This is a long post.\u00a0 Maybe make yourself a sandwich first.<\/p>\n
Here’s the story of how I accidentally auditioned for the UCDP DRM200 performance class, and failed my audition.<\/p>\n
I had just completed my first year of university at UofT as an Electrical \/ Computer Engineer.\u00a0 And I had hated<\/em> it.\u00a0 Like, really, vehemently, hated<\/em> it.\u00a0 The computer programming classes were fine, but the other ones….bleh.\u00a0 ECE was not for me.\u00a0 So I switched out of Enginnering, and transferred to the Arts & Science faculty.\u00a0 I hadn’t declared any majors yet, so I was more or less free to pick and choose among the courses in the calendar that I liked.\u00a0 I had no direction, no goal, graduation date, no program of study, nothing.\u00a0 I was starting from scratch at UofT, with only a few transfer credits to my name.<\/p>\n So I dug through the UofT calendar, and here’s what I chose:<\/p>\n Yep, I spread it out, just choosing the ones that sounded interesting.<\/p>\n Now, the UCDP website just recently got a face-lift (I think they switched to Joomla!, if it matters).\u00a0 Anyhow, organizational-wise, it wasn’t in the greatest shape when I was in second year.<\/p>\n So, scouring around, I found on the site that if I wanted to take any of the Drama courses, I needed to audition and be accepted, and that there were only a few audition dates, and they needed a headshot, and cover letter, and a ballot form.<\/p>\n So, naturally, I printed out the ballot form, wrote out a cover letter, sent in a photo.\u00a0 A week or two later I got an email with my audition date.\u00a0 Cool.<\/p>\n Here’s where it starts to get hairy.\u00a0 Grimsby is about an hours drive from Toronto, and on the morning of my audition, traffic was really bad<\/em>.\u00a0 By the time I got to the audition location, I was about half-an-hour late.<\/p>\n Yikes.<\/p>\n Plus, it didn’t help that the man who was running the audition (who I would later discover to be Ken Gass himself) seemed quite annoyed at my lateness, and the fact that I’d missed half of the audition<\/em>.<\/p>\n So, what did we do in the audition?\u00a0 Well, from what I remember, he gave us an extremely short monologue, and we had to deliver it each, one by one.\u00a0 Here’s the monologue:<\/p>\n I thought we were going to<\/p>\n Oh<\/p>\n Forget it<\/p>\n Just forget it<\/p><\/blockquote>\n We had to find a way to deliver that.\u00a0 So naturally, everyone was trying to do something different and interesting, and I did mine, and I have no idea how I did.<\/p>\n What I did <\/em>notice, was this strange…familiarity between people.\u00a0 All of the people auditioning seemed to know one another.\u00a0 This was kind of spooky.\u00a0 I felt very out of place, and way out of my depth…and I totally knew I was bombing the audition, on top of my late arrival.\u00a0 I could feel Ken Gass, scowling into my brain.<\/p>\n And then it was over.\u00a0 The audition part, anyways.\u00a0 Everyone got off the stage and started talking to one another – again, like they all knew one another – and I just grabbed my stuff and left.<\/p>\n But it wasn’t over…the audition has a second half.\u00a0 It’s an audition AND an interview.\u00a0 So, I killed time at Tim Horton’s with my Dad (probably telling him how much I bombed the audition, while he listened, patiently) and waited until my interview time came.<\/p>\n And then my interview time came.<\/p>\n I walked into this room…and there were three people sitting across from a table, and a chair on my side, facing them.\u00a0 I sat down.\u00a0 I recognized Ken as one of the interviewers…the other two I didn’t recognize, but I’d later find out that one of them was Pia Kleber, who at the time was the Drama Program Director.<\/p>\n So, right to business (since they were auditioning\/interviewing hundreds), she asks me what kind of theater I’ve seen lately.\u00a0 I stumble a response, not prepared…I say something about the Lion King production, and The Blue Man Group… they didn’t seem impressed at all.\u00a0 She asked me what kind of plays I liked, and I said I enjoyed Shakespeare (the only playwright that came to mind instantly).\u00a0 She quizzed me on Shakespeare, asking me my favourite play, and why I liked it, and basically proved to herself (and myself) that I didn’t know what I was talking about.<\/p>\n And then she asked the big one:<\/p>\n So, tell me, what will you do if you don’t get into Drama 200?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n And I sit there.\u00a0 Confused.<\/p>\n I don’t want to be in Drama 200.\u00a0 I signed up for Drama 100<\/p><\/blockquote>\n There’s an uncomfortable pause.\u00a0 Ken Gass facepalms<\/a>.\u00a0 Pia Kleber stares at me in dumbfounded silence, and then says:<\/p>\n You don’t need to audition for Drama 100.\u00a0 Take some workshops, see more theater, and audition next year.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n And I walked out.\u00a0 I completely blew my audition for DRM200, a class I wasn’t even going to take.<\/p>\n The next summer I auditioned again.\u00a0 I had seen more theater, read more plays, prepped…I don’t think Ken recognized me, but if he did, he hid it well.\u00a0 Anyhow, that summer I got in.\u00a0 And that’s how it happened.<\/p>\n The end.<\/p>\n Coming out of high-school, you do NOT need to audition for DRM100.\u00a0 You only need to audition if you want to get into DRM200.<\/p>\n If you are <\/em>auditioning from DRM200, here are some tips:<\/p>\n That last one is a biggie – show respect to your fellow audition-ees.\u00a0 Ken (et al) are looking for lots of things; but one of the big ones is this:\u00a0 Is this person someone I will want in my class?\u00a0 Is this person someone I can work with?\u00a0 If you’re chatting while someone else is doing their work, it’s no good.\u00a0 Even when you’re not on stage, if you’re watching someone else work, you’re learning.<\/p>\n Anyhow, this is a super-long post, I think I’m going to wrap it up.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This is a long post.\u00a0 Maybe make yourself a sandwich first. Here’s the story of how I accidentally auditioned for the UCDP DRM200 performance class, and failed my audition. I had just completed my first year of university at UofT as an Electrical \/ Computer Engineer.\u00a0 And I had hated it.\u00a0 Like, really, vehemently, hated […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[6,9,4],"tags":[77,78,1208,1204],"class_list":["post-179","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-personal","category-theater","category-ucdp","tag-audition","tag-ken-gass","tag-theater","tag-ucdp"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/prmTy-2T","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikeconley.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikeconley.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikeconley.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikeconley.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikeconley.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=179"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/mikeconley.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3269,"href":"https:\/\/mikeconley.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179\/revisions\/3269"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikeconley.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=179"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikeconley.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=179"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikeconley.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=179"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
So, take home message:<\/h1>\n
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