Twelve folding chairs along a corridor, and the corridor smells of floor polish and old radiators.
Through the wall somebody is warming up badly, running the same four bars and stopping in the same place each time.
The person opposite you has their eyes closed and their lips moving. The person beside you has taken their shoes off.
Your number is nine. They are on four.
Everyone here wants precisely the thing you want, and there is one of it.
What This Working Is For
This is a rite for the corridor, not for the room.
The work in the room is already done. You have prepared it, or you have not, and the next forty minutes will not change which.
What the next forty minutes can very easily do is spend the whole of you before your number is called.
So this working has one job. It keeps you ready without letting readiness burn down to ash while you sit on a folding chair.
It cannot make them choose you. Nothing can, and anything claiming otherwise is selling something.
The Problem With Waiting
Your body does not know the difference between waiting and doing.
It has already gone to pitch. The heart is up, the hands are cold, the breath has moved high into the chest.
That state is exactly right, for about ninety seconds, at the moment you walk in.
Held for forty minutes it becomes something else entirely. Shaky, brittle, tired before it starts.
You have felt this. You walk in and your voice has no bottom to it, or your hands have gone stiff, and you cannot understand why when you were fine an hour ago.
Readiness Is a Fuel, Not a Setting
Think of it as a quantity rather than a switch.
You arrive with a certain amount of it. Every minute spent at full pitch draws it down.
Nerves are not the enemy here. Nerves are the fuel. The problem is burning it in a corridor with nobody watching.
The whole rite that follows is about bringing yourself down deliberately, and then back up, on your own signal.
Down is not calm and up is not panic. Down is idling. Up is the engine at the line.
What the Rite Asks For
Nothing. That is not modesty, it is the design.
No candle, no stone, no cloth, no oil. You are in a public corridor and any object you take out becomes a thing you have to explain or lose.
What you have is:
- Two hands.
- Your breath.
- A chair, or a wall, or a floor.
That is the whole kit, and it is enough, and it works in a stairwell, a green room, or a car in the parking lot.
The Hour Before the Corridor
Arrive with enough time that you are not running, and not so much that you are furniture.
Twenty-five minutes is usually right. Enough to find the room, use the bathroom, and sit down before your body decides where it stands.
Eat something small an hour beforehand. Not nothing, which leaves you light-headed, and not a full meal, which leaves you slow.
Drink water in small amounts through the morning rather than a bottle at the door.
Wear the clothes you rehearsed in, or clothes that behave the same way. A collar you keep touching becomes a habit the room can see.
Do the last real preparation at home, in a room with your own things in it, and then close the case and stop.
The Rite: The Idle and the Line
Do this as soon as you sit down, and then once more three numbers before yours.
- Put both feet flat on the floor. Not crossed. Both.
- Rest your hands palm down on your thighs and feel the whole weight of them.
- Breathe in for a count of four, hold for four, out for six, rest for two.
- Do that four times. Only four. This is not meditation and you are not trying to go anywhere.
- On the fourth exhale, press both palms down into your thighs, hard, for three seconds.
- Release, and say inside your head: I am ready. I am not starting yet.
- Then let your attention go somewhere ordinary. The pattern of the floor tiles. The sound the radiator makes.
That is the idle. It takes about ninety seconds and you can run it as often as the corridor requires.
The count is one of several that do the same work. If you already use the four breaths, use that instead. The one you know beats the one you are learning.
Coming Back to the Line
When your number is two away, you bring it back up. This part is short and physical.
- Stand up. Do not do this sitting down.
- Roll your shoulders back once and let them drop.
- Shake out both hands from the wrist, eight or ten times, until the cold goes out of the fingers.
- Take one breath in through the nose that goes all the way down, and let it out through the mouth without controlling it.
- Say inside your head, once: Now.
That is the whole signal. Nothing more elaborate, because elaborate things fail under pressure.
The point of doing it twice, down and then up, is that the rise becomes something you cause rather than something that happens to you.
Why the Hands
Because they are the first thing to go and the first thing you will need.
Cold hands are not a mood. They are blood moving away from the edges of you, and it happens whether you are frightened or excited.
Pressing them down, then shaking them out, brings warmth back into the fingers faster than sitting still does.
It also gives the fear a job. Attention that is on your palms is not on the door at the end of the corridor.
The Others
Eleven other people, and every one of them is a full argument against you if you let them be.
