Audition preparation and coaching
Whether the audition is on Friday or you just want your audition technique to stop letting you down. One-to-one coaching in Pascoe Vale, twenty minutes from the CBD.
The audition is a different skill
Plenty of good performers audition badly. It’s a separate craft, and almost nobody teaches it.
You’ve got somewhere between two and five minutes, in an unfamiliar room, in front of people who’ve seen forty others that day. You may be handed pages you’ve never read. You’ll be asked to do it again, differently, for reasons nobody explains. And the whole thing rewards a specific, learnable set of skills that have very little to do with how well you perform once you’ve got the part.
That’s what these sessions are for.
What we cover
- Choosing the right material. The most common reason a good audition fails. The wrong song shows off everything except what you’re good at, and a monologue that suited you three years ago may not now. We find pieces that fit your voice, your age and casting, and the specific room you’re walking into.
- Preparing the piece properly. Not just learning it — knowing what you want, who you’re talking to, and where it turns. So that when the nerves take 30% off the top, what’s left still works.
- Cold reads. Handed a page, given a minute, asked to perform. There’s a technique to this: what to look for, where to breathe, how to make a choice fast and commit to it.
- Taking direction. “Great — now try it angrier.” Panels are testing whether you can be directed, not whether you got it right first time. Learning to take an adjustment quickly and visibly is one of the highest-return things you can practise.
- Nerves. They don’t go away and you don’t want them to. But there’s a difference between adrenaline you can use and a body that’s stopped cooperating, and the gap between the two is largely technique — breath, preparation, and having a plan for the first ten seconds.
- The room. Walking in, the small talk, what to do with your hands, how to recover when something goes wrong. Unglamorous and it matters.
- Self-tapes. More auditions are self-taped than in-person now. We can prepare the material here and record it properly in the same session — more on self-tape sessions →
Who it’s for
Actors and singers with an audition coming up — professional, community theatre, or anything in between.
Students auditioning for tertiary training — NIDA, VCA, WAAPA, NASDA and the rest. Phoebe went through this process herself and graduated from NASDA in 2020, so the panel’s side of the table is familiar territory. Start early; these auditions reward months of preparation, not weeks.
Young performers auditioning for school productions, youth theatre companies or agency representation.
Anyone who keeps not getting the part and suspects the audition is where it’s going wrong.
Timing
If you have a specific audition, book as early as you can. One session the day before is better than nothing, but three sessions over three weeks is a different order of preparation.
If you’re building general audition technique with nothing specific booked, that’s arguably the better way to do it — you can work slowly, build a repertoire of two or three well-prepared pieces, and be ready when something appears at short notice. Which it will.
Prices
| Session | Price |
|---|---|
| Trial (30 min) | $20 |
| 30 minutes | $35 |
| 45 minutes | $55 |
| 60 minutes | $75 |
For audition work, 60 minutes is usually the right call — there’s rarely time in half an hour to work a piece properly and then run it under pressure.