Auditions

Hey all! I hope you're all well and are enjoying your time here. I know some of the third years have completely finished their lectures and only have placements and things left now. That's so exciting, I literally cannot believe how far we have all come in these three years. It's going to be completely weird when we all finish and move on with our lives. For a lot of us, we are never going to be in education again. Scary thought really.

Anyway, in this blog I thought I would write a few tips and tricks for auditions. As an acting student I do auditions a lot as part of my degree. The really good thing about the BA Acting course is that it does prepare you for the acting world and one huge part of the acting world is auditions. You will, of course, have to audition for any part you would like to get. During the your time on the Acting course you will do auditions and some audition technique classes. But I thought I would give you all a few tips and hints when it comes to auditions. I'll be mainly talking about workshop auditions and panel auditions.

So in a workshop audition the tendency for an actor is to either be too quiet and respectful of the other actors or to over compensate and be boisterous, but it's actually so important to find a happy medium. You need to be able to sit and listen while also contributing to the workshop. I have been in many workshop auditions where actors try to outshine each other and it's just not necessary. It's important to be yourself and let your skills speak for themselves. You need to ensure that any and all of your contribution is worthwhile and you're not just speaking for the sake of speaking. Listen attentively whenever is someone is speaking and try to learn people's names if you don't know the people you are auditioning with. Always be supportive of other actors, even if there is someone there that you don't get on with  you don't want that to show. Always be professional. Be smiley and open to do anything, make sure to throw yourself into whatever the workshop leader asks you to do. Don't be afraid to get silly and trust your instincts with things.

When it comes to panel auditions things are very different. You will either have to present something that they have given you or something that you prepare for the audition. Either way make sure that you know your material inside out and back to front. They may ask for you to do the speech prepared with a little direction to see how you respond to feedback, so it's important to listen to their feedback carefully and consider what they said to you and change what you've done appropriately. Make sure during the whole audition that you are warm and smiley, you need to make sure that you're friendly and be genuinely interested at what the panel have to say. I always ask how their day was and how they are just to get a conversation going. I would always thank them for seeing me as well. I just think that it's polite and it's always important to be polite in auditions.

I hope this has been helpful for any of the people on the BA Acting course or indeed for anyone who is looking to go into a career in acting. Although a lot of the time you will be turned away and you won't fit the parts that you're auditioning for it's so important not to give up and to keep on trying. Acting is such a hard career to break into, but it's all about being positive and resilient. You will get there one day.

Thank you all for reading!

Professional Practice Module

Hey all! I hope you're well and enjoying the last few weeks of uni before we all break up for Easter. It's weird that it's going to be my last Easter of driving home and working to get some money for the last term of university. I am seriously going to miss it when I leave. Carmarthen has become my new home and I don't know how I feel that these three years are almost over. 

So in between Main House and Site Specific we have a module called Professional Practice, this module aims to help prepare us for the professional acting world. I can honestly say that all the activities we've had set for us have been so helpful. I felt a little lost before doing the few weeks of workshops but now I feel like I'm so much more prepared than I did before we did the module. 

Ioan asked us to create a professional development plan (PDP) as well as a strengths, weakness, opportunities and threats (SWOT) which we would present in front of him and Dave at the end of the year after Site Specific is finished. This was something that I found incredibly useful and it made me realise how much I wanted to do stunt horse riding develop my pre-existing riding skills. Since having a tutorial with Ioan about my future and looking over my SWOT and PDP, it's made me so keen to start doing more work on my riding and attempt to get some stunt riding qualifications which I never would have considered doing before. 

We had a chat with Simon Curtis, the man in charge of Wales and the South West when it comes to the acting Union, Equity. That was super helpful when it came to knowing our rights and how Equity works. They ensure that all actors get paid a minimum amount of money, it makes it easier for us to make sure we're being paid what we need to be paid and not taken advantage of. If we are a member of Equity and something goes wrong they can sort it out. Being a member also means that you have insurance incase anything goes wrong on set or when delivering a workshop. These are some things I had no real clue about so it was super helpful to learn all about Equity.

We also had a talk with the head of careers who gave us some advice on creating a CV, an actors CV and how to behave in interviews. He gave us a few really good tips and tricks when it came to personalising CVs for different jobs and things like that. We also had a brief meeting with Sally Hewes who gave us an idea about what it would be like to be self employed and how to start up our own business which was very helpful.

