When done right, acting showcases can be a huge benefit to both the actor and the industry. I highly recommend making your showcases short, fast paced and informative. Have an instructor, director or coach choose pieces that give you emotional opportunities, and create a fun and casual environment, so people can socialize without feeling too pressured on either side.
If you participate in a showcase, do good work, but don’t raise your expectation of how the industry is going to respond. Enjoy the process, but don't put all of your hopes and dreams into the result. Trust that the process will result in some good in some part of your career, then let it go and have a good glass of wine.
READ: “How to Make a Showcase Work for You”
Here are several ways a showcase can strengthen your acting career:
1. Play to your strengths.
An actor in need of representation has an opportunity to show themselves off to the industry. If you as an actor are given a scene that shows your strengths, it allows you to give your best and most confident performance. The key is to perform material that gives you the outlet for expressing your emotional strengths. Not just your type or a specific character you are good at. A scene that gives you an opportunity to create organic emotional moments can help you to have an experience on stage in front of people who need to be moved by you.
2. Show, don’t tell.
An actor who already has representation has an opportunity for their current agent to see their work. Your agent gets to see this work in performance and not just on an audition tape. Casting directors, directors and managers can witness your abilities as well. I have witnessed conversations at showcases when casting directors are talking to agents about talent of theirs who they are much more interested in after seeing their work.
3. Get real-time responses.
Actors have an innate need to perform. While auditioning is a form of performance, it does not necessarily give you the connected feeling of an audience responding to your moments. When that happens for an actor, it informs your soul. It lets you know when you have touched or moved someone. Knowing that, feeling that, is a chance for you to grow in your work in a way that training cannot give, that on-set experience cannot provide, that auditioning will never truly afford you. The emotional response from an audience gives an actor an understanding of what works and what doesn’t, and how what you are doing lands on someone. You are given that opportunity in a showcase.
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and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Backstage or its staff.
