Insights on Becoming a Real Artist After A Collegiate Theatre Education

(Photo by Stephen Duncan)

I had started this blog with the intent of telling you how I have found surprising delight in this year’s audition season. But then I realized, there was a deeper self-discovery I needed to share with you first about how I learned to reevaluate my lifestyle as an artist after college. You can expect to see my audition blog in a little while. Right now, I want to tell you how to balance hard work with artistic freedom and how to validate yourself as one artist in a world of many. I want to tell you about how I finally learned to forgo my perfectionism and relax into what I learned in college, to become a healthier and more confident artist than I’ve ever been before.

I will start with a disclaimer saying that I absolutely do not want to discount in anyway the valuable education I received in college or my caring professors. I am more discussing the harmful way in which my own perfectionistic brain interpreted my college education. A college theatre and dance department will really get inside your head, especially if you are a perfectionist like me. I will say that being two years removed from the saturation in theatre education has proved extremely beneficial to me as a performing artist. Here is why:

Beating a Dead Horse ... Or Tennis Ball

When you are in school, you receive correction after correction, note after note on your performance work (understandably so, as this is what you pay heaps of money for). But by the time you are a senior in college, you are usually so polished that half of the corrections you receive from various instructors end up conflicting, because no one knows what to tell you at that point. You just end up being beaten back and forth like a tennis ball in a court between varying opinions on nit-picky things like whether or not to wear panty hose under your dress, which inflection you should slate with, and how big of steps you should take to the piano. I’m not kidding! I actually received all of those notes. Now, I know all my beloved college professors meant very well, and I will always be very fond of them and grateful for their teachings. But for a good student type like me, my senior year had me so wrapped up in tedious critiques that I actually thought quietly to myself that I sucked. I began to feel like I couldn’t get anything right, and probably shouldn’t pursue theatre as my career anymore.

Standby

I graduated from college in 2017, and until quite recently I hadn’t done much related to musical theatre at all. Honestly, I was so thankful to be rid of it all, that I didn’t even want to think about subjecting myself to it again upon the freedom of graduation. I had gotten too bogged down in detail after detail. It was like I was trying to find my way to perfect, but every time I achieved one layer, I’d peel it back to find a new layer, and a new one. This endless work was overwhelming, a perfectionist’s worst nightmare, and ultimately became my downfall for a little bit. They say you have to love it enough to want to do the work, and I did. But I was doing the work so much that I was forgetting to love what I was working towards. So, instead of trying my hand at performing professionally I went to work at Disney World and then started teaching theatre and dance in my hometown. Up until a few months ago, I still dreaded auditions, I didn’t want to sing. I didn’t want to act. I didn’t want to put to use any of the skills I learned in college because all the nit-picking and polishing from my senior year just had me confused, defeated, and overwhelmed.

At two years out of college I genuinely thought I was awful and was just kidding myself if I thought I could do this. My musical theatre career was on major standby because of it. But then a few months ago I got out my external hard drive, and I pulled up an old video from school of me singing in one of my classes. And with a mindset two years clean of college, I watched myself from a non-critical lens for the first time since high school. And I thought to myself: You know what? You are actually decent. And that is when I decided I could be good. That is when I decided I was going to jump into this year’s audition season with both feet and do the very best I could do and have that be enough.

Artistic Freedom and Empowerment

I went on to make a brand-new performance reel that is leagues better than the one I made in college. And I made it without my heels on. I totally updated my website and made new cover letters. I updated my song book contents. I resurrected old songs and monologues from college that I sounded great doing, even if they weren’t necessarily as impressive or didn’t have as many high notes. I took out songs and monologues that had gone to seed in my soul even if everyone else claimed they were better suited to my type. As my good friends Maria Kondo and Sabrina Sieg reminded me, I only held onto the material that brought me joy. I submitted my materials to at least fifty different theatre companies because in the glorious absence of writing useless dance concert papers, I had the time to research theatres in advance. I got to travel to more auditions this season than I’ve ever gotten the chance to travel to during an audition season because I wasn’t tied down by collegiate obligations or handicapped by dorm life. It oh so cinematically felt like I was dusting off my old parts, re-learning the curves of the track, and getting ready to enter the race again. Haley was back, stronger and smarter than ever before! And guess what? I successfully achieved a higher callback – audition ratio than I everhave.

