Showing Up: A Conversation about the Audition

The Actors: Showing Up

• Produced and Directed by
• Riad Galayini Read Bio »
• James Morrison Read Bio »

They write:

The Elements

The audition itself does not live without the combination of elements that comprise it and it changes with every new ingredient that enters the mix. You can have the same material and the same people conducting the audition but what it becomes depends on who walks in the door and how their preconceptions have, or have not, allowed them to inhabit both the moment and the material.

The audition doesn’t exist without their chemical elements tossed into what’s already in the beaker. Those holding the beaker, or even feeling they created and therefore own the beaker and the ingredients, may believe they are in possession of the primary components but it’s far more than what any one person can own or convey.

An audition can be Ganeshian, destroying all obstacles in the path of creation, or Frankenstienien, destroying its creators. The truth we seek to inhabit is what is revealed when you add fire to the beaker. Anything can happen. Actors, the flame, live for that.

No Yesterday, No Tomorrow

When Krishnamurti wrote about love and our attempts to define it, he said, “Love is something that is new, fresh, alive. It has no yesterday and no tomorrow. It is beyond the turmoil of thought. It is only the innocent mind which knows what love is, and the innocent mind can live in the world which is not innocent. To find this extraordinary thing which man has sought endlessly through sacrifice, through worship, through relationship, through sex, through every form of pleasure and pain, is only possible when thought comes to understand itself and comes naturally to an end. Then love has no opposite, then love has no conflict.”

I guess it could be argued that love has no relationship to auditioning. Or that it’s impossible for ambition to be removed from the equation. Or that love and ambition are mutually exclusive. It could also be argued that dreams and goals are fussy cousins who avoid each other at the family reunion. Or that dreams are Unicorns and goals are Quarter Horses. I think these arguments are made by exhausted adults who, in their need to be protected from the pain of rejection, have distanced themselves from the childlike purity of an open and objective encounter with the unknown. How do we then describe a thing created to involve us when we’ve detached ourselves from it in order to survive it.