At Long Last, A Post on Joseph N. Welch
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Showing posts with label acting. Show all posts
Showing posts with label acting. Show all posts
Wednesday, December 29, 2010
above all else
It's crazy not because of what it says but because of how it made me feel. It's Josh Waitzkin's The Art of Learning.
Waitzkin is a child prodigy chess player. He was playing and winning international chess tournaments in his teens and even younger. Then a documentary was made about him, based on his father's book Looking for Bobby Fisher, about Josh's young chess life. And Josh got a taste of celebrity:
But there were problems. After the movie came out I couldn't go to a tournament without being surrounded by fans asking for autographs. Instead of focusing on chess positions, I was pulled into an image of myself as a celebrity. Since childhood I had treasured the sublime study of chess, the swim through ever deepening layers of complexity. I could spend hours at a chessboard and stand up from the experience on fire with insight about chess, basketball, the ocean, psychology, love, art. The game was exhilarating and spiritually calming. It centered me. Chess was my friend. Then, suddenly, the came became alien and disquieting.
He goes on:
My game began to unravel. I began to think about how I looked thinking instead of losing myself in thought. The Grandmasters, my elders, were ignored and scowled at me. Some treated me like a pariah. I had won eight national championships, and had more fans, public support and recognition than I could dream of, but none of this was helping my search for excellence, let alone for happiness.
And then, the money shot:
At a young age, I came to know that there is something profoundly hollow about the nature of fame. I had spent my life devoted to artistic growth and was used to the sweaty-palmed contentment one gets after many hours of intense reflection. This peaceful feeling had nothing to do with external adulation, and I yearned for a return to that innocent, fertile time. I missed just being a student of the game, but there was no escaping the spotlight. I found myself dreading chess, miserable before leaving for tournaments. I played without inspiration and was invited to appear on television shows. I smiled.
In some ways, it's a familiar theme and a familiar story: is this all there is to fame? His observations thus far are keen, sincere, and heartfelt, but it's what happened next that makes Waitzman's story so electifying. He discovered T'ai-Chi, and began to study it, and after a time, he had a remarkable realization:
This type of learning experience was familiar to me from chess. My whole life I had studied trechniques, principles, and theory until they were integrated into the unconscious. From the outside T'ai-Chi and chess couldn't be more different, but they began to converge in my mind. I started to translate my chess ideas into T'ai-Chi language, as if the two arts were linked by an essential connecting ground. Every day I noticed more and more similarities, until I began to feel as if I were studying chess when I was studying T'ai-Chi. Once I was giving a forty board simultaneous chess exhibition in Memphis and I realized halfway through that I had been playing all the games as Tai-Chi. I wasn't calculating with chess notation or thinking about open variations...I was feeling flow, filling space left behind, riding waves like I do at sea or in martial arts. This was wild! I was winning chess games without playing chess
Waitzkin went on to compete and win international tournaments in push hands, the martial arts form of T'ai Chi. This was an incredible story: a young man who becomes a beginner again to rediscover the joy of learning, and then goes on to master a totally unrelated field.
There is so much to talk about, even in this first chapter, that it kind of makes me crazy, as I said earlier. I feel like jumping around and shrieking, in a completely crazy way. You will be hearing more about Waitzkin on this blog, believe me. My students will find his book on their curriculum list. But I will close this initial discussion with the following:
A lifetime of competition has not cooled my ardor to win, but I have grown to love the study and training above all else.
This is something I often want to express to students, but I hold back, because coming from someone who makes his living as a teacher, it can sound self-serving. But an actor who has stopped learning has probably stopped acting. A high-performing athlete does not train to be able to stop training: the training continues throughout her career, and ultimately, the training is the source of the true satisfaction. The siren's song of performing in front of an audience is strong, and not necessarily to be resisted. But the pursuit of greater skill is not something that should be abandoned, well, ever.
Take it from the champ:
What I have realized is that what I am best at is not Tai Chi, and it is not chess -- what I am best at is the art of learning.
Saturday, December 04, 2010
acting on the razor's edge
Ten years.
I knew that terror well. Helping an actor to develop a performance in which every word they say and everything they do issues from a visceral need is no mean feat. Many actors and directors never come anywhere close to this. But let me tell you, there is nothing more heartbreaking for a director than getting an actor to that point, where you actually see them do deep, compelling work, and then having to watch the show with an audience when the actor, for whatever reason, does not deliver that work that you have seen them do, that you helped midwife and that you KNOW they have in them. It is a very, very bitter pill.
Acting is a uniquely difficult pursuit in that if you are watching yourself do it, YOU'RE DOIN IT WRONG!!!! Sure, there will always be a part of the actor's awareness that is not totally absorbed in the scene, but ideally, most of the actor's faculties are involved in the world of the character. This fact about acting, that you can't successfully watch yourself do it, makes it difficult for the actor to have a real sense of how it's actually going. I have seen actors after a show in states of high elation over how it went, and then I have seen the same actors on different nights feeling badly about what they did, and often, I see very little difference. It's just the nature of the beast.
