Balancing Intellect and Emotion at Audition Doctor
In an interview for Whatsonstage, Kate Fleetwood spoke about Medea’s rehearsal process and said: “It’s hard in rehearsals to get that contact with something emotionally whilst also trying to contain an intellectual dialogue as well; it’s easy to bellow and scream your way through these things, you have to make sure you’re clear and the argument is being addressed.”
Speeches that demand this balancing act are the speeches that Audition Doctor always encourages students to tackle. If properly worked on, these speeches often reveal vulnerability and a real mastery of craft. As Harriet Walter said in the Guardian: “Treat directors (and writers) as innocent until proven guilty. The good ones, if you don’t resist them, will take you places you never thought you could reach.”
However, as Fleetwood attests, it’s easy to confuse being loud with conveying honest emotion. This is a particular area in which countless students have cited Audition Doctor as being a great help.
Lenny Henry advised actors: “Think of long speeches as a series of connected thoughts, not one big clump of dialogue. Each thought, each sentence, is a separate piece of your armoury. Think through each sentence: about how you glue it together; what it means; how you feel when you say each thing. You’ll find it comes together like a kind of delicious soup.”
From the premeditated “actioning” of every thought, to spontaneous experimentation, Audition Doctor guides her students through a variety of techniques to ensure that the resultant performance is an original and true take on a character.
Aside from the obvious artistic reasons, students also come to Audition Doctor to gain practical knowledge on how to harness the inevitable nerves that most, if not all, actors suffer from in auditions.
Lesley Manville said in the Guardian: “Accept that you’re going to have nerves to begin with. I don’t know many actors who aren’t nervous the first time they do a performance on stage. You’re nervous about whether you can remember your lines; whether you can get through it; whether the audience are going to like it; whether the other actors are going to remember their lines, or you’ll have to bail somebody out. But after that, the nerves should get better.”
The level of preparation that each student goes through at Audition Doctor means that nerves do get harnessed and cease to negatively affect performances. With these under control, students find that they feel much freer to experiment, make bold choices and generally be unafraid to take risks. Although the outcome sometimes may not quite serve the writer’s intention or indeed your own, being vulnerable enough to make such unorthodox artistic decisions is what audition panels are looking for.
Audition Doctor sessions push students to combine imagination as well as thought, to risk and to embrace the uncertain outcomes that ensue. The sessions remain so popular because students can clearly chart their progress week by week as they take what they’ve learnt from one speech into the next. It is the students that persist in this unceasing quest for improvement at Audition Doctor that find they land the jobs they audition for.