Time for some inspiration

I just listened to another great Everything Acting Podcast which came at a great time during my end of June/July audition marathon.  Take a listen as Tim Schall, an actor and cabaret singer in St. Louis talks about his audition process with equity theatres in his region (and the emotions experienced and the attitudes needed) to make it the best it can be.  Good stuff.  Take a listen!

Tim Schall

“Acting is not anaerobic”

I’m skating on top of a white, hard, cold, frozen sheet of ice, only imagining the deep water underneath that will be unbridled by the warm hand of the coming spring, but that is now being held firm under the cold’s unrelenting grip.  I imagine myself swimming in its depths, the water flowing over me and through me, a much prefered state, but instead I teeter on the surface, separated from the ebb and flow underneath.  

This is what breathing in an audition is still like for me and has been the source of frustration for years.  This is my final frontier, my last bridge to cross in order to achieve the performance-calibar audition.  I’ve written about my quest here, here, and (a kind of funny outtake of how breathing can go wrong) here.   

While listening to another Everything Acting podcast, Caryn West, (voted the #1 acting coach in 2009 by Backstage subscribers) was being interviewed regarding audition preparation.  Very early in the interview, she addressed the importance of breathe in an audition situation.  

“Acting isn’t anaerobic,” she says.  Anaerobic means literally a lack of oxygen.  This, along with a lack of flow,  has always been my problem in a nervously charged audition situation.  Caryn talks about how, as performers, we effort our way through an audition with only our heads when everything great about good acting, she says, comes from the gut, fueled only through the breath.  She talked about how performers forget to tap into their lungs and, instead, become helpless to the  “fight-or-flight response where the breath is held prisoner.  It is in this shallow state that we try to do our best.  I have experienced this firsthand.  My efforts to find my breath and ground my body worked great 20 minutes prior in the hallway but would be immediately eradicated the minute I found myself in front of “the table of expectant faces.” 

It was what Caryn said next that stopped me in my tracks because of its seemingly revolutionary nature.  She asks her students, when faced with the words we all hear in an audition, “Are you ready?” or “Start whenever you are ready” to actually take the time to get ready and not to just launch; to actually take control, to ground, to dig under the nervous ice below or feet and to dive.  She recommends, in a 15-20-second pause (which in an audition can feel like a lifetime), taking three very deep breaths as low as possible to center ourselves and tap in. …and only then to begin our audition.

Had I heard that correctly?  Was this my missing link?  Should I have been doing deep breathing right there in the room instead of in the hall?  Caryn talks about how opera singers take breaths just before musical phrases (something I happen to understand) so why aren’t actors doing this before emotional responses in their auditions?  Why indeed.

I’m eager to try this new practice in my next audition, to dive below and let the waves carry me hence.