A Change in the Weather

A Change in the Weather: Ok it’s been exactly a month. I really didn’t plan to take so long before writing another post, but, hey, things happen.

Ok, here goes (and excuse me if I’m a little rusty – as I’ve said, it’s been a while)…

*Deep breath*

So I won’t be going to drama school in September.

*Dramatic pause*

But I won’t be going to university either.

…

*Awkward pause while you digest the information and question my sanity*

…

But WAIT! Wait, please, hear me out…

Look, I think I’m going to have to break this down into random-and-not-necessarily-chronological chunks so that I can get my head around it all. I’ll start with my GSA audition on the 28^th April, though I’m not going to go through the whole thing from start to finish on here because a) this post is probably gonna be pretty long as it is, b) it was a little while ago now so the details might be a little hazy, and c) I didn’t get a recall there so screw them.

Ok maybe not that last one, but yeah really I’m not going to go through it all in too much detail because I really can’t see myself ever setting foot in GSA again. I’m sorry to have to say that, but there was just something about the place that I just didn’t like. It’s really difficult to put a finger on exactly but I think I just found the whole place a little bit patronising, and thought it tried too hard to be different (oh how that word makes me shudder…).

I really promise you that I’m not just saying this because I’m bitter (as you’ll see later when I talk about LAMDA, just because I get rejected from somewhere doesn’t necessarily mean I don’t like the place). I did actually, genuinely, really want to like GSA. It was my last audition. I wanted to feel at home there, to fall in love with it, to find my perfect drama school match blah blah blah (this is sounding like a dating blog). But I just couldn’t. So here I’ll sum up some of what happened. Be warned: the following may contain excessive moaning – but I hope that by the end of this post that will have changed.

I’ll quickly tell you about my monologues before I explain in a bit more detail about what I meant by the “patronising/trying to be different” stuff. Actually, I won’t tell you about my monologues, I’ll tell you about my monologue, because, weirdly, we were only asked for one of them. ONE?!? The other was supposed to be saved for the afternoon (though of course I never reached that stage), which I found pretty weird, but anyway… It was fine. I picked my modern piece because I think it’s a more well-rounded monologue than the Shakespeare, and I thought I did it pretty well (it was probably about my third best rendition of it out of the five schools that I performed it at), though unfortunately a boy who went only a few minutes before me, who actually looked a little bit like me, did another monologue that was very similar to mine which got a lot of laughs and had me gnashing my teeth in annoyance (inevitably, he got a recall…). But anyway, mine went fine. It was good, even. Not brilliant, but in my humble opinion it was certainly no worse than the monologue that the other boy had given a few minutes earlier.

Though not according to the panel.

*Sigh*

Anyway, back to what I was saying earlier; I’ll start with the acting workshop: I found the exercise in which we had to describe the view from our bedroom window patronising – not because it was a childish exercise or something like that, because I think that sort of thing can be a good way of judging people’s imagination/storytelling ability, but because they didn’t tell us anything at any stage about what they were looking for. I have been investigating the idea of drama school since about October 2009 – I know how difficult it is to get in. I know that all the schools look for slightly different things. I really can’t stand it when the schools pretend that it isn’t a competition; that we aren’t all desperate to know what it is that they want to see, so that we could try to provide it. They seem to think that by telling us what they were looking for, they would somehow be “sullying” the integrity of the audition process, or something like that. The lady running the workshop told us to “visualise the view from our bedroom window, and describe it”. Now I’m no genius, really, but I assumed that the sort of thing that they might like to hear would be a vivid, detailed vision of what I can see out of my bedroom window, filled in with colourful little details and personal touches, as if I can really see it all in front of my eyes and am really living in the moment of being in my bedroom looking out of the window. Made sense to me, anyway.

But apparently that’s not right – or at least, it can’t be, surely, or I might have got a recall? Because I know I gave a detailed, colourful, personalised description of what it’s like for me to look out of my bedroom window. I would have much preferred the lady to have said to us, “describe the view from your bedroom window, trying really hard to make it sound like a cartoon image”, or even, “describe the view from your bedroom window as if you were an alien from another planet who had never seen anything on Earth before”, because to me, those things require imagination, storytelling and characterisation. They have a clear goal. But what on earth is the goal for “describe the view from your bedroom window” supposed to be? It could be anything! If it was a test of who could give the most vivid description, then I could understand that, though clearly it wasn’t, as I know I gave a very vivid description and didn’t get a recall. I am trying to remember the descriptions given by those who later were given recalls, but I can’t bring to mind with any sort of clarity what exactly was different about those descriptions in comparison to everyone else’s (and yes, I know this exercise wasn’t the only thing we were judged on with regard to getting recalled or not but it certainly played a part). In fact, I don’t remember there being that much difference between anybody’s descriptions at all, to be honest.

Maybe they just wanted to check which candidates had the biggest back gardens as part of their “equal opportunities” policy or something…

If I were running a drama school, I would sit everybody down at the start of the audition and explain meticulously to everyone what type of drama school this was, what sort of methods of working we used, and what sort of attitude we liked to see in our applicants. And before each exercise, I would explain if there was anything in particular that we were looking for in the candidates and if there was anything which should be avoided (and this isn’t so people could bluff their way to success, it’s so that honest people like me could do the best they are capable of doing in that situation, and not accidentally do the wrong thing when they are perfectly capable of doing it much better).

I would love to be told what I need to do, even if it is far removed from what I personally like to do, as long as there is a clear goal – something to focus on. Because to me, an adaptable actor is a good actor. After all, acting is all about adapting yourself, changing, channelling your experiences in a way that they wouldn’t normally be channelled at that moment in your own life, right? It is to me, anyway. Yes, it’s great if you find somebody whose natural way of working is exactly in line with your own way of working, because that means you’ll work well together, but surely somebody whose natural way of working isn’t perfectly in line with yours but who manages to adapt themselves to it, and ends up enjoying it and giving just as much to it as they do with their original way of working, is actually more valuable to you in the long run? Those students are the ones who are going to be taking the risks – not the ones who blindly did the right thing without really knowing how, and don’t really know any other way.