The one who is clearly better prepared. The one who is younger. The one who came with a folder of things you did not know to bring.
Here is the plain fact that helps most: you cannot see their inside from their outside.
The person with their eyes closed may be very calm. They may also be running the same disaster you are running, with a better face on it.
A Discipline for Not Measuring
Measuring is a habit and it can be interrupted. Not stopped, interrupted, which is enough.
Use a rule rather than willpower. Willpower loses in corridors.
- Do not watch anyone leave the room. Their face tells you nothing and you will read everything into it.
- Do not ask anyone what they are doing. Not out of coldness. It gives you information you cannot use.
- If you catch yourself comparing, look at an object instead. A door hinge, a notice board, the tiles. Name three things about it silently.
- Then go back to your own hands.
Three seconds on a door hinge breaks the loop more reliably than ten minutes of telling yourself not to compare.
Someone Warming Up Badly Through the Wall
There is always one, and they will get into your head if you let them.
Either they are worse than you, which makes you complacent, or they are better, which makes you sick. Both are useless.
Treat the sound as weather. It is happening near you and it is not about you.
If you can move further down the corridor, move. Nobody will find this strange.
If you cannot, run the idle again. Feet flat, hands down, four breaths, tiles.
The Last Two Minutes
Do not use them to run the piece one more time in your head.
Mental run-throughs at this stage are almost always partial. You get to the hard part, it goes wrong in imagination, and now you have a fresh memory of failing it.
If you must do something, do the first two seconds only. The opening breath, the first word, the first note, the first line.
The beginning is the only part worth loading, because it is the only part that has to be decided in advance.
Everything after the beginning runs on its own if you let it.
Walking In
The door opens and someone says your name or your number.
Walk at your ordinary speed. Not fast, which reads as apology, and not slow, which reads as a performance you have not started yet.
Look at whoever is in the room, once, and say good afternoon like a person.
Put your things down deliberately. Take one full breath before you begin, and take it visibly. You are allowed the room’s air.
Nobody has ever been marked down for taking two seconds at the start. Plenty have started before they were in the room.
The First Ten Seconds
These are the expensive ones, in the same way the first sentence in a meeting is expensive.
They are not the best ten seconds you will do. They are the ten that decide whether the rest belongs to you or to your nerves.
So make the opening something you could do badly and still survive. Simple, slow, and entirely known.
Do not open on the hardest thing to prove you can. Open on the thing your body does without asking.
By second eleven the pitch has somewhere to go, and the fuel is being spent where it was meant to be spent.
If voice is your instrument, the older workings for steadiness are worth reading beforehand rather than in the corridor. The rite for steady nerves and a clear voice and the beautiful voice spell both belong to the week before, not the day.
When It Goes Wrong Halfway
It might. A crack, a dropped line, a bar gone missing, a hand that will not do what it did all week.
The rule is the same as in a car and the same on a stage.
Do not stop, and do not apologize with your face.
Almost everyone in that room has heard the thing you just did wrong a hundred times. What they have not seen is who keeps going.
Recovering well is itself the audition. It is often the more useful information, and people on the other side of the table know it.
If they stop you, that is not a verdict either. Sometimes they have heard what they needed.
Finishing Anyway
Get to the end. Whatever the end is.
Then stop cleanly. Do not trail off, do not add a comment, do not explain what it should have sounded like.
Say thank you. Pick up your things without hurrying. Leave.
Resist the corridor conversation on the way out. You will be asked how it went, and any answer you give in that hallway will harden into your version of the day.
Putting It Down Before the Result
This is the part that matters most for the next one, and almost nobody does it.
Between the audition and the answer there is a stretch of days that belong to you, and you can either live in them or spend them refreshing something.
So put it down deliberately, the same evening, with a small closing act.
Wash your hands and face. Change your clothes entirely. Eat something you actually like.
Then write three lines: what you did, what you would do differently, and one thing that was good. Three lines and no more.
Close the notebook and let the thing be finished, whatever the answer turns out to be. The wider practice of ending a working properly is in the page on closing a rite and the days that follow.
What This Rite Will Not Do
It will not get you the part. It touches nobody in that room.
It will not stop your hands going cold, and it does not try to.
What it reliably does is stop you spending forty minutes of readiness on twelve folding chairs and a radiator.
You walk in with fuel left. The rest was always theirs to decide.
Number nine goes in the same as number one did, with hands warm and one full breath taken at the door.