Sunday, December 13, 2009
Chicago is a theater town. And how.
I am visiting Chicago for the Memorial Service of my first great theater teacher, Robin Bennett. This morning I met her daughter Jenny and Jenny's partner for breakfast. When I met them Jenny handed me the copy of the Riverside Edition of the Complete Works of Shakespeare that my school had won when we took our ensemble developed "Songs and Sonnets" to the Folger Shakespeare Library's High School Festival in 1988, pictured here. Apparently Robin had wanted me to have it. The place we went to breakfast was an Irish pub type place called Hackney's I believe, with lots of carved wood and ketchup bottles on the tables. It was full of people in Chicago Cubs regalia, who were headed to a football game. During the meal, the Riverside sat on the table, but I had set my black leather gloves down on top of it, obscuring the title. While we were eating, not one but TWO waitresses stopped by the table, guessed correctly what the book was based on familiarity with the decor on the binding (the title was obscured remember), and voiced their enthusiasm for its contents. Can't really picture this happening in another American city. Although I suppose we should make some allowances for the fact that the spirit of Robin Bennett was probably working her voodoo on the waitresses to make sure they noticed.
sundry digital ephemera
- These digital drawings for the Green Movement by architect Soheil Tavakoli to honor Iran's Freedom Fighters are pretty great.
- If you had to work for the Man, these offices would be where you'd want to do it.
- Al Pacino is getting his Shylock on in Central Park
- See these butterflies try to fly in space and fail massively
- Note to self: if building a replica of San Francisco, toothpics are the wrong materials. It takes to too long (34 years)!
- This poor slob's conjugal bed was tweeting his, uh, activities, thanks to his best man.
- I want my own Fortress of Solitude desk. I just don't know how I can ever feel complete without one.
Friday, December 11, 2009
15 minutes a day
I didn't actually read this book, but someone explained the principle to me -- that accomplishing a little something everyday can add up to a lot -- and I embraced it, in writing my dissertation on Thomas Bernhard in German studies at Stanford, and I found it to very effective. The biggest enemy of the writer (I'll get to actors in a moment) is procrastination. The magnitude of the task at hand just feels so great, that you just don't want to start. This procrastination persists over time, and then guilt starts to set in, which in turn compounds the procrastination, and creates a vicious cycle. By telling yourself that you ONLY need to write fifteen minutes a day, and NOTHING MORE if you don't feel like it, you eliminate the difficulty with facing the daunting magnitude of taking on the whole project at once. By only needing to take on a little bit at a time, the fear factor is greatly diminished. But there are other substantial benefits to the fifteen minutes a day plan: by staying connected, if only in a relatively small way, to the project at hand, the mind stays engaged with the project, so that when you are doing other things, washing your hair, mowing the lawn, walking the dog, a part of your mind will be chewing on the problem, even if it is not in the foreground of your mind. You will find that when you return to your writing the next day, things that may have seemed intractable or puzzling the previous day will have sorted themselves out. I used to experience this all the time when I worked as a software engineer: I would puzzle over some bug for hours, finally give up and go home, and then, over the weekend, while I was eating a hot dog or cutting my toenails, the answer would come to me, like a bolt from the blue. The thing that had eluded me was suddenly visible, and the bug dissolved before my eyes. By exposing yourself to your work on a daily basis, you keep the unconscious mind churning, and you maximize the likelihood that it will spit a solution out into your lap.
This is an extremely valuable principle for actors. I require my acting students to meet once per week to rehearse. Some of them meet more than that, but that is the minimum. Some of them end up meeting the day of class and rehearsing before the class starts. While there is nothing intrinsically wrong with this, it sometimes means that the student is leaving the scene alone for the whole week and then taking it up only when he comes to rehearse it. He doesn't make a conscious decision to do this, but life happens, way leads on to way, and before he knows it, a week has passed and he has not thought about the scene. In that time, the scene has morphed into a foreign, unfriendly entity; the warm glow of familiarity has not been allowed to grow through repeated exposures.
Even the actor who does little outside of rehearsal but meets her partner midway through the seven days between classes to rehearse is better off, for she is re-exposed to her work every three days or so, between rehearsing and coming to class. But the best case scenario is that the actor does some work on the scene each day, even if only fifteen minutes worth. You'd be surprised at how much you can accomplish in fifteen minutes of focused work, and that does tend to accumulate quickly as the days and weeks pass. Plus, you get the enormous added benefit of staying close to your work, so that your comfort with it grows, it begins to appear less demanding and menacing, and your mind continues to chew on the problems even as you are occupied with other things.
