Auditioning is always difficult, apparently even when it's not an actual audition.
Today, I had the students split into pairs and they had 15 minutes to go over their assigned scenes before they performed for the class. I also had them introduce themselves before they started as if it were a real audition. We also went over their vocab/skills before we started and I tried to give them a criteria to keep in mind for their performance, including eye contact, vocal projection, presence, etc. They did really well in terms of participating and being patient. They were very respectful when watching each other, and succeeding in applying most of the suggestions I made for their scenes. If I gave them a simple adjustment for their scene, or a line reading – they understood and went for it.
However, I'm still having difficulty with getting them to take bigger risks with their character choices – sometimes it happens and sometimes it doesn't. To be fair, I think today was difficult for them in terms of focusing on character because they didn't have the same amount of time to invest in developing the scene- like we had with the scenes from last week. It's especially difficult for many of them to perform a cold reading because many of them are insecure about speaking English. It's frustrating because as much as I want to help them improve their acting and performance skills, I feel like they could also benefit from extra time going over their quickwrites/journals for class, or having more one- on- one conversations with them to insure they understand the concepts, but there just isn’t enough time to give everyone the attention I think they deserve.
I'm really excited for next week because I'm devoting most of the time to let them rehearse their scenes for the culminating performance and it should give me the opportunity to observe their progress more closely. In a way, I wish I could have worked on one major scene this whole time with them – and worked on very specific skills each time… ain't hindsight a bitch…
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