Ioan also spoke to us about the new trend of self tapes and brought the creator of Cut Casting a new website like Spotlight which allows you to audition for parts via the use of self tapes. This gave the whole of the third year the opportunity to sign up to this website for free with a lifetime membership which was awesome. If you're interested in this website I'll link it at the end of this blog as the first 1000 get a free lifetime membership. Ioan also gave us a chance to create our own voice reel and as we had practised doing radio plays in second year so we already had some experience with it, which I was so glad about. The voice reels that we created can then go on our Spotlight accounts and casting directors can listen to them. Ioan also spoke to us about being self employed and how we would have to do our own tax returns, something that is vital for us to know about and understand. 

We had the opportunity to listen to some awesome people talk about how they got into the acting and singing industry. We had a talk by Mark Evans, a professional opera singing , his mother was Elizabeth Evans who saved The Lyric Theatre in Carmarthen town centre. We also had a workshop with Nicola Hemsley who owns and operates the circus company Organised Kaos and who had a very successful career working for S4C. 

The best part of doing Professional Practice was having the chance to meet the fantastic theatre company that is Flossy and Boo. I'll link their website at the end of the blog post so you can check out the sort of things that they do but oh my gosh, they are the loveliest girls ever. Flossy and Boo are two characters that they created so the girls real names are Laura and Anja, one amazing thing about these two is that Anja is actually a graduate from UWTSD. It was so awesome to see a really successful person who came from UWTSD. We had a two day workshop with them where we created our own theatre company and pitched it to the rest of the group. They both gave us a real insight into how you could start our own company and what commissions are. They were both so lovely and awesome to work with. I couldn't believe how amazing they were, they were so friendly and super helpful. They had created some awesome pieces of theatre and I felt so lucky to have met them and know that they will be there should I need some help and advice when I'm actually in the industry. Hopefully I'll see the two of them very soon!

I would like to say a huge thank you to everyone who came and spoke to us over the last few weeks and a huge thank you to Ioan Hefin for organising it all. Special mention to Flossy and Boo aka Laura and Anja as I had the best time ever with them and cannot wait to see them again. Hopefully this gave you a little insight into what Professional Practice is like and you found it an interesting read. Until next time!

Cut Casting Website

Flossy and Boo Website

Main House Theatre

Hey all! I hope you've been having a good second term here at UWTSD. I literally cannot believe that the second term of university is over and I only have a few weeks left here. I'm totally going to miss being here so much. I feel like UWTSD is my home, it's going to be so strange to be out in the big wide world soon. Anyways, I thought I would give you all a little insight into what the Main House Theatre module is like in third year.

Instead of a workshop audition this time we did an audition in front of a panel, on the panel was two of the directors, Ioan Hefin and Peter Doran, as well as Lynne one of the lecturers on the course. We had to do two contrasting monologues that were modern, we also had to write down our top two choices of shows and why we wanted to do them. The audition wasn't as stressful as I initially thought and I actually quite enjoyed it. 

There were four main house shows this year:

The Elephant Man - Directed by Peter Doran, shown at The Torch Theatre at Milford Haven

Animal Farm - Directed by Ioan Hefin

Our Country's Good - Directed by Suzanne Phillips 

Gwaun Cwm Garw - Directed by Carri Munn

I was cast in my first choice, Animal Farm, which I was so excited about. It will be Ioan's last show directed here at UWTSD and I love the book so much. I was so glad to be cast in a show that I was so passionate about and that had so much relevance to society today, what with the Brexit vote and with Donald Trump being elected as President of the United States. We were given our research tasks and we started rehearsals a week after The Elephant Man. 

We weren't initially cast in any parts until about the fourth day of rehearsals. Before then we read through the three different adaptations we were looking at, then deciding to do the Peter Hall version, we also analysed the script and looked at our tasks that we prepared the week before hand. One of the tasks we had to create music to one of the songs that was in the script, that was probably my favourite task, bar doing a monologue as a different animal. I was cast as Mollie, a pretty white mare, a hen, a cow and Napoleon's Dog.

We were lucky enough to have a third year BA Dance student, Sean, help us as well. This show was the first time that all three courses (Dance, Design and Production, and Acting) have been in collaboration together which is something we were all really happy about. Sean warmed us up every morning for an hour to help build our strength and stamina and although it was so tiring at times, it really helped us in our performances. I think without Sean we would have found it very hard to be that physical for the whole time while we were performing.

Although there were some parts that had a lot of lines and some parts didn't have as many, we were on stage pretty much all of the time so it didn't matter that much if you didn't speak as much you still had something to do. As we were on stage all of the time our rehearsal schedule was super busy, we were in 9-5 pretty much every day which was exhausting for all of us physically and emotionally. 