If the audition process was a spatial awareness test and not an acting test, then at my imaginary drama school I would put the students in a room and tell them to remember where the door was, before blindfolding them, spinning them around, and asking them to point to it. At GSA, they wouldn’t bother telling you to remember the door, they would just blindfold you without telling you anything and spin you around and then ask you to point to the door; some people would naturally have remembered the layout of the room and visualised it turning around them as they span, and therefore would be able to remember where the door was, because that’s just what those people are like. Others would not have remembered and wouldn’t be able to point to the door with any level of accuracy.  But if everybody had been told to remember where the door was before being blindfolded, then some of those students who might have otherwise failed to remember where it was would have been able to remember, even though it wasn’t their original instinct to do so. Those students are the ones who would be hungry to learn and quick to adapt to new ideas, which would be things that I would like to see in my applicants if I was running a drama school.

If that didn’t make any sense (and it might not have done), then I’m sorry about that.

Anyway, I had planned to go on at this point and continue on to the movement workshop and explain why that was also patronising and tried too hard to be different, but I think I’ve probably bored you enough with the first part of this, and I don’t want to risk repeating some of the same points that I made earlier. So I’ll sum up my main experience of that second workshop in three words:

Angles, ambiguous, peculiar.

Yeah it was a weird workshop.

So yes, I probably won’t be heading back to GSA any time soon, as only one minute after the post-lunch spiel of “just because you’re not right for GSA doesn’t mean you’re not right for another school” the list of successful first-round auditionees had been read out, and my name hadn’t made the list.

To be honest with you, it’s no great loss to me. But as you might have guessed, the day did manage to annoy me quite a lot…

Sorry if I’m sounding grumpy by the way – this is my mindset as of approximately three or four weeks ago that I am describing here, and I will eventually get to how I am right now; but first, LAMDA…

There isn’t really much to say here to be honest, except that I was bitterly disappointed when I got the rejection (via email, just moments after the post had arrived – hah, there I was thinking that I would have to wait another twenty-four hours to find out…). But it was, indeed, a “no”, and if it wasn’t my interview that let me down then I don’t know what it could have been, unless they’d already got too many people like me in the second round or something like that. My audition speeches were genuinely as good as I’ve ever done them, so I can’t fault myself much there, really.

So with that email, my attempt at drama school 2012 was done. Finished.

Game over.

And I had really tried to tell myself that I would be able to brush it off, that I could just go straight off to university and then take things from there, and that I should just follow the plan. But somehow things are never quite that simple, are they?

I didn’t rush the decision. It did take me a while to think about it, get other people’s opinions (which I really did value, by the way, so thanks, those people), weigh things up and figure it out. But I came to the conclusion that I still want to be an actor more than anything else at all, that drama school is far and away the best way of achieving that goal, and that I do (somewhere deep down, maybe) have the ability to get in to a top drama school.

I just think that 18 is a bit too young to give up, to be honest.

Yes, my parents weren’t thrilled (understandably), but after a while they came round to the idea and realised that it’s what I want to do. No, the effort that they put into my education was not a waste. I am thrilled to bits that I went to the schools that I did and got the grades I did, because not only will that prove very helpful for getting jobs, but it’s also helped shape me as a person. But acting is what I want to do, and I’m not prepared to throw in the metaphorical towel just yet. They understand now, and I’m happy about that. I’ve just got to push onwards and upwards now until next year’s auditions, I guess.

So yes, to sum things up, there’s been a bit of a change in the weather since the last time I posted here. The sun is out, my Dad’s mowing the lawn, I’m walking around in a t-shirt for the first time since about October and I’m now going to actually really try and be an actor. Because I’ve realised that I really can’t have a repeat of the last nine months or so, when I focused in specifically on drama schools and missed out on the bigger picture. I want to take courses, I want to do actual acting, whatever it may be. Yes, I did plays this year at my theatre group/youth theatre, but I’ve been doing that for seven years! I will keep doing those things, but I also want to move forward a bit, I want to try different things too.

I want to dip my toes in the real world of acting, and theatre/film as a whole, not just to make me seem a more attractive prospect to the drama schools, but also to help me develop as an individual interested in the performing arts in general.

So it’s now approaching summer, and I’m looking for a front of house job at a theatre. A nice bit of experience to have, I think (ok, it’ll probably be deathly boring but I’m definitely willing to give it a shot – it could be useful, after all). I’m also going to be one of several thousand people in the Olympic Games Opening Ceremony, which will be interesting, so I’ll keep you posted on that if anything of note happens.

But most noteworthy of all, is the intriguing news that I am going to be touring in a play for two months from the end of August!

Ok, it’s theatre-in-education, TIE for short, so it’s not quite the same as actually touring a real proper play to real proper adults visiting real proper theatres. But it’s still touring a play – which I think will be a fantastic thing to be able to say I have done, and a great bit of experience to get under my belt. And I have pretty much the main part in it, which is pretty awesome actually, even if, as I said, it’s not quite the same as a “normal” play.

And hell, it’s paid, which makes it a very attractive proposition to me right now.

So anyway, that should pretty much have brought you up to date with things. I apologise an absurd amount for the ridiculous length of this post, but I had a lot to say, and it’s been a while. I promise the next post will be shorter, funnier and more interesting.

But enough from me; go and enjoy the weather – the sun’s shining again, and I don’t know about you, but I for one am planning to make the most of it.