mental, physical, and emotional. Feel the peaceful strength that comes from being completely present without the pressure to think of something brilliant to say. Tell your friends what you’re doing so they don’t have you committed, but let go of the struggle of getting everybody to understand what you are doing. Enjoy being different and just listen to them.

I have had some of my students do this “day without speaking” as part of the Life of the Actor course I teach, and it has greatly improved and energized their work. Here are five of the benefits.

1. Stronger choices.

When you get used to the feeling of being silent, one of the things you notice is that when you do speak, you tend to be very strong and specific.
After spending a day with next-to-no speech, you become familiar with how to express a range of feeling with just a few words, which is the very definition of a good audition.
When you’re working on a piece, you can tap back into that feeling of clarity when making your choices and more easily find the sharpest most effective way to convey your feelings. If all you do is talk all the time, your mind and body have no way to reference this job-winning specificity.

2. Deeper knowledge of your emotions.

Many times, the reason we talk is to escape
our feelings, but as actors, you need to lean into and learn from them. Meryl Streep has said that when she is working on a character, she spends a great deal of time exploring how the character lives in their silences. By doing a day without speech, you will have the opportunity to see how you live in your silences—making it easier to bring those feelings to a character. When you are quiet and you really stay with your emotions and let them breathe, you experience all of them.

Having a conversation about how you feel isn’t the same as truly feeling. Putting words to feelings before they’re fully felt makes you vague and unclear. Being silent and abiding with what you’re feeling will inform your speech and your work in powerful ways.

3. Stillness.

We all know that being still is essential in an audition, especially if you’re
being taped. If you haven’t explored your choices to the point that they are rooted in your body, your stillness will look frozen. However, if you have experimented with truly feeling your emotions through the three sense doors before speaking, your stillness will have emotional power and energy attached to it. Also, because silence is normally a fairly still experience, the stillness required in an audition will feel more natural and less
manufactured.

4. Brighter reactions.

Film and television are not mediums of speech. They are
mediums of reaction. For the first 30 years of its existence, film had no sound. The stories were told on the faces of the actors, and even though we now have sound, this is still—to a great degree—true. One of the main things you hear about actors that don’t book is that “there isn’t enough going on behind their eyes.” A day of silence is a great reactive work out. With no pressure to speak, you can really focus your emotional, physical, and mental energy on what is being said and feel the reaction on those same three levels.

During your next audition, you just may find that you take that extra split second to absorb the words being spoken and let that potentially job-getting reaction play out on your face and behind your eyes.

5. Presence.

Silence is a great way to deal with the temptation to anticipate. If you
know you’re not going to be speaking, you’re more apt to really hear what’s being said as opposed to jumping ahead to your response. This rooted quality is presence— staying in each moment as it occurs, with no thought as to what is coming next. If you spend some time practicing with staying silent, the next time you’re in a fast-paced and frenetic audition room, it will be easier for you to remain calm and be rooted in your
body. Whether speaking or silent you’ll be centered and be less likely to get whipped around by the manic energy in the room, and more apt to bring a confident, strong presence to that room. This sense of presence will also strengthen your work, as well as strengthen the confidence of everyone watching you.

Silence is a wonderful teacher. I encourage all of you to try “a day without speaking” and see what the benefits are for you. The result could make a job getting difference.

~ Craig Wallace

Passion, Discipline and Soft Goals – a Recipe for Acting Success!

I was on a panel recently and one of the questions we were asked was, “What do you think is the most important thing an actor needs to achieve success?” Some answers were “passion” and “determination.”

When it came to me I said, “Skills. Passion and determination mean nothing if you can’t deliver.” When asked to explain further, I said that, as far as the audition goes, the people in the room are looking to see if you have the skills to make the role come life in a way that will engage the audience and enhance the project. They want to see the effortlessly connected, dynamic result of your hard work. If you go in to audition passionately determined to blow them away, but you don’t know what you’re doing, all they’ll see is an unfocused mess—no matter how determined and passionate you are to make it good.

