As we think about trying to cast the next apartment play, we’re realizing we don’t know the best way to go about it. The best way to go about seeing actors. The theater we’re interested in making is pretty weird stuff. It’s not for everybody. Maybe we need to create an audition process that’s entirely our own – a la the Neo-Futurists. They’ve crafted a way of holding auditions that tells them exactly what they need to know about potential future company members.
We get so stuck sometimes in conventions that we keep doing it all just the way we learned it: have a dramatic and comedic and classical monologue ready to go, two minutes, thank you, and cold readings at callbacks. But the sole purpose of an audition is to get to know a performer you don’t yet know (or, maybe, to see how certain performers work together – how they might participate in an ensemble). We should create a getting-to-know-you method that suits our needs as a company that’s interested in the wacky, the site-specific, the nonlinear, the playful, the ensemble-created.
What might an audition like that look like?
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Give them a challenge – surprise them. See how they do with it. Like: Here is a sheet of paper. Your audition is to do something with this sheet of paper. Come back in 5 minutes.
Or give them a text. Like a Mac Wellman, or an Elfriede Jelinek. Something with no characters. Without clear thruline. Non-linear. Tell them they can use the text however they want to create their audition – doesn’t need to use all the text – doesn’t need to use it in the order it’s written. Come back in 5 minutes. Or, email it to them the day before their audition, like a take-home test.
Hmm.
This creativity test: http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/galleries/2010/07/10/creativity-test.html
I like this as an inspiration for the description:
“This job will be sort of like being a community organizer at a non-profit. It combines elements of marketing, PR, and sales, but it’s really something different. I don’t expect that there are a lot of people out there who already kn0w how to do this well, so I’m going to train them, personally. Not that I know how to do this, but we’ll learn together. Every workday is going to start with a huddle at 9am and a plan for the day’s activities and an intensive six hours of work. Every workday is going to end with an hour of learning… reading Kawasaki and Godin and Ries and Trout, talking with invited experts, meeting with members of the community about what worked and what didn’t worked. Everyone who joins the program (and survives for a year) will come out with an almost supernatural ability to take a dead, lifeless site on the internet and make it into the hottest bar in town. That’s a skill worth learning for the 21st century.”
What are we auditioning?
The person. The skills. The creativity. Why they do art.
Hmmm. Let’s think about that an use as a guide for our process.
[...] to make our auditions as non-standard, as Yinzerspecific as we could. We wanted to figure out how we could craft an audition that would work for this very particular project. So, obviously, no monologues. Instead, we handed out [...]