So it's important that actors work very, very hard at developing their skill. It's one thing to truly connect with the need at the core of the character, and to learn to play the scene from that place. But it's quite another to be able to do that consistently. It's a real tightrope act. On Friends and Family Night in the class, I am never really sure what I am going to see, because I am working with people who are learning the process. That's a big part of why I have them do the scenes that night for me once before the guests arrive: they can warm up the scene, and I can take an inventory of what they have managed to hold on to and what they need to be reminded of.
It's also the director's responsibility to create a safe, sane environment of support and encouragement that allows the actor to develop her work on the role in a way that promotes mental equilibrium and readiness. Directors who terrorize or bully are doing a disservice to everyone involved, and the actors can't be faulted for inconsistency under such circumstances.
Work hard, actors, and stay in trim. We need you to be able to renew us, inspire us, to bring us to life.
Thursday, November 18, 2010
quantum leaps
The expression "quantum leap" is kind of tricky to use correctly. As one physicist explains:
Some people think that a quantum leap is a particularly large leap. This is incorrect. In fact, in quantum physics, where the expression came from, a quantum leap is usually a very tiny leap indeed, often smaller than the diameter of the nucleus of an atom.
In defense of the people who are using the term incorrectly: if I recall correctly, quantum leaps can produce radiation, so while the leaps themselves may be very small, the results of said leaps can be significant, to say the least.
So what does all of this have to do with acting?
There are certain types of behavioral tics that crop up again and again when people are acting that, once they are addressed, can unleash enormous acting power. It's as if the actor has everything in place, internally, but some part of her is using the tic in question to hold back and remove herself from the fray, to stay safe. Once that little bit of interference is removed, the actor's work catches on fire, becomes radioactive, in a good way.
So what are some of these tics?
LOOKING AWAY BEFORE STARTING TO SPEAK:When I see an actor CONSISTENTLY look away from his partner before starting to speak, I always take notice. The actor is not looking at anything in particular, but is simply looking to the side or down, into space, for a moment, before starting to speak. Then, as soon as he starts to speak, he makes eye contact with the partner. Why is he looking away? It would seem he is formulating his response to what he has heard, find the right words, or something of the sort. We do this in real life. However, when an actor does it CONSTANTLY, every time he speaks, or more than half the time, this is a sign that the looking away is not arising from the situation he is attempting to inhabit, but is rather a response to being an actor in front of an audience, and the anxiety that goes along with that. Often, the actor will be using that disengagement to recall the next line, and will also use it to "compose" himself before speaking. As such, this looking away is a bid for control, an unwillingness to allow the impulse to arise from the connection with the other actor, but rather to reserve the right to shape or control the utterance he is about to undertake. Eye contact is intimate, and is therefore scary. Invariably, when I call an actor's attention to this and INSIST that he make eye contact with the partner upon starting to speak (this usually takes a little work, first to make the actor aware of what he is doing with his eyes, and then to get him to stop doing it), there is a DRAMATIC flowering in the actor's work. And to be clear: the goal is not "eye lock", which occurs when an actor maintains eye contact with the partner only because she is directed to, but to inhibit HABITUAL looking away before starting to speak.
SMILING:Again, smiling is part of our repertoire for expression as human beings, a regular part. However, an actor who is smiling more often than she isn't smiling in a scene is simply holding tension in her lips, probably out of anxiety. This will dramatically affect her ability to "throw the ball", that is, to use her words to impact her partner, to place pressure on him. She will be effectively pulling her punches. When I see this, I ask her not to smile, and again, the results are often remarkable. Suddenly she is no longer fighting herself in her verbal expression, and she starts to really get her words out into space and into her partner.
STANDING OFF CENTER:When I see an actor standing with their weight over one leg or the other, rather that equally distributed over the two legs, I will ask him to stand over his center, by which I mean the abdominal core of the body, the Pilates core, if you will. When the weight is entirely over one leg or the other, the core muscles are "off the hook": they do not need to be engaged to hold the body upright. When the actor's weight is equally distributed over the two legs, the core has to engage to help maintain balance between the two. And when the core is engaged, the chances that the actor is doing something interesting increase exponentially. But what if it's a character choice to stand with the hip popped and the weight over one leg, like Fonzee? Well, let's just say that that is like a handicap in golf: the actor is making her life more difficult. Not that it can't be done, but it is harder, because the actor is choosing a way of standing that actually undermines the engagement of the all-important abdominal core. So it's a kind of advanced challenge. The actor first needs to learn what it is to engage with his core in a scene, to use it to put his words out and also to receive with it from his partner and from his environment. Once he has mastered that, he can start working at adopting alternate physical attitudes WHILE engaging from the core. But as always, first things first.
These are just a few examples of the kinds of tics that can undermine actors' efforts to engage fully in a scene. It never ceases to amaze me the difference addressing them can make. We get to see an actor catch fire, in a good way.
Monday, October 18, 2010
listening to liars
[One researcher] says lying executives tend to overuse words like "we" and "our team" when they talk about their company. They avoid saying "I."
She says there's a reason for that: "If I'm saying 'I' or 'me' or 'mine,' I'm showing my ownership of the statement, so psychologically I'm showing I'm responsible for what I'm saying."