As an example, I said that I had just come from my accountant that day. I didn’t choose her because I admire her passion for accounting; I hired her because she knows tax law and can save me money. Same with my doctor. He may have had passion and determination to get through medical school, but all I care about is that he can read the lab results correctly and that he knows what to do when he puts the rubber gloves on.

It’s about the skill. And even though our profession has a large creative and emotional component, in the end, how frequently you work will depend on how skilled you are at getting and performing the job.

While passion and determination aren’t magic bullets and are far from being enough on their own, they can be helpful as part of a successful work ethic and as motivators to be the absolute best actor that you can be. But, it’s important to use these qualities in the most positively artistic way possible.

With determination, for example, there is a big difference between stubborn determination and artistic determination.

When I hear some actors say that they’re determined, it’s many times code for bull headedness. It means that they’re going to keep doing what’s not working, but with even more energy. Creativity is not linear. The answers that will most enliven your work and your life will be found through deep, open, and honest exploration. So, being artistically determined means that you’re aware of what you need to work on and doing that work willingly and energetically—to dive in and grow, enrich, and improve.

Determined to be a successful, working actor, but doing so in the rhythm of life and the spirit of creativity – incorporating everything that appears on your path is the way to go!

And yes, be passionate. But be passionate about the work, not the fantasy of fame and fortune. True actors are so excited about the process that they don’t see it as work at all. They have a passion for knowing themselves more deeply and specifically, and a passion for connecting to other people. They’re passionate about listening and learning about human nature. And they’re passionately curious about acting in all of its forms. They have a passionate dedication to learning and widening the scope of their art.

Having a strong sense of passion and determination and a week set of skills is a recipe for frustration and anxiety. You don’t deserve something just because you’re passionate about it. You deserve what you earn through doing the hard work of making yourself the most highly skilled professional you can be.

Someone saying that honing your skills and working your ass off may not seem as “inspirational” as telling you that being determined and passionate are going to be enough to succeed. But it’s honest.

And to real actors, what could be more inspiring than to hear that the real key to success is getting better and better at doing what they love?

To actually live this though, to be a true artist and do the work that it takes to be a truly great actor takes a tremendous amount of self-discipline.

The other performing arts have more obvious disciplines than acting. Dancers train their bodies for hours and hours a day; singers train their voices; musicians practice their instruments tirelessly.

Since acting’s requirements are less pronounced, it’s up to the actor to create the necessary artistic structure. An artist needs to live a life that supports his art and encourages development of his craft. Putting together such a life can be both exciting and intimidating, and no one can do it but you. In the “Life of the Artist” program that I teach, we help each actor create a life that keeps him living on artistic purpose 24/7. Even when life is not artistic, you are still an artist living it, and you need to experience everything through that filter.

Staying on point takes effort. Besides all of the distractions that the artist can fall into on his own, there is also the fact that many people won’t respect your artistic life and will fail to see the value in your activities. For instance, if you tell them that you need to read an hour each day to expand your imagination and improve your text recognition skills, they may dismiss this as “not real work.”

I have a student whose parents live in Michigan. They called to say that they were selling their home and he needed to fly back from L.A. to help. When he asked if his brothers, both of whom live in the same town as their parents, were going to be there to help, they responded that the brothers “had real jobs and were busy with those.” Unsurprisingly, this is how much of the world looks at artists and it takes a mighty discipline not to let these people pull you from your center.

In terms of the audition process, there are two immediate benefits to living an artistically nourishing life.

The first is that you are always in the acting gear, so that when auditions come up, you are already in the head and heart space that will create a great audition. You don’t have to try to remember what being a creative person feels like; you’re a creative person all of the time and the work of the audition is just one more expression of your continuous creativity.

The other benefit is that your artistic identity isn’t tied to just that one job. You are an artist walking into the audition and an artist walking out, whether the job is yours or not.

This does wonders in taking the pressure down and freeing you in the room to do the personal, dynamic, and risky work that books the role.

