I used to car­ry a cof­fee mug around the music build­ing at Dick­in­son.  On it was a love­ly pho­to of sev­er­al snowflakes, with the cap­tion, “Always remem­ber that you are unique.  Just like every­body else.”

One of the things I love most about teach­ing is the way it reminds me (on my best days, of course) that, while we all may speak dif­fer­ent lan­guages and con­nect most read­i­ly with dif­fer­ent metaphors and envy dif­fer­ent role mod­els, we all real­ly are more alike than we are dif­fer­ent.  While in the course of a week I may see a cou­ple dozen indi­vid­ual students—and to be sure, those cou­ple dozen lessons often look very dif­fer­ent from one anoth­er in goal, approach, and result—at their heart, all of those stu­dents strug­gle with what I think are three uni­ver­sal goals among artists.  Every one of them strug­gles to:

1. over­come their own self-doubt,
2. claim and devel­op their incip­i­ent strength, and
3. demon­strate that they are indi­vid­u­als with unique voic­es, who find val­ue in exist­ing art but also have some­thing to con­tribute to art and its longevi­ty.

Call­backs are this week for CASA’s next musi­cal (Pip­pin), so the past sev­er­al days have been full of the now-famil­iar mini-life-les­son sce­nario that I find audi­tions so often to be, at least in the edu­ca­tion­al set­tings where I’ve been priv­i­leged to serve.  That sce­nario looks some­thing like this:

1. Poten­tial cast mem­ber (PCM) ner­vous­ly enters audi­tion room.  Coughs a lit­tle just to be sure we know s/he’s fight­ing the same con­ges­tion we’ve heard in the oth­er 23 PCMs we’ve seen today, what with it being Novem­ber and all.  PCM also exhibits at least one (but usu­al­ly sev­er­al) of the fol­low­ing:
   • shal­low breath­ing
   • trem­bling extrem­i­ties
   • pal­lid com­plex­ion and lips
   • wob­bly ankles caused by the brand-new but ill-fit­ting shoes PCM hopes will dis­tract from any per­for­mance weak­ness­es
   • “apolo­gia­r­rhea”: the (usu­al­ly sit­u­a­tion­al) ten­den­cy to every response to a com­ment, obser­va­tion, or ques­tion with “I’m sor­ry”
2. Music Direc­tor (i.e., me) greets PCM, asks for charts, ascer­tains start/stop points, tem­po, and cue, and begins to play.  PCM stum­bles through fer­vent but ter­ri­fied ren­di­tion, fin­ish­ing with a “thank you” that sounds more like anoth­er “I’m sor­ry.”

In the “real world,” where the point of an audi­tion is to find the best actron to plug into the role to max­i­mize the pro­duc­tion’s first-week return on invest­ment, this is where the audi­tion process usu­al­ly stops, at least for the PCM.  They slink back to the sec­ond half of their split-shift at the din­er, promis­ing them­selves that next time they’ll have found the right shoes, or the weath­er won’t be mess­ing with their aller­gies so much, or the pianist won’t be quite so hard to fol­low.

But when I cast a show in an edu­ca­tion­al set­ting, I get to move past the self-doubt and the des­per­ate attempts at feat-of-strength per­for­mances, and look for the indi­vid­ual behind the sweaty palms and the strain­ing neck mus­cles.  I get to ask “What do you love about the song you just sang?” and “What about this par­tic­u­lar role real­ly speaks to you?” and “If you could play any role on stage, who would it be?”  That’s where I start to learn what this voice has to say to the world—and if I phrase the ques­tions care­ful­ly enough, the PCM starts to learn how this role could be a ves­sel for their own artistry, not just anoth­er “gig.”  This, in oth­er words, is where the snowflake starts to stand out from the rest of the storm.

That’s a real­ly, real­ly impor­tant part of the audi­tion process for me—the reminder to the PCM of their own val­ue as an artist.  But I think the most impor­tant part of the process comes lat­er, after the cast list goes up.  And the ones who gain the most from the process are the ones whose names don’t show up on that list, at least not where they’d hoped they’d be.

Today’s post on Dr. Noa Kageya­ma’s blog, “The Bul­let­proof Musi­cian,” real­ly digs into the val­ue of those “failed” audi­tions, and how achiev­ing the goals we thought we want­ed isn’t always the best thing for us as artists (or human beings, frankly).

In a nut­shell, “suc­ceed­ing” at an audition—getting the role we wanted—may be a great ego boost, but it does less to help us improve for future oppor­tu­ni­ties than our “failed” audi­tions do.  (And in fact, chances are good that we won’t do as well at our “dream role” as we hoped we would, which can end up being a down­er in the long run if we’re not care­ful.)

So does this mean artists are doomed to lives of pes­simism and self-doubt?  Only if they do it wrong.  If you ask me, “per­fect” art is far less inspir­ing and empow­er­ing than the more com­mon kind.  That lat­ter kind—art that’s about “flaws”—is, I believe, a very good thing for the world.