Useful to know if you are canvassing CEOs, but it's interesting for actors because this sort of precise attention to the nuances of language is essential for finding our way into a character's psyche. Ludwig Wittgenstein observed that any child of 12 is a virtuousic user of her native language: she is capable of making distinctions and expressing herself with the level of nuance that we associate with virtuouusic performers of music. In these nuances, we reveal ourselves constantly, so by paying careful attention to the precise way in which characters express themselves, we have one of our best hopes of finding out who they really are.
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
Al Pacino's movie magic
"What I did with Jack Kevorkian is I worked. I went into my little bunker by the house. A lot of acting is private time," he explained.
It seems that people who are attracted to acting have a hard time accepting this. They see the finished product, and assume that that is what the whole thing must be like. But it isn't. Actors need to invest. And to do that, we need to be alone.
It's that simple.
H/T Larry Mazur
Sunday, August 08, 2010
rehearsal clothes, "priming", and the land of make-believe
This scornful question greeted me once when I was in the midst of a
"Rehearsal clothes" figured into the calculation because, to my mind, any scene study class worth its salt will expect students to bring clothes to wear for their scene, i.e. "costumes". And getting into those clothes takes time, unless you want people to sit around in their clothes for the scene for the whole class, which is undesirable for reasons I'll get to below. At the Drama School, in the design department, with legendary costume designers like Jane Greenwood and Jess Goldstein at the helm, it was the practice to refer to the costumes for shows in which actors were dressed in a contemporary, more or less realistic idiom as "clothes" rather than costumes. A designer was said to be "doing the clothes" for a show or film if the costumes were contemporary, realistic ensembles. That turn of phrase has stayed with me, and I used it in the context on the message board. Hence the confusion and consternation of the person who wrote "What the hell are rehearsal clothes?" (I imagine they must have been picturing something along the lines of uniforms for martial arts classes).
Anyway, I have always insisted that students pick out rehearsal clothes for their scene, and that they bring them to class and change into them. Further, I urged them to do this when they rehearsed outside of class: bring the rehearsal clothes and change into them, do not wear them to class, do not wear them to rehearsal. This had the effect of making life a little more difficult for the less motivated students in the class: they might be inclined to show up in street clothes, and, if their scene permitted, to claim that these were what they were going to wear for the scene. However, with my edict, even if they were wearing street clothes for the scene, they still needed to bring clothes to change into.
But aside from that, why put people out in this way? Why demand that they find special clothes to do their scene, even if the character might dress similarly to the way the actor dressed in everyday life. Well, there are a few reasons for this. First of all, I am a firm believer that the actors greatest enemy, in terms of his/her preparation anyway, is the temptation to ignore some aspect of the character's life or experience, rather than shining the light of awareness on it. I sometimes call this the "get it off my desk" syndrome. There is always pressure from the part of our minds that fears challenge and change to assume that its better to let sleeping dogs lie, not look under that rock, and just assume that some particular aspect of the role does not call for inspection or reflection. Actors have to work hard to counteract this, and developing the awareness of this danger (for that is what it is) and cultivating the habit of examining every conceivable facet of the role takes hard work and dedication.
The clothes worn by the character, or by the "Who-am-I" as we say in the class, are one more instance of this. Clothes make the man, as the maxim goes. What we wear is an important part of our self-presentation, of the way we play the role(s) that we play in the various contexts that we move in and out of. Reflecting on what kind of clothes the character would be wearing, given the situation of the scene, is both good for the scene AND for the actor's developing practice of considering ALL aspects of the role.
But I am getting at something beyond all of this. It has always been my conviction that changing into the clothes for the scene can assume a kind of ceremonial significance: in putting on these clothes, I am now entering another persona in another world. Acting is living truthfully under imaginary circumstances, as Sanford Meisner said. It's entering a land of make-believe. And changing into the clothes can become a ritual that speaks to the whole person of the actor, body, nervous system, and mind, and says: "Now we are becoming Blanche DuBois" or whoever.
It turns out that the latest brain science bears me out. As I mentioned in previous posts, I am reading a book called Mindsight by Dr. Dan Siegel, which proposes that an understanding of how the brain works can be combined with mindfulness and other mental practices to promote mental health. Last night, I came across the following:
Finally, implicit memory creates something called "priming," in which the brain readies itself to respond in a certain fashion. When his mother arrives home, the boy anticipates a hug. Not only is his internal world primed for receiving that loving gesture, he'll move his arms in anticipation when he hears her car in the driveway. As we get older, priming continues to operate with more complex behaviors. If you've learned to swim, when you get your bathing suit on, your behavioral repertoire for swimming is primed and readied to engage when you jump in the pool.
And when the actor puts on her rehearsal clothes, her whole being primes itself for what is about to happen. This only happens, of course, if the act of doing the scene is repeatedly associated with putting on the clothes: actors who don't wear the rehearsal clothes when the rehearse, only when they perform, will have no such experience.
Note that Dr. Siegel talks about priming in the context of "implicit memory". Briefly, implicit memory is the recall of things in which the act of recalling is not consciously registered. He uses the example of how once we learn to ride a bike, we don't have to remember how to ride the bike each time we do it. We recall it without intention or conscious effort. So with priming, the behavior that happens to prepare for some encounter or activity happens unconsciously. You could say that as the clothes are donned, they speak to the actor's nervous system and prepare it to play the role in question.
