The Journey
What’s the step by step journey to becoming a professional performer? Let me take you through it.
[Intro Music]
Hello and welcome to episode 6 of the Theatre Kid Podcast, I’m Karl Davies and today I’d like to go through a standard version of how people generally become a professional performer.
There are of course lots of different ways to do this, there isn’t a guaranteed route to becoming successful, but there is one route that the majority of professionals have taken. I’ll warn you now, it sounds horrendous. It sounds almost impossible at times but do not let anything I say during this episode put you off. I’m purposely going to make it sound tough so you know what could happen and how hard it could be.
I’m going to start at the beginning but bare with me as I may catch up to wear you are in your journey half way through.
The route that so many others have taken usually starts with some kind of drama club as a child or a part time theatre school. You’ve taken part in some shows, you’ve got the bug for performing so you’ve decided you want to be a Professional Performer, simple right? Not really, let’s look into it in more detail.
Adults look back on their school days with fond memories because there is very little responsibility and ‘life seemed a lot simpler back then’, that is mainly because as you get older you experience increasing amounts of pressure and stress, and it’s easy to compare your grown up stressful life to your relatively stress free childhood.
However, during your teen years you don’t have the knowledge your older self has so your high school exams (GCSE’s here in the UK) are by far the most high pressured and stressful experience you would have had so far, that’s until you take your next set of exams (A Levels here in the UK).
During this time we are creating coping mechanisms so we can learn to handle the pressure. These strategies are really put to the test with higher levels of difficulty as we get older. You’ll ask yourself will I get into college? How do I get my first job? How the hell can I get a mortgage on my wages? But these are all as equally challenging as revising for those first high school exams.
The difference is that the exam is the first time we’ve been challenged at that level. To help you understand the extremities of ‘The Journey’, I'm going to list what I believe to be one way of getting into the industry.
So… you’ve just finished your exams whether they’re GCSE’s, A Levels or you’ve just got your BTEC, now it’s time to apply for higher education (Drama School/Musical Theatre College).
You apply to your favourite 2 or 3 colleges, you then realise you have to pay for the pleasure of auditioning for these places and there’s also the cost of getting to London. You arrive at Mountview (example choice 1) and there are 300 other applicants there desperate to get into this school, you sing through your audition pieces and feel quietly confident you’ve done a good job, they made you feel comfortable and you think you’ve impressed them. You then surprise yourself with how well you did in the dance audition and walk away from the day feeling exhausted but mildly confident you did well. You then hear that historically Mountview usually enroll older applicants, people who have auditioned for them 3 or 4 times, you then hear nothing from them, no recall, no feedback, nothing… you were unsuccessful, but that’s OK, you weren’t too keen on that one anyway… on to the next one.
Next up, ArtsEd… you’ve heard some brilliant things about ArtsEd. You’re excited about this one, it’s not important to you that you have to pay to audition again, nor is it important that the train fare is higher than the last journey because you’re not paying for it. You know the process better this time, you know what the auditions are like so you’re ready and you’re going to ‘nail it’. You walk in with your 2 contrasting songs, they ask to hear the legit song and stop you after 20 seconds, smile and tell you that they don’t need to hear anymore, you can move along to the dance session. Wait… is that a good thing or a bad thing? Could they tell straight away that I'm perfect for this school and they should be throwing a scholarship at me or; were they not impressed, they smiled so that must mean something right? The dance audition went well, let’s focus on that, surely they’ll like me and offer me a place.
During the long journey home you find out that your friend also auditioned at ArtsEd and you’re shocked to hear that they were asked to perform their legit piece and their contrasting audition piece and they’ve been asked to go back and sing at the next round of auditions.
You’re both phenomenal performers but your friend has more of a Legit voice and your strength lies in contemporary musical theatre, why did they get a recall and you didn’t? The answer is, only the panel knows what they’re looking for. You may be incredibly talented but if they’re not looking for your specific, but awesome set of skills, you’re not getting in. Sometimes you're just not what they’re looking for, that’s not your fault but hey, it’s still super frustrating.
That’s 2 highly recommended colleges you’ve failed to get into or maybe not, maybe you are what they’re looking for, maybe you do get to perform both audition pieces and then do it again with some direction and then do it another time with some random request to sing the same song in a foreign accent… boom… you’re in, congratulations, you’ve done it… there is no scholarship tho. What next…
Let’s say you’re in a really fortunate position where your family can support you financially or you managed to get sponsorship or some funding for 3 years to cover the £30,000 fee’s to go to college. That’s awesome but, where do you live? Who pays for that? GSA (Guildford School of Acting) is part of the University of Surrey so maybe you can get some funding for University Accommodation. If not, you’ll need to find the cash to pay rent in a house shared with some other students, then there’s the travel costs to college, the trains and the tubes aren’t cheap. At some point during your 3 year course you’ll need to eat, it’ll be difficult to find time to eat during your 12 hour training days but when you do eat, it’s going to cost. That’s ok tho, you’ve managed to get yourself a bar job to get some extra cash so when you finish a full day of training you can go and work all night to fund your need for food and probably the odd social event.
Congratulations… it’s your third and final year, you’ve made it this far, all you need to do now is get a good feature in this year's Showcase so the agents who’ve been waiting for this 1 performance to find their next superstar can sign you up. You’re absolutely right in thinking that their next superstar ‘should’ be you, but how do you convince them of that? It can all boil down to that one performance. You may get lucky and be head hunted earlier in the year or you may perform at the end of year showcase and receive no offers from agents.
