A stage is where an actor performs for many. He knows how to pitch his character just so. The theater is his creative church.
The artist’s studio is selected with acute care-seeking natural light, space, peace, and tranquility. A composer is the same.
And then there is the casting space, usually in a casting director’s office, where you must audition. As an actor, I can imagine that most of the seriously uncomfortable experiences in your life have occurred in a casting studio.
The reason? The casting studio was not developed by the actor, or even the director. It was designed by a casting director, with the purpose of seeing lots of people in a short time.
Next!
It is disempowering for an actor. You walk into a casting director’s studio and you sure know who is the boss! And you better respect that!
Here are a few ways to take back some of your status and power.
Most actors come into my room and they walk straight to the mark and put their toes on it. What sort of creative person obeys like that? You do. Because you feel the power of the CD, which, to me, is like arriving at a dinner party and sitting straight down at the table: dutiful, obedient.
The audition space is the casting director’s creative space. You feel like an interloper. You are certainly not made to feel welcome.
And in this space, you are expected to perform? To create?
You feel as if the only place you have any entitlement is the hot spot—the mark on the floor. And the only entitlement you have is to take an eye line to the reader. You must sit if a chair is on the mark. You must stand if there is not one.
Any other action by you, needs you to ask for permission.—my permission.
And I suspect, many times you do not bother asking for fear of denial. You feel it is better to compromise voluntarily, rather than to request your preferred option, and then be disappointed.
Firstly, you sat in a waiting room full of clones of your character. All dressed the same, looking the same, aged the same. And now you walk into a room, and…obey.
Your instinct on who or what the character should be is not the most important thing. It is what the casting director tells you the writer or the director wants.
You have a natural feeling of inferiority, which is inescapable.
Because even though it is your audition, it is delivered in the casting director’s space, on the casting director’s time frame, and with the casting director’s rules.
To succeed as an actor you need to be clear on one important thing: In here, in the audition space, you are in my creative space—my territory.
I’m sorry to say, but it is not yours. So at the very moment you walk in the door of this room, you immediately give away much of your freedom, much of your character choices.
There is a solution though.
Whenever I would ask to test one actor in particular, his agent would call back and say he wasn’t available, but he is happy to do a self-tape.
The self-tape would arrive and I would see from the studio he used, he recorded it around the corner.
The point? He was available to come into the room. But he did not want to forgo his freedoms. As an actor he has more freedom in doing his own self-test, because he does it in his space at a time of his choosing. He does as many takes as he likes and then he chooses which one is best.
Whereas in here? If he wanted to do a second take, that is not his choice. It is mine and mine alone.
When you walk in this door, you sign away some of your freedoms. To win them back you need to know how to self-tape.
A bigger problem though is that you, the actor, think you should come in to the room to impress me, to meet me.
Done correctly, you have more freedom, far more opportunity, if you know how to self-tape, which is why my website devotes so much time to this skill. It is mandatory if you are going to succeed as an actor.
So right now you have a choice to make. Sitting at home, watching this, the choice is all yours. But as soon as you walk in here, now the choice is mine.
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