Unit 24 - Auditions for actors

Monday 5^th February

Today I was starting to work on my audition pieces.

To start the session, I carried out a full vocal warmup which included many different exercises such as the intercostal diaphragmatic breathing exercise, long note on ‘ha’, ‘pah, tah, kah’, tongue twisters and consolidation exercises. It has been a while since I have carried out the diction exercises and therefore I have lost the speed of which I used to be at. I need to make sure that I am practicing these exercises regularly to ensure that I can get them back up to the speed that I was at and then push past this to get them even faster.

We started by looking at my contemporary audition piece. The monologue that I have chosen is an extract from the play ‘Stepping Out’ where I will be playing the role of Mavis. Mavis is a tap dance teacher and she is teaching an adult tap class. I thought that this would be a good monologue for me to perform because I am very familiar with tap dancing but I feel like it will also push me out of my comfort zone because this piece is quite old and dance teachers were very different then to what they are now. I have carried out some research into the play and the character which I will be playing. Here is a link to some information about the play:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stepping_Out_(play)
Here is a link to a website which has a bit more information about the characters as it is for an audition:
https://caods.org.uk/jpfiles/SteppingOutinfo.pdf
I have had a look at this monologue a few times before today so I do know some of the lines but not very much of it. Although I only knew a few of the lines, we still decided to work on the piece. From now, I need to start practicing in my tap shoes because I think this will help me with the characterisation. I started practicing today with a hat because this is used during the dance routine which Mavis is teaching to the class. This will also help me get into character.

I then moved on to looking at my Shakespeare piece. I have selected a piece from ‘Romeo and Juliet’ however, I am not 100% that I would like to perform this monologue. I therefore need to carry out some research into other Shakespearian monologues which may appeal to me.