Now for a type-A student like me, these minor tweaks I made were a total rebellion against school. For literally any other normal person, this was what you would call “taking something with a grain of salt.” Well call it what you will, salt or rebellion, this integration of my personal comfort and artistic happiness with my college education was exactly the change I needed in my artistic career.

Find Your You

You see, I think it was really nice for me to have that two-year break from college to essentially weed eat my brain. Without my subconscious knowing it, the information from college that resonated positively with me stayed inside, and the information that stressed me out and confused me had time to dissipate and make its way out of my head. In that time, I marinated my brain in the teachings I could execute well, while still staying true to myself and avoiding turning into a cookie-cutter clone product of a collegiate theatre and dance department. My time away separated me from nit-picking and low self-confidence and helped me re-discover my own unique passion for musical theatre and dance, and how I can bring that to people in my own way.

I want to make it clear once more that I am not discounting the important things I learned in college. My point in this blog is interpretation and application. You just can’t worship every single detailed note you receive and risk basing your whole artistic identity around whether or not you should wear flats or heels to your audition. Because in the end it does not matter. Those notes don’t rule you. You have to find your you within those notes you receive. You need to find the wavelength you can thrive on, not the wavelength your professors said you should be on. If everyone were on that same wavelength, then everyone would be the exact same auditionee in yet another jewel toned dress with a generic 32-bar cut and a perfectly trimmed monologue. While these things are considered to be “just what do you” in the professional world, are they really memorable? Are they really individual? Are they really going to set you apart from everyone else?

Pep-Talk

If there is anyone out there like twenty-two-year-old me who is walking the line between being a great student and a thriving artist, remember this: You were good enough to pursue this career in the first place. Remember that you are in school to trim yourself up, not to totally eradicate who you are. Text books aren’t likable or castable. People are likeable and castable. Real live people who make mistakes but who also make bold choices, even if they aren’t “correct” in the professional world.

Screw Petty Rules

The arts are subjective, so to think there is one right answer, or that if you break this or that rule you won’t get cast, is silly. To think the color of your eyeshadow at your dance call or what you are wearing in your headshot is going to prevent you from being cast is ridiculous. And if casting directors don’t like the earrings you wore, or the way you chose to wear your hair, or the fact that you have a hop in your step, then they can shove it. You don’t bow down to them, and if you try, you will suddenly look small and timid and unmemorable like half of the other people who let the “professionalism” stigma get the best of their artistic individuality. You are just as much a person as they are, and if you are memorable, have a good audition, and are the type of performer a company is looking for, you will get cast. But if you are stressing out in you audition over ridiculously detail-oriented crap, you won’t be able to focus on the important things, which are how committed you are to the moment, but more importantly, how good it feels to perform for yourself, and not for anyone else. Not your professors, not the casting directors, not the audience members, not any of your fellow auditionees, but for your own artistic expression.

Be Your Happy Artistic Self

So you know what? Take the hard things out of your book for now. Only implement into your audition techniques that you have absolutely mastered. Sure, we want to always be working at home to be better, but if belting an F is all you’ve got right now, then belt the dang F and do it the best you can do it. Don’t let imperfection stop you from putting yourself out there. You don’t want to have to think about anything other than loving the moment and being one-hundred percent the essence of YOU. You are all you’ve got in this industry. You are your selling point. You are the constant in a world of continuously shifting contracts and chaotic auditions. You have the opportunity to stay just as awesome and just as much yourself. You being a reflective artist are going to get yourself cast. Not your cleanly cut music, not your perfectly structured resume, not your 2-inch nude heels, not your over-rehearsed slate. You are. Okay? Know what you are doing. Obviously don’t look like you picked this career up yesterday. But so much more important than that, be a real artist, and not a cardboard-cutout-overly-polished clone. Don’t let petty rules beat you over the head. Don't let should do smother out the artist in you. Don’t let perfect get in the way of good enough. Go into every single audition room with a little bit of self-love, a good amount of abandonment, and all of the passion and ambition in the world.

(Photo by Stephen Duncan)

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