Discipline is also essential to great work. Auditioning is a process. It begins when you receive the material and doesn’t end until you leave the room. You need a way of working that gives you the discipline and focus you need to stay with each step of your process. Actors have a habit of wanting to get pretty before they’re interesting—to jump ahead in their audition prep and “solve” how the piece is going to look and sound.

In fact, an audition isn’t a problem that needs to be solved. An audition is an opportunity to explore, with diligence and determination, yourself, and a piece of material, until you find the most honest and resonant intersection of the two.

Creativity without discipline is just a mess. But, like the dancer and the musician, the great actor knows that beauty and truth don’t happen randomly, but come about through the concentration, perseverance, and vulnerability that discipline provides.

If you have chosen the path of the artist, you need to develop the discipline to stay on it —to not waver, to move forward with focus and clarity. Starting with the moment you wake up in the morning, everything you do needs to feed your artistic soul and give you the energy and motivation to continue to act and to grow—to be an artist all day, week, month, year, and lifelong.

And as you continue to develop and grow as a passionate disciplined artist, it’s a good idea to have goals that inspire you and encourage you to work toward.

There’s a lot that is positive in having guideposts to work toward in a career that is, by nature, unpredictable and unstructured.

Charting your progress by results on the other hand can be both dangerous and discouraging.

I had an actor say to me the other day that his goal is to book three co-star roles in the next six months. That’s not a goal, but a desire for a specific result that, because of circumstances entirely out of the actor’s control, will probably not work out.

Enforcing your agenda on the business is not goal-making, it’s an attempt to control the uncontrollable.

Results are guaranteed to no one.

Here are some thoughts on the differences between goal-focused and result-focused people:

• People focusing on goals tend to embrace process.
• People focusing on results tend to want shortcuts.
• Focusing on goals keeps you connected and aware.
• Focusing on results can create blinders that shut others out.
• In achieving goals you learn to be flexible and to problem-solve.
• In trying to achieve a result you become rigid and stubborn.
• Goal-oriented people are present for every step of the journey.
• Result-oriented people only show up for what they think will get them what they want.
• Goal-oriented people are open to help, knowing that sometimes they’re not the best judge of what is best for them.
• Result-oriented people can be closed off to any way but their own
• Goals create positive energy.
• Striving for results creates anxiety and fear of failure.
• Goals are rooted in realistic accomplishment.
• Results are rooted in desire and fantasy.
A poignant example of the difference between goals and results took place s couple of years ago at the U.S. Open, which saw Serena Williams two matches away from the grand slam
—a feat only three other female tennis players had achieved. She was playing someone to whom she had never lost and it looked like a clear path to the final. But somewhere in the second set you could see her really start to think about the result.

She fell out of the moment and forgot to take care of the business at hand. Suddenly,one of the greatest tennis players of all time couldn’t move her feet, breathe, or even get her racket back in time to hit the ball. The hugeness of the destination pulled her off the path.

Her opponent, with no expectations as far as the result went, (she had a plane ticket home that night!) was able to focus on the moment and achieve her goal, which was simply to play her best tennis in her first grand slam semi-final. And she won.

Presence in the moment always trumps desire for an outcome.

Now let’s see how the goal- and result-oriented actors fare in the audition room:

• The goal-oriented actor is excited for the experience and the chance to test how far they have come.
• The result-oriented actor looks at the experience as an obstacle to their desired result.
• Goal-oriented actors are present and available in their auditions.
• Result-oriented actors can be anticipatory and closed off.
• Because they are present and available, goal-oriented actors tend to be people with whom you would want to work.
• Result-oriented actors are harder to like because they are showing up for the job and not the audition, so it’s unclear who they really are.
• Goal-oriented actors lean in to the work and the room, experiencing all of the moments with a fresh, open mind.
• Result oriented actors can be defensive, not fully engaged in the room, and risk averse in their work for fear of losing the job.
Power comes from relaxation not tension, so don’t tie yourself up in knots over the result. Make your goal to savor the experience of the audition—to be present, connected, dynamic, involved, available, flexible, and likable.

And in a larger way, make your goal to have your goals fueled by passionate determination and disciplined, focused work.