Hi MT CC folks. If anyone can weigh in on which schools out of the 21 in attendance at Moonifieds did live prescreens vs final auditions, that would be awesome. TIA!!
We were there two years ago and off the top of my head the prescreens were MT: Texas State, Penn State, Otterbein,Coastal Carolina, Pace and TCU.
Pace was final and so was Coastal and TCU
Baldwin Wallace is final and I believe Point Park is also
Since this post is not inundated with responses from last year, here are some of the schools from 2014 -15:
Baldwin Wallace - final
Coastal Carolina - prescreen (was listed as final, but turned out to be a prescreen)
Penn State - prescreen
Point Park - final
Oklahoma - prescreen
Oklahoma City - final
Otterbein - prescreen
Rider - final
TCU - final
Texas State - prescreen
U Arts - final
Viterbo - sort of final (request was made in February to send in a video)
Wright State - final
There were at least 7-8 more programs there in 2014-15 (Pace, Central Oklahoma, etc.) - these are the ones that I remember.
The list of schools and the type of auditions conducted are going to vary year-to-year. Several of the programs sent only one panelist and most programs videotaped the audition.
You said
the type of auditions conducted are going to vary year-to-year
@EmsDad I am asking you this because you seem knowledgable but I put this question to anyone, Do you have any idea (or guess) as to why these college programs change their recruitment process and requirements so often from year to year? Not just Moonifieds but in general. I realize the class of applicants is new every year so they may not be confused by what was asked in the past. But it does make me scratch my head. You would think the programs landed on guidelines that worked well and wouldn’t need to keep changing.
@Notmath1 - hmmm, here are some reasons that I can think of for the seemingly constant changes in the MT college audition process:
- An avalanche of applicants - huge growth in the number of applicants over the past decade or so has resulted in the need for some/many MT programs to scramble more than a little to figure out how to best reconfigure their approach to the process when the number of applicants exceeds anything that they could have foreseen. The fact that the staffs at most college theatre departments are really small exacerbates the problem. This has resulted more than a little experimentation and a seemingly constant stream of changes year-to-year from an applicant's perspective. The use of prescreens to help manage the huge mass of applicants for some programs has been an area which has seen a lot of experimentation with a commensurate plethora of changes over the past five years.
- Newness - many MT programs are less than 10-15 years old, and/or have been greatly reconfigured within the past ten years. Processes within new organizations tend to change often.
- Faculty migration - as faculty members come and go, changes to the process for a given school are likely based on the preferences of new faculty members.
- The web - web-based systems such as Acceptd are growing rapidly in use. These systems are rapidly evolving and have offered new features and changes in their workflows each year, which, in turn, have facilitated/instigated/required changes in the process for some/many programs.
- Video - the rapidly growing use of video is resulting in a sea-change in the audition process not only for colleges, but across the acting profession in general (summer stock, professional theatre, agents, film, TV, etc.).
- Budgets - as theatre department budgets shrink or grow, some programs are not able, or are able, to travel to attend various auditions, year-to-year.
@Emsdad makes a number of excellent points - I would add that theater itself has been changing significantly in the last decade or so. Therefore, whether schools are looking for quadruple threats, or moving towards pop/rock, there are lots of new things to evaluate… which I can imagine would change the type of evaluation needed…
These are all great points and some I had not thought about