WHAT TO DO in those fifteen minutes depends on the actor and the process she is exploring or embracing in her work. I present a framework in my class for developing a role based on the training I encountered at the Yale School of Drama, but it is certainly not the only possible framework. That is not really at issue here. What is at issue is the actor developing the discipline to stay close to his work. This, in the end, probably makes as much difference as the precise kind of work that is done in those fifteen minutes. There is a quote that is ascribed to Aristotle incorrectly; it is actually from a man named Will Durant, who was paraphrasing Aristotle : "We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit." Sustained excellence over time depends as much on the way the actor approaches his or her task as it does on what she actually achieves in any given performance situation. Slow and steady, and all that.
This principle dovetails nicely with the principle of units initiated by Stanislavsky, today commonly referred to as "beats." Acting students everywhere are taught to break down the scene into beats, but the justification for doing so is not often explained. In the "Units and Objectives" chapter in An Actor Prepares, Stanislavsky famously used the metaphor of a large cooked turkey that needed to carved up into manageable, bite-sized portions in order to be consumed. The only way to accomplish a monumental task (like embodying a role) was to break it down into smaller ones. He wasn't taking about the rate at which these tasks are tackled, as I am in this article, but the underlying principle is the same: what seems impossible becomes possible when broken down into its constituent parts.
I will note that I do not think classes that offer the actor the chance to "come and work every day of the week" necessarily addresses the issue I am confronting here, and that is because it is imperative that the actor to develop the ability to work on his role without supervision. The input of teachers and coaches is invaluable, but an actor who relies completely on them will be in trouble when facing a difficult or incompetent director. The actor needs to make friends with working by herself, and develop confidence in her ability to do so. I am not saying it is a bad thing for an actor to go to a class every day, but doing that does nothing to bring the actor to develop creative self-reliance. Wittgenstein used a metaphor of a ladder which can be thrown away once you have climbed it to describe the role of philosophy. An actor might look at ther training ins a similar light: ultimately, she wants to reach a vantage point where she can do her work with or without the help of well-wishers and sherpas. That is the source of true creative strength.
Wednesday, December 09, 2009
enough to make you wish you were in Austin
This is one of the most interesting pieces of theater criticism I've seen in a while. It's a discussion of a one-man Henry V done in Austin, Texas:
On arriving at the OffCenter and receiving my complimentary champagne (apparently there was some sort of Federal holiday on) I was informed that I would be seated. This is odd for our fringe spaces, but what the hell… not my show. I waited. And Robert greeted me and showed me to a seat of his choosing.
On setting out to perform a one man version of Henry V, Mr. Faires wasn’t pacing out back trying to find his inner Dionysus, cramming scene 4, or opening his 4th chakra, he was personally greeting and seating all 60 of his guests.
Did he then run out back to compose himself 10 minutes before curtain? No. He simply stepped on stage, surrounded by 20 of those guests, adjusted his props and began when his lights shifted.
It was a piece that could have been told in a bar by as expert a storyteller as Mr. Faires. Simply a gathering of friends who asked for that one story about the time Harry went to France.
The unpretentiousness of what is described here...I could take a bath in it. The intimacy of it, the friendliness of it, dare I say the warmth of it? The author enjoins his readers to "Stop building a monolith to yourself in every production and performance". That's what we need: fewer monoliths, more warmth.
Tuesday, December 08, 2009
from the depths of the Interwebs
- Futuristic buildings Dubai had planned on but will never see. Schadenfreude anyone?
- Get the recorded view of the ride down from the top of the 10 tallest roller coasters.
- Now Kittycam can tell you what your cat does all day. Not so much sleeping, much looking out the window, it turns out.
- Get a bus tour of the stomping grounds of Los Angeles gangs.
- No, these are not from a movie. They are actual pics from the current Space Shuttle Atlantis mission.
- 15 Google interview questions that will make you feel really stupid.
- Watch where you click: 20 Years for Accidentally Downloading Child Porn
- Hermes scarves will blow you away
- If you are going to bash "teh gays", be ready for your choices of apparel to be scrutinized
- Ho, ho, ho! Let's hear it for creepy mall Santas
- Somehow, it's comforting to know that even wikipedia can get sued for propagating untruths.
Saturday, December 05, 2009
(virtual) points of interest
- A game show that shows what happened to all those unemployed people.
- The eco-future of the Christmas tree market.
- Let Beethoven accompany you on a timelapse photography tour of the Alps
- The only thing you really need to know about Twilight.
- John Mellencamp's son has started a Facebook Group to persuade his father to stop smoking.
- Find your evil twin with Facebook's new Facial Profiler
- What was Google missing? It's very own dictionary.
- Be ready for the 9 Silly Things People Say when you say you don't want children
- Don't miss out on the chance to get in on the ground floor of the Somalian pirate stock market
- Incredible hulk cake complete with green nipples
- Who know that smoldering, toxic fossil fuels could create such...beauty?
- Coming soon to a sushi restaurant near you.
- Move over Cirque due Soleil. now there's Circo Visuale Les Farfadais.
- Thanks to this new toilet paper with a twist, you can finally get rid of those pesky piles of Vanity Fairs in the bathroom.
