This column is part of the Craftwork series, in which student artists answer the question: “What piece of art has made you more of the person you are?” If you are interested in submitting a column for consideration, please email gpp5@duke.edu.
In college, everyone experiences an audition of some kind. All of us applied to get in. Walk-on athletes have to try out for the team. Pre-med students have to interview before shadowing at Duke Med. Even professors face an “audition” when it comes time to evaluate courses. Some auditions are easier to ace, while others, the scarier ones, take a lot more preparation and have little chance of success.
Whether or not you come from a performance background, presenting yourself in an audition-like situation is often daunting and leads to a lot of self-questioning. Stressful questions like, “Why do I want this?” “Who am I doing this for?” or even “Am I being [insert impressive adjective here] enough?” can pop up at the most inopportune times and confuse our identities and our core beliefs about ourselves.
Last summer, I attended the Duke in London: Theater program and wondered how I could extend learning about theater into my free time, as though the curriculum didn’t already include enough theater (we watched one play per night Monday through Friday for six weeks). I decided to pack a book that I had bought online— "Audition" by Michael Shurtleff. The book, described as “absolutely indispensable to any aspiring or even mildly ambitious actor,” caught my attention, because I loved not only acting but also the butterflies that accompanied me to every audition.
One Sunday afternoon, I remember sitting in a hair salon in Chinatown, London, getting my hair permed for the first time. I pulled out my book and learned three invaluable lessons about auditioning.
The first of these is: don’t be someone you’re not. According to Shurtleff, “Most people go into acting to get out of themselves, to get away from their everyday humdrum selves and become someone else who is glamorous, romantic, unusual, different. And what does acting turn out to be? Using your own self.” I used to believe that acting was the craft of completely inhabiting the life of someone else, almost as if I wasn’t myself anymore while acting. Instead, it should be using my own self to react to different contexts presented to me.
I think this point can be applied to what many of us believe success to be. Perhaps we think success is a particular job title, set of traits or a certain salary that we have not yet attained. Even once we do attain it, another tier of success soon materializes, determining the next definition of success in each of our lives.
Instead, what if we viewed success as an inherent part of each of us? Then, we need only to use ourselves fully and imagine the possibilities with a willingness to take risks. That said, my first point can be revised as: don’t be someone you’re not, because you don’t need to be.
"Audition" also underlined the importance of prioritizing real relationships. Instead of treating auditions like scary evaluations, it would be a lot easier to treat them as opportunities to engage with real people. “Better to take the chance of communicating to the person sitting on the other side of that desk. Treat him like a prospective friend instead of a hangman. It might work.” What I love about acting is the ultimate goal to create human relationships onstage. We shouldn’t be delivering rehearsed lines at each other; we should be focused on actively engaging with each other.
What could help even more to prioritize relationships is to realize that the interviewers are people too. “It’s a lot harder to interview people than it is to be interviewed,” Shurleff says. With that in mind, we can relax a little more and be helpful to the interviewer by opening up. “Try a little empathy. Put yourself in the interviewer’s shoes.”
The third big takeaway from "Audition" is to not take rejection personally. There is really no way of knowing for sure why you get rejected. In acting, people can actually be rejected because they’re too short, or too similar in appearance to the director’s ex-wife: “What good will it do for you to find out you’re too short for the leading lady or too tall for the leading man? The solution would be to go home and cut your leg off or put on a pair of stilts; neither will help you.”
The best solution is to shake it off and be thankful for the opportunity to have auditioned at all. Instead of judging your own performance on what you think your auditioners wanted, it is much more grounded to evaluate yourself on how true you were to your identity.
What’s your next audition? You've got this. Give it your best shot. You’ve got nothing to lose.
Harmony Zhang is a Trinity senior.
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