Lessons from a serial auditioner

What an emotional rollercoaster the past couple of weeks have been. Story to come, but firstly let's get the practical out of the way. 2 musical auditions, 2 film auditions, 1 film callback; and here are the lessons I shall impart from them.

1. If you're asked to prepare a monologue, make sure you create the opportunity to deliver it! At the Beauty World audition in Singapore, the director didn't ASK for the monologue (though you were told to prepare one) - after presenting your song, he just asked "do you have anything else for me?" Open-ended, and a few missed the opportunity. By extension, this applies to the song as well! This lesson I learned from a friend who is still regretting the song he didn't sing.

2. Always prepare a monologue. I was so caught by surprise at the Standoff / Taiko audition that I did the first thing that came to my head - the opening to Dylan Thomas' Under Milk Wood. Which I think I did "too theatre" for the camera, and it ran too quickly.

3. Make sure that the accompanist works with you. Coming from a musically inexperienced background, this is very important - my accompanist for Beauty World played some funky stuff during my song that threw me off. I'm sure that it wasn't funky in the big picture, but as a noob singer I needed some very VERY simple stuff - timing and chord. Jazz it up and I shit bricks.

4. Film is a LOT quicker than theatre. This is from very basic experiences so far (ie Jarum Halus), but what it means is that you're expected to 'get into character' a lot more quickly for film castings and callbacks. I feel with theatre you've the rehearsal times to explore and discover your character before production - with film, it seems that there's minimal rehearsal time so the exploration and discovery stages need to be done before then. Most important lesson: if you have the script, USE IT TO PREPARE IMMEDIATELY.

6. Film is a lot QUIETER than theatre. Yes #5 is "use the script". Now I have an annoying automatic program in my head that goes "if you have an audience you have to project your voice". Bloody useful program on stage, not so bloody useful in front of a camera.

7. Do NOT give up. Again, drawing from my experience at Beauty World, I had a wonderful breakthrough during the dance audition. Now this bloody dance audition was CHALLENGING. Everybody else in the damned room was keeping up better than I was. Bigger, smaller, dancer-dressed, casually-dressed, what have you. I later discovered that what they did is street jazz, or something like it, and holy shitamoly it was hard. I of course had no experience with it whatsoever. They went through the choreography so fast, and asked for such funky stuff, and in a quick timing - to say I was demoralised is mild understatement. There was a time halfway through when I was ready to quit. Raise the white flag. Throw in the towel.

I suppose I was lucky that I didn't bring one to throw. I kept at it, encouraging myself, stiffening my upper lip, and just telling myself that no Singaporean is gonna make me quit - and thankfully I think I managed a half-decent performance at the end for the director. The very fact that I kept at it and continued doing it meant that more stuff got ingrained into my body, so it helped loads and I did get better and better.

8. Practise, practise, practise. Breathing exercises. Vocal exercises. Enunciation exercises. Vocal range exercises. Pitching exercises. Dance exercises. Stretching. Monologues. Rhythm exercises. Isolation exercises. Body-building exercises. Strength exercises. Talk about discipline, eh?