For the past decade or so, the nonprofit Austin Creative Alliance has been hosting an annual unified audition, a one-day event that aims to connect actors and other creative artists with producers, filmmakers and casting directors. Originally an actors-only audition day, the event has now expanded to include directors, designers, choreographers and other theater professionals.
“I took over the event two years ago, and … the numbers had dwindled a little bit, so I’m always looking to just increase how many people we have – how many auditors we have in the room and then also how many people are auditioning that day,” says Austin Creative Alliance Director of Programming Jenny Lavery. “I’ve also been very focused on increasing the number of production people, so crew and designers and directors and choreographers. And the other big metric that we’re trying really had to increase is the level of diversity of the participants in general [including] differently abled actors. So this year we have a big range of differently abled people auditioning.”
“It’s an annual event that we do where artists can be seen in front of Central Texas’ top producers, directors, filmmakers, casting directors and agents,” Lavery says. It’s open to anybody who has at least one year of training or experience in their chosen field.
For performers, it’s a pretty standard audition process – “you come in and you either do a monologue or you do a monologue and a cut of a song,” Lavery says. “For crew people – for crew, directors, designers, anybody who wants to work in a production role – they come in and they talk about their artistic philosophy and how they like to work and what they work on and kind of just pitch themselves for sixty seconds.”