Let’s say you don’t get an agent, that’s ok… their loss right. You can still sign up to Spotlight, see all the breakdowns that are available to members without an agent (which is sometimes limited) and submit yourself hoping that the casting assistant who is scanning through thousands and thousands of applicants every day will take a risk on you, a graduate fresh out of college with no agent. In the meantime, reality kicks in, you’re not at college anymore, you either need to get a job so you can afford to live in London and be available at the drop of a hat for any audition that might come up or, you move back home, hope that when the auditions come through that they’re on a day that you can get someone to cover your shift in work so you can blitz last weeks wages on a train fare into London for the day just to be seen for 3 minutes… but on this occasion… success!
Congratulations… you’ve got a recall, the first of seven recalls that you’re going to have to attend to stand a chance of getting this job. Let’s hope your friend in work is really flexible and covers all of those shifts and that you have enough in the account to keep travelling into London. It’s the final audition and unfortunately on this occasion “it’s a no”, apparently you’re not tall enough. Surely they would have known that from the beginning, why did they call you to 7 recalls if they knew you weren’t tall enough, that doesn’t make any sense does it! That is going to be the first of many frustrating disappointments you experience, but certainly not the last.
Let’s rewrite the story a little, let’s say you graduated from college, you did or didn’t get an agent (it doesn’t matter for this example) and you manage to get that job. It’s a West End theatre job but it’s unlikely to be a lead role, you’ll need to work your way up and prove your worth in the ensemble, which is a phenomenal opportunity. The Equity minimum for a West End Contract is £483 a week, let’s say you had an agent and that agent managed to negotiate your fee up to £500 per week, thank Mrs Agent, that’s a great wage isn’t it. Let’s put our sensible heads on for a moment though, we should probably budget just to make sure we’ve got enough so we can go back home for Sandra’s 21st at the end of the month.
A weekly fee of £500 is a lot of money however, you now have agency fees at 10 - 12 percent (agency fees can go as high as 22.5%). Let’s take off 10% so you’re down to £450 a week, let’s put £75 away per week to commute into the centre of London everyday, so that’s £375. We live on the outskirts of London because accomodation is so much cheaper, I say accommodation is cheaper, what I meant was we’re paying £400 a month for a box room in an area you’re not too comfortable walking the streets alone in. Let’s put £100 a week aside to cover the rent, we’re down to £275, then there’s the food bill, some can live off £50 a week but you might want to treat yourself so we’ll spend £75, we’re down to £200. Then there’s your phone bill, clothing, equipment, mum’s birthday card, etc etc… that weekly budget is disappearing pretty quickly. But hey, that’s ok… you may be on a self employed contract for a job so you can claim for those replacement ‘New Yorkers’ you had to buy on your taxes. Infact, you’ll spend most of your time looking for ways to set off purchases against your self assessment so you don’t have to pay any taxes. You’ll wish they taught you how to do your accounts in school, it’s a minefield of confusion so you’ll rely heavily on your accountant (who you’ll have to pay for) to do your accounts for you. They’ll want receipts and proof of purchase but although we meant well, we tried to organise everything from the beginning, we have no Idea where the receipt is for that lipstick you bought 10 months ago.
OK… maybe I'm being too negative, let’s focus on the positives. You’re phenomenal, the majority of castings you walk into are successful and everyone wants to work with you. You’re comfortable, work is good, your relationship is great and you want to settle down together… Let's buy a house. All we need to do is send our accounts over to a mortgage advisor and they can tell us how much we can have. However, you’ve spent your whole career claiming for everything possible as a business expense to get your taxes down so it looks like you’ve earnt very little. The £100,000 mortgage they’ve offered you isn’t going to buy a garage in the place where you’d like to live, never mind a 2 bed flat. So now we’re changing the way we do our accounts and we’re not claiming for everything ‘legally’ possible so it’ll bump up your income so you can get a higher mortgage, however… The mortgage advisor wants 3 years of accounts so you’re going to have to wait a while before you can go for the higher mortgage. In the meantime, you have a baby… you’re not just earning your wages to feed yourself now, there’s a little person who is depending on you, that changes everything. I want to be at home to watch my little person grow but I have to work all the hours possible so we can afford to live where we want to live, drive the car we want to drive, have the push chair we want for the little one and so on. It never seems to get any easier. Take me back to my school days where life was so much easier!
My point is this, performing on stage is a gift of a job. You have the opportunity to change someone’s life (dramatic I know), you can change people’s emotions, their opinions, their choices can change all because of something you have done during your performance. That is a powerful gift, you can make someone cry tears of joy simply by doing something that you love to do. For me, it is without doubt the most amazing job I have ever done. My self esteem was at its highest when I had thousands of people rise to their feet to applaud my work every night. My confidence levels were through the roof when projects that I managed were hugely successful. I’m not saying that to boast, I'm saying that the psychological effects it had on me were incredible. Had my career not have gone the way it did I sometimes wonder if I would be the same person I am today, probably not.
If you’re still listening to this episode you either really want to work in this industry or you want your child to be a professional performer. I haven’t purposely written anything in this Blog to put you off, the examples are actually inspired by true stories that i’ve encountered along the way.
If you’re a born performer, you’re going to perform but I also think knowledge is power, if you can prepare yourself (either financially or emotionally) then you’re going to have a great foundation to be the very best version of yourself.
If this episode has been an eye opener for you then please do give it a like or a 5 star review, whatever you can to support the podcast would be really appreciated.
I also strongly recommend you check out The Academy over at My Theatre School .com I work very closely with our Academy members to help them prepare for this industry and you are more than welcome to join us.
For now though, that’s it from me… i’ll see you next time.
