My audition journey for Beyond Workshop Series was a game-changing experience. It was exactly what I needed, in more ways than one.
When I got the very first email, I didn’t know what to expect. I was just told (by my friends who have been part of Revolución Latina’s projects before) that it wasn’t going to be a regular audition process.
In my head I was freaking out, “What does that even mean?”
I asked myself a hundred times. I expected it to go the same way it always does. We write our name in a list, we hand our headshots and resumes, we sit down, we watch the hours go by while playing Candy Crush until our name is called and then we get 90 seconds to convince the people on the other side of the room that we’re everything they’ve been looking for. I was so wrong.
It may sound cheesy, but after being in that room for more than two hours, I realized they were everything I had been looking for.
And when I say they I don’t only mean the people in the panel, I mean every single person who came to audition, and I’ll tell you why. For the longest time I had been longing for something to be a part of. Someplace where I could feel seen.
New York City is beautiful, but sometimes it gets lonely. I go out every single day and study, work, in English. I know it’s silly to give that importance to something so simple, but to me, Spanish is comfort, it’s putting my guard down and not thinking too hard about everything, it’s safety. And the second I stepped in that audition room, I heard it… Spanish. My language, my refuge, my home. I looked around, I smiled and for the first time since I started auditioning in the city I got to experience a new phenomenon in the audition room.
People smiled back at me! And when I first heard that “Hola!” followed by a chorus of our voices saying it back… I knew that those people around me, those faces in the crowd were no longer strangers. We were a team; we were the same. I may not have known their names, but I knew we were the same. Latinos. Hermanos. I felt safe, safe enough to raise my voice and take risks I know I wouldn’t have taken had I been in a room with a different group of people.
For the first stage of the audition, we sang together. We raised our voices, and it was a beautiful moment of wanting to blend in to become one voice, in the very same room where you’re originally supposed to want to stand out. We were one, the echo of the voices of our past. We were powerful, we were represented. For a moment, we were not individuals. We were culture, we were community.
We were Puerto Rico, Panamá, Mexico, Colombia, Ecuador and Paraguay, all at once. We may have not known it in that moment, but we came together to achieve something bigger than any of us, and it was genuinely beautiful.
After that we talked about the music and for a second I was transported to a whole different world. I felt represented by the songs we learned and even though we were given no more than 35 bars of music, it felt real. I felt like we were back in the 1400’s, before Europeans came to our territory and changed everything. The music sounded like a ritual, like a calling. A call to our ancestry and our culture. And in my heart I heard it, I heard the call.
Maria Valadez
Auditionee at BWS 2025