Growing pains of an actor

Over the past four weeks, I have survived the grueling demands of six consecutive auditions for full-time drama schools. Huzzah!

I thought I would summarise what I’ve learnt from these rigorous months.

1) On the matter of ‘hear say’: A lot of fellow actors-in-training would recount anecdotes of terrifying, draining, horrible experiences during their auditions.

I have learnt to pay as little heed as possible to these anecdotes, because at the end of the day, you will have YOUR experience of the audition and what YOU make of it.

2) Fall in love with the process, rather than becoming obsessed with the outcome

I have been preparing for these auditions more intensively since late July 2010. This means that I have been working on the same 5 monologues for approximately 5 months.

It began with Shakespeare classes with Lyn Pierse at Actors Center Australia on Tuesday and Thursday nights as well as with audition preparation classes with Michael Denkha all day on Saturdays.

Lyn’s tutelage was invaluable in getting me to deeply comprehend and ecstatically love Shakespeare’s works. She helped all of us to have fun with the language and to grasp the emotional core of a piece of text.

Working with Michael was like working with a completely new director, who gave a different opinion on the execution of the monologues.

For example, whilst playing Carol from Oleana by David Mamet, he stressed the importance of paying attention to the ‘music of the text’. He gave excruciating attention to the punctuation of a piece as this gives clues as to how the text can be delivered with maximum emotional impact (amongst other things), the way the writer intended it to be delivered.

Following the conclusion of these 12-week courses, I still had a month leading up to my first audition. And so, I continued to work on the monologues, touching on them 3-4 times a week, dedicating 2.5-3 hours for each session.

It became clear to me that a useful challenge to set myself was to practice the craft of keeping a constantly open and curious attitude to the already ‘familiar’ pieces.

I hired out affordable rehearsal spaces from Queen St Studios and met weekly with my fellow-actor-friend, Sam Herps.

Sam greatly assisted me to stay curious about the monologues. He would point out the beauty of certain words that I was taking for granted. For example, in Black Sequin Dress (Jenny Kemp), Woman 1 describes the ecstatic atmosphere of a nightclub by declaring: ‘I love, I love, I love love they think. Love me, me, me, me, all of me.’ He urged me to think about the significance of the word ‘love’, especially given that it features so often throughout the monologue. With his prompting, I separated out the different qualities that ‘love’ may embody: lust, infatuation, childish crushes and so on.

I cannot stress enough how helpful it was to have someone give me feedback as to the work I was doing. An outside eye is more able to pick up whether the pace of your performance is engaging or not, whether there is a clarity of the images behind your eyes as you visualize a person/object/place relevant to the monologue, whether you have effective comic timing, whether you are holding tension in any areas of your body and so on.

By keeping at the forefront of my mind, that every piece will continue to yield up treasures I had not seen previously, as long as I remained open and curious, the past grueling 5 months have been a wondrous journey of falling more and more deeply in love with the craft of acting.

3) On the day of the auditions:

I have Andrew Lloyd from Actors Center Australia in particular to thank for the following words of wisdom: Let go of ‘being good’. Every performance is different. Your only responsibility now is ‘to be in the moment’ and to communicate with the other actor.

This is possibly the most terrifying thing you can say to a perfectionist control-freak such as myself: Let go of all the work you’ve done and focus on being in the moment. This gives the impression that you really have no control over what happens next.

I discovered that it is important to distinguish between what you can focus on (different to ‘what you can control’) and what it is that you just have to let go of (mainly- how you perform the monologue on the day).

For every audition, I set myself a different goal to focus on.
12th November (NIDA): Let go. Be present. Let loose. Let the breath replace itself.
23rd November (VCA): Keep discovering. Stay curious. Honour my impulses. Thought by thought. Loose hips, pelvis, knees, jaw.
24th November (ACA): Do it with love.
25th November (VCA Recall): Let go. Really go with them, trust their direction. Do it with joy!
29th November (NIDA Recall): Where you are most uncomfortable about going is where you will learn the most!
1st December (ACA Recall): I think by this point I was too tired to write down a particular goal, but I do remember ‘letting go’ being at the forefront of my consciousness.

I experienced something beautiful during my VCA audition with regards to ‘being in the moment’.

I focused on my breath, felt the floor beneath my feet and noticed how I was holding weight or tension in my body. Then, suddenly it hit me.

There was nowhere else that I would rather be.

I thought about my family in Indonesia, whom I love dearly and no, no matter how much I missed them, Indonesia was not where I needed to be. I thought about my family in San Francisco, whom I have not seen for 5 years, about my loving partner who was at work at the time and neither of them pulled me so strongly that I felt torn between them and that room at Sydney Theater Company, working with the directors of VCA.

