12 Guideposts to a Compelling Audition

These are the 12 guideposts from Michael Shurtleff’s “Audition”. If you are into acting at all, these are essential points to consider. 

Guidepost 1: Relationships

Relationships are the foundation of acting. In order to express how you feel, you need to know what your relationship to the other characters are in order to be successful in the scene. However, it’s not enough to just say “She’s my mother/sister/girlfriend/classmate” or “He’s my brother/father/best friend/coworker” etc., you have to dig deeper and figure out how they make you feel. Do you love that girl because she is the most wonderful person you have ever met or do you hate the person so much it makes you want spit because every time they walk in the room they do something that just drives you crazy?

Guidepost 2: What are you fighting for?

Breaking down a scene into beats and sections is helpful but it doesn’t go deep enough. Instead of using goal, motivation, or any other customary terms, ask yourself “what are you fighting for?” and find a positive motivation. This will serve you in a stronger manner than a negative choice will. Dig deeper into what motivates the character because the actor can’t settle for whatever the character appears to be on the surface.

Guidepost 3: The Moment Before

Every scene begins in the middle. It’s up to the actor to figure out what happened before entering the room or wherever the scene takes place. The moment before is needed the most in the audition situation. Coming in with little or no thought to whatever happened before will cause the actor to take to long to warm up and you will lose the auditors attention very quickly. Don’t wait to get yourself going, get yourself going off stage and come on with whatever happened before the scene started. It needs to be specific and well defined. Prime yourself like priming a motor. Figure out the details of the scene and drop into an emotional state so you are aching to get up on that stage and start to fight. You want to work with your feelings, not you head.

Guidepost 4: Humor

Humor doesn’t mean making a joke or finding something funny in a situation. It is “that attitude towards being alive without which you would long ago have jumped off a Fifty-ninth street bridge”. It’s all those little things we do as humans to get us through the day. “Humor exists even in the humorless”. If you take the humor out of a situation instead of putting it in, you make a scene unlifelike.

Use your instincts to find humor in the situation. If your instincts are being interfered with, become conscious of humor and look for it. If every life situation has humor then every scene in every play does too as does every human being no matter how negative the character is. To be a great star you have to find the humor.

Guidepost 5: Opposites

Whatever an actor’s motivation in a scene is, there is always an opposite that is true as well. Find this and put it in the scene too. Swinging the emotions makes a scene more interesting. Droning too long on a single thought or emotion and being consistent is “the heart of dull acting”.

Opposites tend to be one of the hardest guideposts to explain. The concept is murky but once you start doing it they will be eminently clear. Every emotion, desire, feeling, action, opinion, etc., has an opposite. Creating the opposite develops conflict. Conflict develops drama which sparks interest. Resolution isn’t interesting without the conflict and since we are trained in life to avoid and run away from conflict it’s hard to bring this on screen yet we need to show the process of dealing with pain.

Guidepost 6: Discoveries

We make discoveries every day and there needs to be discoveries in every scene. It could be something that happens for the first time or something that has happened a hundred times, either way there is something new about this experience. If you cannot find what is new, the acting will become boring.  Discoveries can be about anything, the more you make, the less you have to rely on “we do this everyday”–the more interesting your scene will be. Sometimes the discoveries won’t be written in the script and the actor will have to dig in the subtext to find them.

Guidepost 7: Communication and Competition

It is not enough for an actor to feel if that feeling isn’t being communicated. Nothing will happen if the feeling isn’t being communicated. However it goes both ways and requires a sender and a receiver where both sides need to acknowledge the message. All dramatic relationships are competitive. Contrary to popular belief or feeling, competition isn’t a negative thing. Without competition a dramatic relationship becomes dull. Games aren’t fun if the participants won’t compete. Playing with someone who won’t fight to win isn’t interesting to anyone. Get passed the stigma that comes with the concept of competition and realize that we as humans compete in everything we do. Competition is healthy. “An actor must compete or die”.

Guidepost 8: Importance

Plays and films are written about the most important moments in people’s lives. If it wasn’t important, who would leave the house to see it and what would be the point? If what you present is every day, it wouldn’t be interesting because we see it every day. Importance doesn’t have to be significant to others if it is emotionally important to you. For example, petty events like missing the subway or getting a wrong order to which you may throw a fit in real life, don’t give it any less in a scene. Look at the stakes in every scene, find the maximum importance, and add importance. Nobody will be listening to you otherwise.

Guidepost 9: Find the Events

One of an actor’s main tasks is to create the events of the play or film. An event can be change, confrontation, or climax. A production must progress and events make that movement possible. Something has to happen in order to move the story forward. Sometimes the events are so hidden they are almost imperceptible. It’s the actor’s job to root these out and make them happen.

Changes come in many forms and the more changes you create, the more alive the scene is. For every change you make, there will be several minor changes along the way. Fine actors register these changes which keeps them interesting to us. Ask yourself “What happens in this scene? What changes are made?” and then work to create them. Don’t accept that nothing happens, something has to happen. If the script doesn’t tell you then it’s your job to figure it out.

Guidepost 10: Place

Place has to be created by the actor in an audition scenario. Doing so will help you in creating reality in your reading. Figure out where you are before you come on stage. Place all the objects that would be in the room and figure out where all the other people in the scene would be standing.

Guidepost 11: Game Playing & Role Playing

We play games and take on roles all the time in real life. These are ways of dealing with reality. People play different roles in different situations. If you’re at work, school, or a party, you are still a person but you make different adjustments in different situations. It will help the actor to ask himself in each scene what the game they are playing is and what role do you assume to best play that game. Your answer will depend on the circumstances: What people want from you, what you want from them, what you are offering, and what they are expecting. What are the stakes of this game?

You may be willing to play one role if it is asked of you but if the circumstances change you may cast aside one role to assume another. Knowing the game and the roles will help provoke conflict and drama. Every relationship we have demands a different role and every situation we are in is a game. They all have different rules and the rules will tell us how to act in that role.

Guidepost 12: Mystery and Secret

Mystery and Secret are the most difficult guideposts to explain. After you’ve gone through all the other guideposts, add to it what you don’t know. The best acting always has a quality of mystery. Once you go through the guideposts and discover everything you can, there will always be something there that is unknown. No matter how well you know someone, there will always be something going on in their heart and mind that we can only wonder about. Add this wonderment about your scene partner to your audition and the wonderment about yourself too. These are mysterious feelings that can’t be spoken or explained. They can however be felt, therefore added to your audition.

Originally published by purpleslinky.com as a short summary of the book AUDITION by Michael Shurtleff.

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