#137: How’s it going? Good. You? Fair.
Tuesday 1/21/25
Hiii… hey…. How y’all doing?
Well, last week was a total failure on my end! Actually, when Monday came around, I ended up getting so overwhelmed with stuff. I had to do that I kept saying all right. I'll post later. I'll post later. I'll post later…. And then I just simply didn't. And then the next day came and went. The next day came and went… And all the sudden it was the weekend.Hopefully you feel like there's plenty of stuff here to read and go back and read and you didn't miss me too much! It was a big crazy wild week and yesterday I ended up working like 9 AM to 10 PM since I was off (of coaching) all weekend due to the New Jersey thespian festival. This week will be similar because this weekend is the NYC unified auditions for college students! It's really exciting and I'm gonna get to meet a lot of my students from all over the country since they're mostly all coming to New York. I'll be there both days… Got a nice warm-up room for my students at one of the Ripley Grier locations…so it'll be a blast! And as of now… I didn't get sick from this weekend! I don't wanna jinx it, but I'm gonna hold out some help. However, I did get a stye. Honestly, how do teachers do it? The sickness, the overuse of The Voice, the styes!
This weekend was the New Jersey thespian festival and if you don't know what that is, it's the state wide festival for the "international thespian society". Students from participating schools are in a troop, and that troop can attend the festival simply to attend workshops and some opening and closing ceremonies… Or they can do those things in addition to presenting duets, solos, group numbers in front of adjudication panels. So the whole festival is half competition and half workshops. There are workshops and all kinds of theatrical things like lighting design, costuming, acting, improv, film, and TV, singing, and so much more. This was my fifth year as a workshop presenter… Wow, that's crazy.
I got involved with this in January 2021 when the festival went on zoom. My friend from college actually ran the workshop, coordinating for the festival and reached out to me to see if I would be willing to run two sessions on zoom about the college audition process. One for teachers and one for students. I really had no idea what I was doing, but I had known enough about the college audition experience and had done enough presenting on it to be able to throw something together for a 50 minute presentation.
The following year instead of doing two over two days I did for over two days and I think we were still on zoom that year. In 2023 I did six or seven workshops over the two days and we were back in person then. Last year I did about 10 workshops over both days and this year I was scheduled to do 13 but we did call the day early on Sunday due to snow so I still did 10 again. My workshops included a belting workshop, college audition preparation, how to select and curate your rep binder, a workshop called "fearless cold reads" where I help you navigate how to learn to cold read, And then my least attended one lol called "the 60 second audition where I teach you how to take your song or your monologue and get it into a nice minute long cut.
I usually have teachers pop in to a few of my workshops just either to check on their students who decided to attend or to listen themselves. This year I had a few teachers attend my "build your belt" workshops, and one came up to me afterwards, and said… “Oh, my God, I come from a classical singing background I'm a choral teacher at my school… And thank you so much for your work, because I have no idea about any of this”. Those belt workshops are really the biggest attended, but it also takes the most energy out of me. I also tend to pick up a few students here and there after these workshops. And every year I get someone to oing my college audition prep program, which is really great. It really makes it financially worth it to attend these. You do get paid for the workshops but it's not as much as I would get paid if I just stayed home and worked, do you know?
I hope y'all had a great week and will talk to you tomorrow!
Dreams Don’t Die
Julie