The same goes for creating an environment for the scene. Recently, I had a student who was doing a scene in which his character was in a conference room at a hotel in which he had just finished giving a lecture. The student informed me of his intention to go out and purchase a bunch of chairs for Friends and Family Night, and then return them the next day. I gently explained that the environment was to be created for the rehearsal process, so that by setting up the environment every time they rehearsed, gaining familiarity with it and using the setup as a springboard into the land of make believe, they would be getting themselves ready to act. Bringing a bunch of chairs for the performance only was not going to help anyone act, and would probably undermine him and his partner, since it would be introducing a new element on the day of the performance.
When actors act in projects, in films or in theater, they aren't going to be setting up the environment, but they do need to be attuned to it. The practice of creating an environment for a scene and setting up each time they rehearse, allowing that arrangement of rehearsal furniture to become an altogether different place where the actor leads an imaginary life, is a great way of developing the awareness that provides for that kind of attunement when they walk onto a movie set.
Here's a talk that Dan Siegel gave with Goldie Hawn about his work. The first part of the video is Goldie talking, he comes in about halfway through. He gives a good overview of what he's about.
Friday, August 06, 2010
in defense of the third degree
Mindsight is all about the proposition that awareness about how the parts of the brain interact can actually impact mental health. It's brain science meets I'm OK You're OK. Ok that was kind of glib, but it gives you the idea. And so far it has been interesting, notwithstanding the fact that it can't seem to make up its mind (heh!) about whether it is making a serious intellectual argument or popularizing brain science, mindfulness and other stuff. But anyway, I came across something quite striking as I was reading it the other day. I'll just lay it on you:
Research has revealed that the best predictor of the security of our children's attachment to us is our ability to narrate the story of our own childhood in a coherent fashion.
You want your kids to be able to securely attach to you because, from both a neurological and a psychological point of view, their ability to form attachments in the future is going to be heavily shaped, limited, and conditioned by the success of these initial formative attachments (Read about attachment theory here).
So let's recap that: the best predictor of the ability of children to form these all-important bonds with their parents is the ability of said parents to narrate the story of their own childhoods.
Not what you would call an obvious or intuitive connection.
What struck me about this was that this ability to narrate a life is what my teachers at Yale, and in their footsteps, I, use as a way to take the measure of an actor's preparation and their readiness to walk in the shoes of the character or "Who-am-I" the actor was attempting to portray.
During the three semesters that I was a TA to Evan Yionoulis, who chaired the acting program at the Yale School of Drama for five years, I watched Evan elicit narrations from actors by posing questions to them that they were to answer in the first person. It was part interrogation and part Socratic dialogue. These questions were about the past, present or the future of the character. At the very minimum, these questions were intended to probe the actor's mastery of the given circumstances of the scene. "So why did the second of your two daughters turn you out?" "Who did the person behind the curtain who you stabbed turn out to be?" etc. A firm grasp of the circumstances is essential to anything further. Often actors take such knowledge for granted, only to discover, awkwardly, that their command of these basic facts is lacking when they are standing in front of the class being questioned by a teacher.
But it's not only the facts that Evan wanted to hear about. She wanted to hear about how the actor had surveyed those facts and arranged them into a narrative that heated up the scene. It's the difference between "And I discovered I had killed Polonius" and "And I discovered that the man I killed was Polonius, the father of the woman I love and the trusted advisor of my late father." Actors were expected not just to grasp the facts, but to be able to talk about them in ways that articulated their importance, and injected urgency into the situation.
And then there was the fanning of the flames, the term for the supplementing of what the writer provides by the actor to enhance the interest and urgency of the scene, and provide greater fullness and specificity to the life the actor is leading in the scene. Actors were taught that they should not just arbitrarily add details to their background, but details that make the scene more compelling.
Actors were also expected to be able to talk about the potential future of the character. They were expected to be able to say without hesitation what they would most like to see happen in a given situation and what they would least like to see happen.
Finally, it was important that the actor have personalized all of this: found ways to make the people, places and things that make up the world of the character carry the weight for the actor that the story called for. So the actor needed to be able not simply to recite the facts in the first person, but to talk about those facts as if they were the facts of their own life. Not that the question and answer process was supposed to be a performance, only that when the actors address subjects important to the character in the first person, the weight of the topics discussed should have been palpable in the actor's narration.
The ability to speak about these things with fluency attests to the time and thought an actor has put into the situation and priorities of the character. It's a lot more difficult than it sounds. It's the process that I use in class when students show their scenes for the first time, and the first pair that gets up has the hardest time. At the end of the night that the first pair show a scene during a ten week cycle, other students invariably express relief that they got to see the process once before having to go through it. They leave class knowing that they have a lot of work to do.
Thursday, August 05, 2010
take it from Travis
Thursday, July 29, 2010
why acting matters
I am a passionate reader of political blogs, liberal political blogs in particular (the other kind not being good for my blood pressure ;) ). Earlier this month I read a piece at Digby's Hullabaloo which has been knocking around in my brain, and I think offers some valuable insight into the precise way in which what it is that we do is such a precious asset in our world, or can be.
