with Max Barsness
March 25th - April 22nd
An audition is an opportunity to enhance and evolve your craft while demonstrating the level and range of your work to a casting director. You want to dissolve the false belief it is to get a job. Fact: you could deliver the best audition the casting director has ever witnessed, making them laugh and cry from their hearts but you are too tall, have blue eyes, remind the director of his ex-wife, cologne is too strong, have big hands, look like the lead’s sibling, voice bit too high. etc. etc. You do not control being right for a role.
In this class, we will approach the audition from the belief of what we can control. Focusing on tasks that can keep us present & quell our anxieties. An opportunity to focus on an aspect of the character. What do we want for our characters? How does our personal life affect the story we are trying to tell? What is our relationship to the material and how we can best serve ourselves and therefore serve the story? We will approach the audition as an opportunity to focus on an aspect of your craft or self-development. This task orientated approach serves to make your work specific, unique, and driven, while silencing the voices of self-judgment, self-criticism, and most of all performance anxiety. You will be so focused on achieving the task-at-hand that “the room” is owned by your will to overcome, to expose, to express, to heal, to voice, to prove to yourself what you know is true.
The class will offer definitive insight into the business of casting. How to develop personal
relationships, recognize casting WANTS you to book, taking adjustments, and asking the right
questions. You will have the opportunity the other side of the table. We will work on script
interpretation and analysis with a focus on achieving the unpredictable. There are choices you can
guess, and everyone will expect them. There are choices that are a risk and involve a leap of faith...
you want to exist in this place. You can always “dial it back” or even “phone it in” if that is what is
needed. You want to present work that always keeps the casting director intrigued and on their
toes. Tension wins a room.