Taking Care of Business

As I alluded to in my last post, my fellow Divas and I have been making good on our promise to do more for our careers. And part of that process this month was a dinner meeting followed by a seminar by Dallas Travers, an award-winning author and actors’ advocate who is incredibly passionate about helping actors help themselves. She provides methods and strategies for actors to get ahead in the business; it’s essentially Marketing 101, only with a left-brained slant that makes the whole thing understandable for those of us who have been told that artists have no heads for business.

I won’t go into the details of Dallas’s seminar here; I think she deserves all the credit, and I’m more than happy to pimp her to my friends (just as Amy pimped her to me). However, I do think that this blog is a good forum to run through a few points that I took away both from my “Diva in the Details” meeting and the seminar itself.

1. Get out of your own way. This is my biggest problem. Most of the time I don’t think I’m worth the success, so I don’t follow through on leads or auditions. I see it as a sort of subconscious sabotage. I’m hoping the Divas will help me by keeping me accountable for the things I said I was going to do. Even now, as I’m typing this, I realize that I have been meaning to call a certain conductor for about a week now. I’ll call him as soon as I’m done writing this. Really, I will.
2. Trust in the power of pursuit. I don’t think it really occurred to me that the “power of seven” marketing strategy could be applied to me before I heard Dallas talk about it. But it makes sense. All I have to do is be consistent and targeted in my outreach to industry professionals.
3. Make a plan. This is my next step. I don’t really know WHO to be contacting within the industry. Dallas mentioned a bunch of acting websites that are good resources to find agents, but I’m not looking for an acting agent. I am looking for a singing agent, and, frankly, I have no idea where to begin. But I need to start somewhere, so maybe I should get off the computer and go make that phone call to that conductor I’ve been putting off. Odds are he knows at least who I should start with.

I do have the audio of our Diva in the Details meeting and will (hopefully) be able to edit it and turn it into a proper podcast. You know, in all my free time. But we talked about those three topics quite a bit throughout our dinner, and I think we managed to have a few really good anecdotes as well. More on that later.

As for me, I didn’t make it through to the Oratorio Society of New York finals. I’m sad, but I am not going to let one setback stop me.

In fact, as I was moping about my failure tonight, I paused and looked around me, with the realization that I was sitting on the Avery Fisher Hall stage with the NY Philharmonic. Not only that, but I was successfully performing some incredibly difficult music that only a handful of people would dare tackle. So I’m not chopped liver.

I have a list of a bunch more competitions that I would like to enter, and there’s no reason I shouldn’t get right back in the game.