Digby quotes a Boston Globe article:
Recently, a few political scientists have begun to discover a human tendency deeply discouraging to anyone with faith in the power of information. It’s this: Facts don’t necessarily have the power to change our minds. In fact, quite the opposite. In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger.
And of course that is only the beginning:
...it appears that misinformed people often have some of the strongest political opinions. A striking recent example was a study done in the year 2000, led by James Kuklinski of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He led an influential experiment in which more than 1,000 Illinois residents were asked questions about welfare — the percentage of the federal budget spent on welfare, the number of people enrolled in the program, the percentage of enrollees who are black, and the average payout. More than half indicated that they were confident that their answers were correct — but in fact only 3 percent of the people got more than half of the questions right. Perhaps more disturbingly, the ones who were the most confident they were right were by and large the ones who knew the least about the topic. (Most of these participants expressed views that suggested a strong antiwelfare bias.)
People generally don't change their minds over salient political issues through rational argumentation. And I think that's where the (really good) actor comes in.
A really good actor can arouse not only sympathy for the character's plight: he can actually arouse empathy. The people sitting there watching can experience the character as an extension of themselves. In other words, the barrier between the self of the actor and the self of the observer can be temporarily dissolved. Plato was so worried about this possibility that he proposed that the dramatic poets should be banished from his imaginary republic. The threat to people's rational capacities seemed to him to be just too great; people could entirely lose track of the distinctions between themselves and others. This possibility of forging an empathic bond between the actor and spectator is rare enough that most people haven't actually experienced it, but important enough that striving to fulfill this promise and keep this possibility alive is, to my mind, among the most legitimate and worthy of pursuits. Lucky thing, since I teach acting.
I think this possibility of empathic bonding is one of the ways in which people might be brought to revise their views of situations in the larger society. Not by being told that what they believe is wrong, but by getting that the other guy dreams, the other guy hurts. That the other guy's dreams and hurts are our own dreams and hurts, the differences are superficial. Not by being told this, but by getting it, getting it because some actor embodied that dreaming and that hurting in a compelling and undeniable way. In a way that lets you see something in the other guy's eyes that you've never been able to see before.
Friday, July 02, 2010
like a dog with a bone
For a casual reader of the play, it can be easy to miss what a confounding circumstance this must be for Blanche. In Laurel, Missisippi, from whence Blanche has just sojourned, blacks and whites surely did not fraternize so readily. This is the "easy cosmopolitanism" Williams speaks of in his introduction. For Blanche, it is one of the first signs that she is, well, not in Kansas anymore.
It is only by projecting one's self into Blanche's mindset and looking at the situation through her eyes that we can recognize how challenging this apparently innocuous bit of stage direction is for this character. Once recognized, this bit of insight can enrich these opening moments for the actor playing Blanche dramatically.
I started new cycles of my class this week, in SF and LA, and some students have started to send me their Who-Am-I charts to review. This is a process I present to them in the first class, using Blanche's first moments in Streetcar as an example. I always draw their attention to this particular aspect of the initial situation Williams poses for Blanche, and hope that it communicates something to them about the value for carefuly scrutinizing and studying what the writer has given the actor, looking impossibly closely until the superficial starts to fall away and the depths begin to present themselves. However, the Who-Am-I charts I usually receive are almost always pretty skeletal. Actually, the three I have received so far have been better than most. But in general, the initial drafts of these assignments usually have the look of something that has been hurriedly dashed off so that it could be sent off even more quickly, safely out of sight and out of mind.
I don't really fault my students, especially not the new ones. Learning to read like an actor takes years of practice. The fact that they are putting fingers to keyboards and generating anything at all is a giant leap in the right direction. But I cannot help but wonder about why they don't approach the text as something that has to be studied relentlessly, chewed on like a dog with a bone, right out of the gate. Something that has to be forced, through dogged tenacity, to yield up its secrets. And the answer, I think, has to do with our wish to believe that things will be easy. The proposition that the work might be quite difficult, coupled with the proposition that the actor has it in her power to nevertheless do this difficult work, is quite simply too frightening to contemplate. Our greatest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure, and all that. It's much easier to comfort one's self with the notion that the work that lies ahead does not require much effort, it is nothing like a struggle, and there is absolutely no chance of falling short.
I majored in mathematics in college. Math had always come easily to me, and I discovered I could have a BA in it by taking exactly eight classes, which would leave my schedule open for all of the literature and theater classes I was truly focused on, and would at the same time mollify my parents. I breezed through the first two years of math classes. However, in my third year, I took Complex Analysis, and suddenly, I wasn't in Kansas anymore. Math, which had always been a matter of being shown a technique in class, and then practicing that technique over and over again in the homework, was suddenly a matter of being introduced to a new concept and then being asked to do a lot of hard, original thinking about how to apply the concept. What had always come easily to me was suddenly maddeningly difficult. I started getting bad grades on quizzes and tests. I found myself having to go nearly every day to the professor's office to ask for help with the homework, which I found to be totally humiliating. No sooner would he have walked me through one problem, then I would be asking him for help with the next one. One day, I found myself breaking into tears in his office at my frustration at finding myself unable to handle this subject with the ease with which math had always come to me. The professor was gentle, but kept pressing ahead with the problem, prompting me to reason incrementally from one claim to the next. It was poinful, and I was even more humiliated by the emotional display. At 20, I thought of myself as a mature adult(!). But we both stayed with it, eventually, I reached a point where the light at the end of the tunnel was in sight, and it was not an oncoming train. I found myself chuckling, involuntarily, from the gut, and it was not an entirely pleasant sensation. Sure, it was great to reach the solution, with help from the professor but also figuring some things out for myself. But mixed with this was the awareness that I COULD do problems this difficult, and since I could, I could no longer expect that things would be easy. The training wheels had come off, and I had continued to ride, however tentatively, and with however many falls along the way. There would be no going back to the training wheels. It's an exciting moment, to be sure, but there was a strong measure of fear as well. The fear of having to be responsible for myself.
