written 8/2019

I have a fabulous new high school student who is preparing to audition for her high school musical, a show she is very passionate about. As we were finishing up her lesson she said, “Now all I need to do is get in my directors’ heads and find out exactly what they are looking for.”

Nope, nope, and nope. Absolutely under no circumstances should anyone start down that dark and twisted road to nowhere, full of unnecessary pain and suffering. It is an exercise in futility that will only succeed in making you crazy.

You can’t know. You don’t want to know. (It’s ugly up there in someone else’s mind.) You only have one course of action: prepare to the best of your abilities and then perform/audition to the best of your abilities. You treat the audition like a performance and show them your skill, your passion for the material, your love of performing, without (much) regard for the outcome. And then, the truly hard part…

You let it go.

Yup. Practically impossible but absolutely essential.

LET. IT. GO. Out into the universe. You’ve prepared, you’ve practiced, you’ve done your best work at that time, in that place.

That’s all you can do.

It is the only way to stay (somewhat) sane.

And this way it stays about the work, about the process, about the love we have for the art form; those things we can control. The rest is out of our hands.