We’re coming up to audition time for musicians and actors looking to get college places, so this post is aimed specifically at those groups, but I think all of us can learn something from it. So read on…
I always recommend that my auditioning students have some sort of back-up plan, so that if they don’t get a college place they’ll still have something halfways organised for the year ahead. The reason for this is to avoid making an already stressful situation worse. All auditioning aspiring actors know that the places in colleges are limited, and that it’s entirely possible that even if you audition well, you might not get selected. With that in mind, it’s not a good idea to add extra pressure by going to your auditions worrying about not getting in because you have no idea what you’ll do with yourself for a year if you don’t!
A couple of my students told me about their experience of doing the rounds of acting college auditions last year. They weren’t successful in getting a place. When I asked them about the experience, they said something really interesting.
They both said they went into the experience knowing that they might not get a place. They did the sensible thing and made sure they had a back-up plan. But they both admitted that, by the final audition, they’d both felt an emotional investment in their back-up plan. They were almost looking forward to it. They almost didn’t mind not getting through the audition.
They didn’t get through. And they (almost) didn’t mind. Because they had really cool back-up plans.
Plans and consequences
I think this story demonstrates something really important about the nature of planning. First of all, planning is important. You need to have plans. Plans are so important that FM Alexander spent time in his seminal chapter Evolution of a Technique explaining a model for how to create them.[1]
FM tells us to have a plan, because without it we have no blueprint for the creation we wish to bring about. But we need to be aware, too, that the creation of a plan isn’t enough, in and of itself. If we create a plan and we don’t like it, our commitment to carrying it out will be low. If we like the plan, we will be more motivated to carry it out effectively and efficiently.
And this is what tripped up my students. They knew that getting a place in acting school was difficult. So they made a ‘mental reservation’ – in a sense, they accepted the unlikelihood of getting a place, and mentally said goodbye to it.[2] In a sense, they gave up the mission of getting into drama school! They created a back-up plan that was so interesting and creative that they could place an emotional investment in it. In other words, they effectively made the ‘back-up’ their actual Plan A. And now that’s the reality that they are living.
Plan B really should be ‘Plan B’
So I’m not telling you to go into audition rounds without having a Plan B. It really does take some of the pressure off a difficult situation. But I am telling you that you need to be honest with yourself. Do you really want that place? Then commit to it.
Commit to the experience of doing the best you can. You may still not achieve a place – there are many applicants and only relatively few places. And if you don’t get the place, you will feel disappointment. But at the very least you will be able to feel pleased that you had committed to the process. And then you can look to your plan B.
[1] FM Alexander, The Use of the Self, Orion, London, 2001, p.39.
[2] FM Alexander uses this phrase in his discussion of students going about things in their own way; they hear the teacher’s advice and say they accept it but don’t really act upon it. I think we can also do that with ourselves: say we are going to do one thing, and actually commit to doing another. See FM Alexander, Constructive Conscious Control of the Individual, Irdeat ed., p.398.
Image courtesy of truengtra_pae at FreeDigitalPhotos.net