I had an awful dream last night. I had an audition for something – I can’t remember what, but instead of arias they wanted two art songs. OK, I thought, and picked two that were impressive and I sing well, and put the sheet music in a binder.
The audition was in one of those only-in-dreams scrambled spaces where my studio was somehow or other attached to a theatre or rehearsal space. I arrived just as my audition was about to start. I wasn’t dressed, just wearing sweats or street clothes, and I was called.
“I’ll just change and grab my music,” I said. This was fine, so I went into the studio…
…And I couldn’t find the binder. It was NOWHERE. I had lost it or forgotten it somewhere or it had just disappeared. I was in a room full of music, and I couldn’t find anything.
So I kept thinking, “Oh, I’ll do that song instead,” and then I wouldn’t be able to find THAT piece of music.
And the minutes were ticking away, and every now and then someone would poke their head through the door and see how I was doing.
“Just fine!” I’d say. “Just give me a minute longer, I can’t find this one score.”
But of course I was getting more and more desperate and frantic and I hadn’t even changed yet.
(This is, I should add, not at all like real life, where I’m always hyper-prepared for auditions and show up super early with too many copies of everything in binders and extra headshots just in case. As you can see I appear to have some anxieties around punctuality and preparedness.)
What I eventually decided to do was sing something I knew that was unaccompanied (because then the accompanist wouldn’t need the music!) and something, anything else at all that I could find. I don’t remember what the second song I eventually found was. To top it all off the room I was supposed to audition in had to be used for a choir practice, so I was going to have to audition in front of eighty snarky gum-chewing teenagers.
I woke up before the actual auditioning began. This may not sound like much of a nightmare to you – but to me it’s enough to wake me up in a cold sweat.
And I don’t even have any auditions booked for the near future…
I can relate, Kristin.
For a long time I had a radio dream where I had to read the news and I didn’t have any news to read. When I moved out of radio the dreams stopped.
My real life experience was a high school play we were doing for competition against other schools. I was the lead in this melodrama and didn’t know my lines and never read the play.
The teacher made me do the play anyway. He sat down front and center of the theater and loudly heckled me every time I opened my mouth.
As a result, throughout my entire long professional career on stage, screen, video and live performance I always, always studied hard and knew my lines cold.