We all had to make sure that each animals physicality was clear so the audience knew what animals we were playing. There was only about four of us who had only one character to play so it was so important for us to have a clear physicality and vocal quality so that the audience didn't get confused. That was quite difficult for me because there were times when I literally had to switch between different characters so quickly. 

In order to do this we all had to research our animals very carefully, we watched so many videos of animals and their behaviours. We also had a trip to Manor Wildlife Park in Tenby which the whole cast enjoyed. We observed the animals there and took notes to see how their physicality could be filtered into our characterisation. We were unsure for a while as to whether we were going to be on two legs or on all fours and after some experimentation with crutches we decided that two legs would be better and easier for us to do. 

We all had to work collaboratively to create the animals physicality and we all had to make sure we were clear on the differences so that any one of us could switch and play a different animal at the drop of a hat. This was hard for us at first but with the help of Sean and the wonderful direction of Ioan we all managed to pull it off effectively. 

Ioan was very clear from the offset what he wanted to get across with this piece. He was so passionate about the message and what he wanted us to portray on stage. We had regular chats about what was going on in the world and how disconnected people are to what's going on. We spoke about how meat gets to our table and why some people don't seem to care about where it comes from. A lot of people in our cast had their eyes open, mine included, about what was happening in the farming industry, many people decided to go vegetarian or vegan from watching the things we had to and from the discussions.  

When we were cast in this play none of us thought that we would have to sing or dance as we didn't have to sing in our audition. But as we decided to do the Peter Hall version there were a lot of opportunities to sing and do a bit of movement. Luckily two of our cast members, Rosey Cale and Charlotte Edge, were very good at putting their original music onto the lyrics that were already existing in the play. They created their own original tunes to go along with the songs and they taught us them. We didn't have any accompaniment to the songs, we just sang them all acapella as Ioan just wanted the music to be more raw and have a little bit more of an impact that it would have done if we had music backing us up.It would also have looked a bit odd if a horse or a cow suddenly started playing guitar or whatever. I think it worked quite well with just us singing. Sean then choreographed any pieces that Ioan wanted movement in, my favourite of which was an awesome dance to Sugarcandy Mountain in the style of a gospel choir. This show also gave me the chance to have my own solo, something that I had never ever done before in a show. I had sung before but I never had a solo in front of such a large audience and I was so nervous about doing it. I think I pulled it off... well at least I hope that I did. 

I have to say, the show wouldn't have had the impact that it did if we didn't have the amazing Design and Production students designing and organising every technical thing to do with our show. Alice Walker did a fantastic job at designing the whole of our set, our costume, our hair and every tiny little detail about the show. She and Ioan worked collaboratively on the concept of us being in an abattoir and having us all in scrubs, I have to say I think she did an excellent job on the whole visual concept behind Animal Farm. We also had the talented Ben Males who created all of the AV for the show, he spent upwards of 300 hours creating his own version of the Animal Farm game and working through it all and making it work. He basically did what he calls a cheating version of stop start animation. He did an absolute amazing job at it. I couldn't believe what he came up with and how amazing it looked. He worked so incredibly hard to create the AV, I certainly couldn't do it. He did a fantastic job, I cannot sing his praises enough. We have such talented DP students here with us at UWTSD, I feel so grateful to be around them and to be able to work with them. I can't forget to mention our fantastic stage manager Prunella Marsh. She organised all of us and was so helpful and calm at all times. She brought us all together and ran the whole operation. We would have been so lost without her. She was brilliant. I cannot sing our DP's praises enough. Unlike us, they worked on three shows at once which meant that they were always so busy, but they totally pulled it off. It might have meant late nights and early starts but they managed it. I'm so proud of them all and they should be proud of what they've achieved too.

Although pretty much our whole cast was ill in some way or another we managed to do our three shows and we were all so proud of what we created. I would like to thank everyone who came and supported us in the show, it means so much to all of us that people would take time out of their day to see us and laugh and clap. We had the best audience anyone could ask for and we all appreciate it so much. I hope everyone who watched Animal Farm enjoyed it.

I would also like to thank our director Ioan Hefin for casting me in this and giving me such a fantastic opportunity to make something great. I know I was a handful at times, but I will be forever grateful for your patience. You made this show wonderful and so unforgettable, I will never forget this experience and feel so blessed to have had you as a director. Good luck in everything you do. 

Thanks guys!!

Photo credit to Jennie Caldwell