In response to yesterday's post, today's training was uneventful. I was supposed to read a chunk of the quiz questions, and practice doing the quiz and scoring simultaneously, which is a big part of the multitasking required in quizmastering. Except, the venue was in Quincy, in case you don't know Quincy as my fellow quizmaster but it, it is where twenty somethings go to die. So not a lot of turn out on a Wednesday for trivia night, actually no turn out, the place was empty. The bartender chalked it up to last night's play off game. We stuck around for an hour, and then gave up on the venture. I'm still getting paid, and it was nice getting to leave early, especially cause it's such a pain getting back, but the training would have come in handy.
In other news, the topic I was going to write about was preparation. How do you prepare for an audition. If they gave you something specific to prepare, that's easy, read the rest of the text or as much as you can get, piece together the given circumstances and make choices based on that work. Or, what about when you are presenting two contrasting pieces. That I find more challenging, actually. Being told what to prepare is kind of a crutch for me to lean on, "this is my text, now I work on it" and I feel there is less judgement because they know this is what they gave you, and this is what you did with it. I find monologue auditions of my own choosing much more stressful and difficult. Maybe because I haven't really locked down a good way of preparing monologues yet. I feel like in the case of a full performance, I have all this context around which to build and prepare, from the director to my castmates to the production itself, all that context gives me structure and goals to meet and a circumstance in which I rehearse. Working on my own, I'm sort of at a loss sometimes. I guess what I do is sort of run the piece in my head, think through the beats, the shifts and accompanying tactic changes, the relationship, etc. It's very intellectually driven for me, and sometimes that works, othertimes I get to the audition and the piece just doesn't take off. I've worked a lot in classes on how to prepare monologues, and I felt like this past semester was kind of a breakthrough but one which I'm yet to fully harnass so that I'm consistently doing work in auditions where I'm like "fuck yeah you saw that shit" which is what I want. I don't lack for material, I have five monologues in rotation, three contemporary and two classical and another contemporary I've been meaning to learn but haven't yet. Still all this is taking on poignancy because guess what's around the corner STAGESOURCE. This is my first time doing it, and now that I'm graduated, I'd really like to start making some steps forward in my career and Stagesource is an opportunity to do that if I get seen for the right roles. I also have to be ready for nothing to come of it. Acting is hard, huh? I am certainly (not) the first person to ever say that, ever.
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