I feel that I am up against this fear all the time with students. It's a natural fear. We all have it. And there is nothing wrong with wanting to be taken care of, sometimes. But I feel like I am constantly trying to confront students with two facts at once: it IS difficult but you CAN do it. Every once in a while, one of them bravely looks those truths in the face, and forges ahead. It's in moments like that that I get to feel like a true teacher.
Thursday, June 24, 2010
the paradox
But it's the watching-yourself-do-these-things-while-you-do-them that is, unfortunately, the essence of self-consciousness. It's this awareness that has to be marginalized if not banished altogether from your mind to achieve maximal absorption in what you are doing.
Unfortunately, it's this desire to see one's self doing these things, to watch one's self in the act of imitating, transforming,entertaining or inducing laughter that brings most of us to want to act in the first place.
If you want to be great, you don't get to watch yourself be entertaining. That you have to give up. You can be appreciated by others all you want afterwards. But while you are acting? Don't look into the light!
Or, as the famous nineteenth century Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard said: when Abraham consents to make the sacrifice of his son Isaac, he regains the world!
Saturday, June 19, 2010
because you never know who's watching
We had the Friends and Family Nights at the end of the cycles in Los Angeles and San Francisco two weeks ago. These events are intended as celebrations: I do not invite prospective students, to try to sell them on the class, because on those nights I don't want to be distracted by having to play host to these prospectives. The way that I run the class, there is usually a familial feeling (in a good way!) among the graduating students. I like to savor that feeling, and not have to worry about making sure that the prospectives feel at home. I also don't want to feel pressure for the students who are showing their scenes to "deliver for me" and sell the class. I want to celebrate the work at whatever level it is at as the course comes to a close. When industry people have inquired about coming to the Night, I have allowed it, but have asked them not to speak to students in a professional capacity that night, but rather to contact them through me later, because I wouldn't want the word to get out that night and for other students to feel that they had not measured up in failing to attract the attention of whoever these industry people were. I want my students to celebrate their achievement and enjoy the their last night together as a class.
But I have no control over who students choose to invite. It so happened (I later learned) that at one of these events, a student had a guest who was a casting director for HBO. Now many of the students had worked hard throughout the cycle, and were Ready. And casting my mind back over the evening in question, the man who I take to be the HBO director (based on whose guest he was) complimented me on the way out, in a "No, really, I mean it" kind of way. So I think he felt those students were Ready too. But I know for a fact that some students had not worked as hard and as consistently as the ones who were Ready, and as a consequence, were not as Ready.
Oops.
The moral? Always be Ready. Because you never know who's watching.
Sunday, June 06, 2010
what Sheila quoted Minnie as saying about performing
"Genius is the great unknown quantity. Technique supplies a constant for the problem. Fluency, flexibility, technique, precision, virtuosity, science - call it what you will. Why call it anything? Watch Pavlova dance, and there you have it. She knows her business. She has carried this mastery to such perfection that there is really no need of watching her at all. You know it will be all right. One glance at her and you are sure. On most of our players one keeps an apprehensive eye, filled with dark suspicions and forebodings - forebodings based on sad experience. But I told Gabrielle Rejane once that a performance of hers would no sooner begin than I would feel perfectly free to go out of the theatre and take a walk. I knew she could be trusted. It would be all right. There was no need to stay and watch."
-- Minnie Maddern Fiske, famous American actress of the late 19th and early 20th centuries
the production effect
I did come across something of interest recently though, that does offer some help with the task of memorization. It turns out that if you are attempting to memorize something and you say it aloud, the act of verbalizing it makes it more likely that you will remember it. It's called "the production effect", according to Psychology Today:
In this paper, these researchers document what they call the production effect. They looked at people's memory for items like a list of words. They found that if people studied the list by reading half of the words silently and the other half by saying the words out loud, that [the] words spoken aloud were remembered much better than those that were read silently.
The production effect works because it makes part of the list of items more distinctive. The words you speak aloud are now translated into speech and you have knowledge of producing the items as well as a memory of hearing them. All of this information makes your memory for the spoken items more distinct from the rest of the items that were read silently.
