Around the country, thousands of students have either just submitted or are completing their audition applications for university acting schools. The process can be stressful for students and has many flaws, with secondary school teachers and potential students sharing concerns about its economics and accessibility.
‘I remember being pretty stressed,’ says Liz Stanfield Flores, who is now studying Honours at the University of Southern Queensland (UniSQ). Flores attended a secondary school with limited support for drama. ‘My drama teacher had never been a part of an audition process before. They were trained as an English teacher. Overall, I felt quite alone.’
For Flores and others, the auditions come at the worst possible time of year. Chris Harm, Director of Performing Arts at King’s Christian College, has over 20 years of secondary teaching experience. Every August, she braces herself for a sharp rise in workload for her senior students. Over the years, it’s become worse.
‘That time of year is when trial exams are happening,’ she tells ArtsHub. ‘They usually find out if they’ve been successful during the September school holidays. That usually means a callback, which usually falls during their external exam period.’
Around 2000 students audition annually for the National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA) in Sydney. Post-COVID, shooting audition videos has become the norm for NIDA and many other acting schools to accommodate the large number of applicants.
Audition preparation is now so vital that it’s created a mini-industry. Several small and medium arts organisations offer audition preparation workshops for hopeful students, and it’s become standard practice for the training institutions to run workshops for a price.
Griffith University runs a three-day musical theatre workshop in October, priced at $295. The workshop promises to improve general technical knowledge while ‘gaining insight into training practices encouraged for the Queensland Academy of Excellence in Musical Theatre Bachelor of Musical Theatre audition’. NIDA offers similar priced workshops.
Students and educators have thus become increasingly concerned about the growth and expense around audition preparation. Especially since COVID, audition preparation has become a roaring trade, particularly for young people.
Schools do not prepare students for tertiary acting schools
‘There is a lot of anxiety. It’s such an unknown,’ Harm tells ArtsHub. ‘Nothing in the curriculum supports an audition process.’
If a student is lucky enough to be in a secondary school with a robust drama program, they are still unlikely to encounter explicit knowledge in audition preparation. In Year 11 and 12 drama, there is no requirement for students to do a solo presentation. One of the final pieces of assessment does offer teachers the option to present the task to students in either solo or group formats. Most teachers lean to group work as an exercise in administrative efficiency (they have less marking to complete).
When students walk into a university audition space, they are thus unlikely to have had experience auditioning or know what to expect. Concerned parents share with ArtsHub the ‘devastating’ impact of having a monologue or song cut prematurely after weeks of practice.
Emmy Riber spent much of her extracurricular time in her senior year preparing for self-taped auditions. Attending a small school just outside of Cairns, drama wasn’t offered for senior students. Still, Riber counts herself as lucky.
‘I had experience in community theatre,’ Riber tells ArtsHub. ‘I ended up auditioning for just about all the drama schools. You’d think self-tapes would be easier. But it ended up being so many. So I was studying, and doing a production, and preparing these tapes. It was hectic.’
Most acting schools ask students to prepare at least two monologues, usually one classic and one contemporary. Some schools specify their options; others leave it up to the students to choose. In workshops, students are encouraged to read the plays that they are performing and to audition at as many places as possible.
The result can be eight or more monologues memorised by heart. Suppose the student is studying full-time in their final year of secondary school. In that case, they are expected to learn (and possibly shoot) their monologues while simultaneously preparing for their final exams.
Self-taped auditions for acting schools may be an obstacle
Self-taped auditions have become the norm for professional theatre, a trend that has troubling implications for mental health. Their popularity for acting schools has ‘pros and cons,’ says Harm.
‘Students can do multiple retakes. That can ease or add to their anxiety. It’s also just not how theatre works. But I get that it’s logistics.
‘It’s also a question of equality,’ Harm continues. ‘Some students pay for one-on-one tutoring. But what about regional and remote access?’
Such questions have informed how regional universities differ from their metropolitan counterparts. UniSQ’s Head of Acting Travis Dowling says, ‘We can fundamentally tell if a monologue’s been worked by a professional. For us, a perfect monologue isn’t as interesting as who this young person is and how they can work in an ensemble.’ UniSQ offers Zoom auditions as an option, but generally prefers to see students in person.
‘For a young person coming to us,’ Dowling continues, ‘I believe they are auditioning us just as much as we’re auditioning them.’
UniSQ and other regional universities typically have far fewer applications than their metropolitan counterparts. The demand for metropolitan schools demands a less bespoke approach than Dowling describes.
For students like Riber in Cairns, a successful callback meant auditioning online over Zoom for several leading universities. ‘It was a bit intimidating,’ she tells ArtsHub. ‘And I sort of thought – I’m one of a bunch of people you’re seeing on Zoom today. They were nice, but it was clear they were tired. I feel like they were just going through the motions.’
Harm admits students are less resilient than they were 10 or 20 years ago. She equally sees some habits of predatory behaviour are very much alive in the industry, particularly around young people seeking admission into their favourite schools.
‘There are always those students who will go at it hammer and tongs,’ she says. ‘They will have their plan A, and their plan B and C. If they’re not successful, they’ll take a gap year. They say, ‘I have to do this to breathe’. If you offer those students some way to improve their chances, they’ll take it.’
