I say it over and over, but it bears repeating. The college auditors just want to see you. They do not want you to play a part, portray a role, or disguise yourself in any way. This is why one of the cardinal rules for college auditions is no dialects or accents. When you walk in that audition room, the reps have just a few minutes to get to know you. So you need to make it easy for them to see your true self.
“Be yourself” is the motto. That sounds simple enough, but for a 17-year-old high school student, this can be more difficult than it sounds. The tendency is to out-perform the person in the room before you, choose material that auditors will never forget, and show them all the wonderful facets of your talent. But auditors tell me this is actually not what they want to see. First of all, in a two-to-five-minute audition there is no way to show everything you can do, so trying to do that will always fail. You will end up showing them nothing all. They want to see you perform material that you sincerely resonate with, prepared in the simplest way that shows them something specific about you as a person. Surprisingly, the subtlest most honest audition performance will often leave the strongest impression.
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