Auditions

Auditions – now they can be strange events.

Tuesday saw our first round of auditions. First off, out of  about thirty five candidates from the casting event, only eight confirmed that they would attend, two send messages at the last minute to say they couldn’t do it after all, and nine turned up. Odd!

So, what do you expect at an audition? Well, I have never been in favour of the standard monologue in front of a panel type audition; I have only ever had to do one of those and I think they are just a waste of time. Sure, if the script is a monologue, you might want to see how an actor can portray a character without someone to react to. However, most scripts aren’t monologues so you need to see how actors can relate and react to each other.

Luckily, my director agrees (read her blog, by the way. Just click on “Director’s Blog above).

So, we surprised our candidates by running a workshop with all of them – an improvised workshop, which means that we made it up as we went along as well. Well, okay, we did plan a little bit.

Running workshops like this allows the actors to get comfortable with their surroundings and each other.  It also allows the director to observe who gets along with whom, what the actors make of the characters they are given. Yes we had men playing women and women playing men and even had a group playing the same character at the same time!

The actors, Rebecca (director) and I all enjoyed the process. Although, they did admit that it was the strangest audition they’d ever attended. The orgasm exercise was particularly interesting, but I’ll leave you to guess about that.

This Blog first appeared in http://blog.aslightlyirreverentlook.co.uk/