There was nowhere else I would rather be.

What a wholesome feeling.

Where? Here. When? Now.

4) Exult in the wondrous instrument that is your body

I cannot tell you enough times how grounding it was, within such a pressured environment, to return back to my breath, return down through my feet and into the ground.

Rowena Balos stresses the importance of the actor having a loose and released body in order to channel the moment-by-moment shifts that a fully-embodied character is constantly experiencing.

She highlights the need to give your body enough information whilst you are exploring a piece, so that when it comes to performing, your body does not become confused and you can trust in the remarkable intelligence of the mindful body.

To this end, trusting in my body completely, I found that I was time and time again aroused whilst working on the Black Sequin Dress. Woman 1 describes ‘women melting into their partner’s bodies, the men wrapped around them like blankets’; ‘bare bodies under not much’ and other such sexually alluring images.

Holy Toledo! Let me assure you, I engaged in vigorous masturbating sessions whilst working this piece. No way was my body getting confused about where Woman 1 was coming from- this is about primal sexual prowess, baby!

Having done the homework, so to speak, I found that I was able to really let go whilst performing Black Sequin Dress at ACA. I absolutely enjoyed the orgasm that Woman 1 experiences: ‘Ping! Bulls’ eye. Right to the hungry spot. Ping! And then, ah, ah. That was it.’ A fellow auditionee who was watching said that when I laughed at this point, it seemed so natural. I had not even realized that I was laughing. I was too busy cumming!

It is absolutely wondrous what a loose and released body can imbue your work with. During the month of auditions I committed to having a massage once a week and continued with my practice of swimming and morning yoga. I felt exulted in my body and the rewards that my body yielded up to me were more than fantastic!

5) Train your voice

6) Have a clear code of ethics

During my Social Work training, we were introduced to the Australian Association of Social Workers’ Code of Ethics. The document itself was too bland and too generalized to be of any real use to a practicing social worker.

Nonetheless, it helped me to start thinking about what ethical principles I want guiding my life. I think it necessary to have such a code to adhere to, whatever your chosen career path.

For myself, in my performing arts career, I commit to an ethic of generous compassion, not competitiveness.

Let’s cut the shit here. A part of me will always be competitive. To a large extent this has been a personality trait of mine since childhood and the competitive nature of the performing arts industry will ensure that this trait will continue to live on.

However, higher than competitiveness, I strive to uphold compassion. As Dean Carey said on the day of the ACA audition, ‘Competitiveness is destructive to creativity.’ If I can curb my competitiveness so that it stays to about a 10-15% portion of the propelling drive of my creative practice, I will be happy with this.

On the day of the auditions, I focused on really loving my fellow auditionees. I found this easier to do once I had already performed my monologue, but nonetheless, my intention was to really hold each one in my gaze, to give them my full attention and support.

In this way, I participated in how exciting it was when they had a moment of discovery, of released creative impulse whilst working with the audition panel. Their breakthrough was not a threat to my self-worth as an actor instead it was a shared exciting event!

7) On the matter of one’s ego- the need to be resilient.

I felt a sharp pain in my chest when my name was not called out 2/3 of the way through the NIDA recall. This meant that I did not even have the chance of being shortlisted for this year’s cohort.

Instead of going home to mope, or even worse, to beat myself up and ask the trillion questions I could have asked myself as to how I could have done things differently etc, I stayed out and met up with my ever-supportive partner and one of our good friends, who had similarly put herself on the line for NIDA and VCA.

Their company and conversation helped me to maintain perspective on what I had just missed out on, and also to remember the ample more opportunities that were still open to me.

When I got home, another blow was rained upon my confidence! I received a letter stating that I had not been offered a place in the early round of offers for VCA. Now this really stung. I had gotten all the way through into their shortlist. My feelings about getting in were abuzzed with excitement… and then this damned letter had arrived.

I cried a little. Raved a lot. Let myself feel the disappointment. Engaged in a little bit of denial by looking up rental properties in South Melbourne. Then wrote a sad email to my friends and family.

The stream of supportive emails that I received in response served as a timely reminder as to the loving community that I was a part of. I felt infinitely grateful. Most importantly, their messages of hope helped me to stay alive to the other possibilities of how I can grow as an artist.

My partner made the very good point that this was the start of growing skills in how to be resilient. This career path is rife with rejections and only the occasional ‘Yes’.

I used this experience to dust myself off and try again. And dust myself off I did! I had to! I had my ACA recall just two days later.

Every day is a new day. Stay alive to what this has to offer you.