- Tapestry spun entirely from golden spider silk.
- Woman accused of setting fire to husband's penis.
- One enterprising young man is using Google Street View to promote his rock band.
Friday, December 04, 2009
"I don't know what to do with my hands."
This is a cry for help that comes up occasionally for acting teachers everywhere. I have a few thoughts about it.
Problems in the physical life of a scene invariably stem from a lack of clarity about the immediate potential future: more specifically, what you are looking for your partner to do and say next, but especially do. When problems pertaining to the physical life of the scene arise in class, I pose the question: what do you want to see happen next? Usually, the actor doesn't have much to say, thinks about it for a moment, and then comes up with something, but the something he comes up with is often lacking in HEAT or urgency, and it will often be of the form "I want her to say xyz". It may be true that xyz is what the actor in the scene wants to hear at that moment, but saying xyz is always a part of some larger development that will have a physical component, and getting clear about that is the key to solving whatever is weighing down the physical life at that moment. Do you want to see the other person embrace you? Take your hands and dance you around? Leave the room? Leave the room with you? Sit down and confide in you? Once the actor has clarified this, then usually, without further ado, her body adjusts accordingly to prepare for the expected outcome. These are calculations that we make instinctively for ourselves in our own lives, but when we are pretending to be someone else, they don't always come as readily.
It's often important to be clear not only about what you want to see happen next, but what you are afraid will happen next, and what you may need to be ready to act to prevent. DO you need to stop someone from leaving the room? From picking up a gun? From leaving the bed? Clarifying these possible negative outcomes can have an equally clarifying effect on the actor's physical orientation towards the partner.
The actor is not sure what to do with his hands because he is not sure what he is waiting for or looking for to happen. She is so focused on the verbal interaction with her partner that she forgets that that verbal interaction is wrapped in a physical context. Usually, by reminding the actor of the nature of her physical engagement with her partner and her relationship to the space, her phsycal life sorts itself out.
If the actor is involved in a section of the scene where there is a back-and-forth discussion or debate or argument happening with another character, and they are in a kind of standoff, where they are confronting each other in a kind of deadlock, then there will naturally be some gesturing involved. When an actor is seeming or feeling self-conscious about these gestures, the answer is usually to clarify the desired or feared physical outcomes, as described above, and to remind the actor to consistently receive of his or her partner, which, most of the time, involves sustained eye contact. Tha partner's eyes, as I have written about elsewhere, are the surest antidote to self-consciousness. I know this from firsthand experience. When I meet prospective students for coffee, I have a "spiel" that I do for them about the purpose of the class and the expecations involved. I have been doing this pitch for five years now. I typically gesture as I speak, to help make my points, the way that people who are explaining something typically do. However, I sometimes can feel a bit of self-consciousness about my gestures: I notice that the timing of the gestures relative to the words is off somehow, and I anticipate the gesture I will be making next, which distracts me. However, I have found that if I consciously look directly into to my interlocutor's eyes, not vaguely in the direction of the eyes but right into the pupils, unwaveringly though not aggressively, then the self-consciousness vanishes. There is some vulnerability in doing that, but it's worth it: my gestures then arise spontaneouly and line up perfectly with my words, I feel myself plugged into the "flow", and I am aware of all of this without being self-conscious about it. In other words, by fully giving myself over to connecting with my partner and communicating with her, I forget about what I look like and how I am being received, and I feel free. Or, as a wise person once said, the only way out is through.
Some people need to work to develop freedom in the joints of the arms. In his "advice to the players" speech, Hamlet warns about "sawing the air too much with your hands". If the actor has not discovered the requisite freedom in these joints, his arm will move monolithically, and he will seem to be sawing the air too much. The Alexander technique can be a great help with this, and studying T'ai-Chi is also enormoulsy beneficial in developing the expressive potential of the arms and hands.In the end, it comes down to being in the moment. Paradoxically, though, being able to be in the moment successfully as someone else usually involves thinking things through.
Wednesday, December 02, 2009
from the great flux of the cosmic Web
Some points of interest that have shown up in my browser recently:
- Holy Big Brother Batman: My Mom's on Facebook
- What is your Internet drug of choice?
- When you read about what acting class did for this autistic boy, scratch your head and wonder: what might it do for me?
- For the first time ever, the complete manuscript of A Christmas Carol is available online, edits and all.(HT Jenny Bennett) And there's even a contest to pick the best edit!
- "Old Europe" is old. Really old. Older than ancient Egypt. Older than Mesopotamia. It's OLD. Someone please tell Donald Rumsfeld.
- A wake-up call for your friendly neighborhood TSA
- Jesus Christ excused from jury duty for bad behavior
- Evolution f*cked their shit up.
- New place to pimp your creative wares:
- Who knew you could do THAT with a beer can?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Become a Fan
