The Lovers, the Dreamers, and Me – Following your acting dreams

There’s a 3-year-old post by Allison Ford making the social media rounds this week titled, I Gave Up My Dream, and I’d Do It Again. Ford had aspired to an acting career, but after experiencing the reality of show business decided to change directions. She is now a successful and contented writer and editor.

Her essential point is that while it’s vital to believe in your ability to realize your dreams, it’s also important to allow those dreams to evolve and to be honest with yourself should they begin to shift, because “blindly following a dream becomes less about pursuing a passion and more about just desperately trying to avoid failure.”

Over the course of your life, have you experienced a single, laser-like focus that has guided all your decisions and led you to the course you’re now on? I think that for most of us, dreams are moving targets with varying range. Take a moment to map out how yours have unfolded so far.

Here is how I ended up where I am now:

My dream remains helping singers realize their dreams. But as dreams are moving targets, this is a complicated proposition.

First of all, the dream of artistic mastery and the dream of professional success are distinct. Allison Ford never says that anything happened to dampen her enthusiasm for the actual craft of acting – she left the theatre because she found that there were aspects of the business and career that were not to her liking.

Ask yourself: To what extent is it your dream to master singing for its own sake? Is your commitment to mastery contingent on your dream of earning your living as a performer? Building an international opera career? Superstardom?

None of these dreams is inherently superior to the others, but everyone has their own reasons for doing this and you need clarity about what motivates you.

You also need to be able to draw a distinction between your subjective artistic goals and the objective demands of the business, or the rejection and validation you experience professionally will alternately crush your soul and distort your ego.

Second, whether your dream is artistic mastery, professional success, or a combination of the two, you will find your commitment to your dream continually tested. I can guarantee that obstacles will arise that will challenge you emotionally, physically, artistically and/or financially along the way.

Where your artistic dreams are concerned, opera singing demands so diverse a combination of skills that no one singer is naturally good at them all. Some of what you have to get good at will not come easily to you and will push you outside your comfort zone. Whether it’s a component of technique, emotional vulnerability, foreign language diction, or dramatic interpretation, confronting a deficiency in your skill set can be upsetting enough to make you go into denial about it or try to do an end run around it. Either will put progress towards your dream on hold, and eventually you will have to see whether your dream is strong enough to get you to rise to these challenges. Maybe it isn’t. Maybe there is another dream that you will find more compelling, one that will sustain you when you are pushed outside your comfort zone.

Career dreams are also guaranteed to push you outside your comfort zone. Being good at singing is not the same as being good at auditioning – I know very few singers who genuinely love singing arias out of context in a room with unpredictable acoustics for a poker-faced panel.

Show business is a numbers game, so you’re going to experience some unspecified number of rejections for every gig you land.

Opera is a highly collaborative enterprise, so your artistic vision will be molded by those of the director and conductor, at times in ways that are highly rewarding and at other times not so much. There is the uncertainty of life as a self-employed, freelance artist. There is the instability of living out of a suitcase and finding yourself in a different city every 6 to 8 weeks, at times one where you don’t speak the language well. There is the constant necessity of networking with new colleagues and socializing with opera patrons, which is easier and more enjoyable for some than it is for others.

Again, anything you truly find worth doing will sustain you when challenges like these arise. If your dream of an opera career falters in the face of these challenges, it may be that another, more compelling dream awaits you.

I wish that Ford had not expressed this process in terms of “giving up” on her dream. I understand why she put it that way, but that isn’t really what she did. She was self-aware enough to see that what she was doing was not as fulfilling as she had hoped it would be and found the courage to explore other, more gratifying options.

A change of direction is not a personal failing. I didn’t give up my dream of performing musical theatre – I took up the clarinet. I didn’t give up the clarinet, I took up classical singing. And I certainly have not given up classical singing but rather have chosen to pursue teaching as my profession. Which, let me tell you, has created the same level of daunting challenges and road blocks that I would not have been motivated to overcome as a professional singer, but which I will never allow to deter me as a teacher!

It’s the stronger dream. It’s the right dream for me. But I can only really say that with confidence because I’ve been on this path long enough to feel pretty sure I’m going to stick with it.

I had noticed that Allison Ford’s piece was getting a lot of play but only finally sat down to read it after a student brought it up in her lesson yesterday. She was deeply concerned:

I can’t presume to know where her dream will lead her, but I can observe that so far, she has triumphed over every challenge she has confronted to date (many of which might have proved prohibitively discouraging to someone less determined) and seems to revel in those aspects of the business that others find most distasteful, so I believe she’s on the right course.