Good to know, but the production effect has implications beyond the learning of lines. One of the things students are confronted with in my class is the amount of concerted effort it takes to acquaint themselves with the character's reality and circumstances to the degree that they have a credible claim to embody that character. We call this process developing a "Who am I", or a way of perceiving one's self and the facts of one's life, history, and hopes and fears about the future. I provide students with a framework or set of questions to pose to organize their work on the Who-Am-I, and I urge them to write it out, for precisely the reasons that the production effect entails. The physical act of writing out these pieces of information, as well as the cognitive act of ordering all of these bits of information in relationship to each other, helps these pieces of information enter the BODY of the actor, as well as the mind. Whatever you may think of Julia Cameron and The Artist's Way, Cameron makes much the same point in advocating for the writing of "morning pages": in the act of writing out our thoughts, we process them physically. This may or may not yield answers to our personal or artistic conundrums, but it turns up the soil, so to speak, freeing up inchoate energies to travel neural pathways they may not have traveled previously. Or whatever.
I recognize the difficulty of this. I was recently introduced to something called "cognitive behavioral therapy", which is a process for examining damaging thoughts by identifying their origins or triggers, and then shining the light of reason on them by weighing evidence for and against them. It is a formalized process of self-reflection. In being asked to undertake this, I was handed a sheet of paper with a chart on it with columns which I was expected to fill in, which would guide me through the process.
The chart sat on my dresser for a week. I was immediately aware of the similarity between the Who-am-I process I ask actors to undertake and the cognitive behavioral therapy chart, and so I could hardly object to being asked to undertake it, and yet I felt a marked resistance to doing so. Perhaps that is partly a function of my (male) (Aries?) temperament, but I suspect many of us would similarly chafe under being asked to work out our inner struggles through a chart like this. It felt a little infantilizing. (Is it possible to infantilize just a little?)
I took note of the resistance, sat with it, so to speak, and eventually, I overcame it, and started to work with it. Did the earth move and the angels weep? No. Did I gain some insight about how to reflect on my thoughts and their relationship to my mood? Yes. As adults, we prize our autonomy, and can easily resent encroachments upon it, real or perceived. But any kind of technique is going to be an encroachment of sorts. Otherwise we could all just do what comes naturally and we would all be Awesome at whatever we wanted to do. It doesn't work that way. Freedom lies on the other side of technique, as a wise person once said.
Writing has its benefits for the initial phase of the Who-am-I process, and it is also enormously valuable for the personalization process that follows. Personalization has two components: particularization, in which the people, places and things that comprise the world of the Who-am-I are given detail which imbues them with an enlivening vividness, and investment, in which the actor uses relationships in her own life to endow these people places and things with the appropriate kind of signficance. Writing can be invaluable for both particularization and transference. In addition to the production effect, writing down pieces of particularization and investment force a ocmmitment to be made: if such things remain as mere thoughts, they are likely to remain undeveloped and incherent. Writing out these things asks the actor to bring an urgently needed definition to her imaginative approach to the role.
Uta Hagen is a tremendous resource in this regard: in both her books, she provides countless examples of the kind of writing on the role that provides this kind of enrichment to the actors work.
Of course, what you write when you write is also important. Just the mere fact of writing does not guarantee that the Who-Am-I will be productively developed and rich personalization will take shape. But writing it down is a step in the right direction, a gesture of seriousness to your creative self about your intentions. It beats not writing anything out every time.
Wednesday, June 02, 2010
the new new (acting) thing?
In the last decade, dream work, as it is known, has spread into actors studios and classrooms across the country, taking its place among the ever expanding techniques of actor training and in the long-running debate over what leads to the most authentic performances.
From what I have read, it is not a an approach to scene work itself, so much as a way of working on the connection to the role, i.e. your homework.
In light of that, I found this piece from the Guardian today interesting.
John Clare and Ali Zarbafi are psychotherapists and authors who believe it is vital that we remember and talk about our dreams in order to "discover the thoughts to which we usually have no access" – the "unthought known", as Christopher Bollas puts it — and find a new way of thinking, new ideas. Maybe social dreaming – a concept dreamed up by Dr Gordon Lawrence – is how to find this; Clare and Zarbafi certainly believe it is.
The Guardian points cites some of the major points they use to make their argument. Both are provocative:
Can it really be true that, in 1930s Germany, Charlotte Beradt catalogued hundreds of dreams and, on looking at them collectively years later, found early premonitions of concentration camps and other terrors which were to come? Clare – and the book he jointly authored with Zarbafi – say it is.
and, even more intriguing:
He then gave another example. In the 1930s, the Senoi tribe in Malaysia were found by an anthropologist to have had no war or violent crime for 300 years. He discovered that they were committed to dream interpretation and dream expression – they took their dreams seriously and believed in talking about them, with each family spending breakfast listening to one another's dreams, and the head of the household then taking them to a council meeting to report and discuss them.
There are reasons to be skeptical. For example, I suffer from something called Meniere's disease, which is a minor condition which can sometimes cause me to get attacks of vertigo, sometimes very intense ones. I have sometimes awoken from a dream in which I was on some sort of merry-go-round or something, only to discover that I was having such a vertigo attack. So the merry-go-round image in my dream would seem NOT to have been a deep message from my unconscious, but rather an effect of what I was physiologically experiencing. Ebenezer Scrooge famously dismissed the visits of Christmas ghosts as the result of "an undigested bit of beef", and it does seem likely that there is some link between physiological events and dreams. But it also seems likely that our psyche does make itself visible to us in ways it doesn't in the everyday world through dreams, and that studying these visions can be illuminating, or, failing that, at least provocative.
