Goddess Anna Vocino and I were out on one of our epic ladydates when the convo turned to auditions that go south. Y’know the ones. You’ve done the prep. You’ve had the amazing preread. You’ve gotten ridiculously awesome feedback. You’re at the callback. You want this. You’re feeling great. Then something happens. You’re no longer into it. You’re in your head. You’re overly concerned with what everyone else is doing. You’re psyching yourself out. You’ve left your body. And that’s it. The audition is snakebit. It’s over.
This happens all the time. Why?
It’s hard to pinpoint, but if you *can* go through your process, trace your steps, try and find the “black box” from the cockpit of the crashed plane that is that audition after it’s all over, you WILL benefit from having had the experience.
Now, I’m not one to dwell on the “what went wrong” of it all, so while I’m suggesting you go there and figure out at what point you lost the love for the whole thing, I’m suggesting you do so in service of learning from it.
Here — from the aforementioned Goddess Anna Vocino:
I have learned that whenever something is snakebit in the acting process (more specifically, the AUDITIONING process), I have found that if I’m vigilant, the thing that feels snakebit or off is usually something that I can gain clarification on so that I never make that mistake again.
So whenever something feels snakebit, it’s always something that I learn from — even though the learning comes later in the process, when I’m done smarting from not getting the part.
When something feels like it has gone awry, the best thing to do is to take my lumps and move on to the next opportunity to feel good as quickly as possible. It feels good to realize as quickly as possible, “I coulda done so much better there, and now I know so I’ll never make THAT mistake again!!”
Amen! Learning from it is the best you can hope for, once you know it’s all over anyway.
So, the next time you feel the love go out of the project for you, that moment you feel yourself losing control of your audition, that instant that you know, “I’m out. It’s snakebit,” start by forgiving yourself IMMEDIATELY (because it happens to all of us), then pinpoint the steps along the road to snakebit so you can find the one (or ones) that could’ve gone another way based on things you DO control (and sometimes, those things are few, of course).
Finding out what it was that you heard, felt, experienced, judged about the material, decided about your ability to succeed, thought about your fellow actors who were also auditioning, dreamed about the change in your life that would come with this booking, fretted about making rent without this booking, WHATEVER that derailed the read is not a means to beat yourself up — it’s a way to get better at spotting the misstep, next time. Hopefully before it happens!
Bonnie Gillespie is living her dreams by helping others figure out how to live theirs. Wanna work with Bon? Start here. Thanks!
Originally published by Actors Access at http://more.showfax.com/columns/avoice/archives/001607.html. Please support the many wonderful resources provided by the Breakdown Services family. This posting is the author’s personal archive.