Sunday, May 16, 2010
suction
We know our way around our own lives. There are people we know well, and we have a good sense of what to expect from them, both in the way of satisfaction and of grief. This expectations mean that we don't just listen to them, we listen for something when we listen to them. Other people are strangers, but as fully socialized adults, we are past masters at reading context clues and knowing what we can expect of others based on our knowledge of the world. We know that when we are wandering around Best Buy, people dressed a certain way (store uniform of sorts) are answerable to us as shoppers, and we can prevail on them of help.
These expectations are not just about what will happen, but also about how these expectations will affect us. We are looking for needs to gratified and vulnerabilities to be handled with care.
So when we listen in our real lives, we always immediately know what we are listening for.
As actors, not so much.
As actors, we are attempting to be someone else, and that someone else has a view of their own needs and expectations about their world. So not only do we need to take in what happens around us, but we need to understand the needs and expectations that we bring to those events. No easy task.
In my class, we always look to articulate a visceral, gut-level need that the character is pursuing and that shapes their expectations about the situations they encounter and the outcomes of those situations. This need lives in the belly, and one consequence of this is that we see listening as something that happens not only with the eyes and ears, but also with the belly button. I had an opportunity to speak with a psychiatrist recently who told me that recent brain science suggests that that there is actual processing that goes on in the belly, so this is more than a metaphor. He told me about a book called Mindscape that I am looking forward to checking out.
When I am acting and have managed to connect to that need in the belly, the sensation is always that I am generating some kind of suction in my belly as I listen to my partner, I am "sucking in" what is coming at me in the scene. This is a much more active process than is commonly imagined. Because I am bringing needs and expectations to what I see and hear, these needs and expectations prompt me to "suck in" what I encounter, so that I am not merely observing the events around me, but measuring their significance to me.
An additional complication is that if the actor is attempting to "listen" with the need in the belly, it's possible that other parts of the body, particularly the areas of the body below the belly, that is, the groin and the legs, may go to sleep, because of the hyperfocus on the belly. This is remedied using Uta Hagen's notion of destination. If an actor knows what the possible spatial outcomes are of what is transpiring around them (someone may come closer to attack or to show affection, or someone may leave, or it may become necessary for the listener to leave), then the actor is listening not only with their gut and upper body faculties, but with their faculty of locomotion, with their hips and legs as well.
Some actors don't listen at all, some listen with their eyes and eyes, some listen with their eyes, ears, and in their chest (heart), but it is listening with the belly and the lower body that attests to the visceral importance of what is transpiring in the scene. And that kind of listening, no one is going to be able to look away from.
So go one and get your suck on! Your acting will never be the same!
Sunday, April 18, 2010
listen to the Pinter actor
That changed in 1993, Mr. Hodge said, when the director David Leveaux cast him as the bodyguard Foster in Pinter’s “No Man’s Land,” in which Pinter himself starred as the alcoholic intellectual, Hirst.
“Harold and I became great friends, and the truth is he became a second father to me,” said Mr. Hodge, who went on to act in or direct the Pinter plays “Moonlight,” “Betrayal” and “The Caretaker.”
“He was someone I could talk to and confide in very easily,” Mr. Hodge added. “And I felt I was very like him. I just didn’t have his genius.”
Look what he has to say about how he has come to understand acting:
“For a time I really thought acting was just impersonating,” he recalled. “But impersonation is just big brush strokes, really. What makes acting different is empathy.”
I couldn't have said it better myself.
Saturday, April 17, 2010
Ryan Gosling's tell
There is a movie that came out
Well, I recently rejoined GreenCine, a local, and I guess more environmentally friendly, version of Netflix, and The Believer was the first movie I got. It is a remarkable movie. I highly recommend it. And it has harrowing relevance to the current political moment, saturated as it is with rightwing hate talk and militia activity. It is an incredibly intelligent movie that is unflinching in its examination of the frightening ardor and intellectual passion of the leaders of these groups.
What was interesting, though, was that Gosling was not good in the role. I was suprised by this. I had admired his work in Half-Nelson, and was ready to be impressed with him here. Instead, I found him to be painfully self-conscious, all scowls and poses and no visceral engagement. Only in a penultimate scene, in which he speaks to an assembly of rightwing political benefactors, does he find his footing, and by then it is way too late.
He has a tell that he is watching himself, and that is his incessant licking of the lips. If you sit in a theater and watch acting that is truly compelling, you will notice something remarkable: no one is coughing. It is not that they are consciously preventing themselves from coughing out of reverence or respect for the actor; rather, the members of the audience have largely forgotten their own bodies and its attendant physical sensations, including the need to cough. They have been induced to project themselves into the body of the actor, and hence they have almost no awareness of their own sensations, unless such sensations are very powerful and insistent. They literally for get themselves.
Conversely, an audience watching bad actors will seek to escape the embarassing spectacle before them and retreat into their own sensations and thoughts, and their will be a superabundance of coughing, almost as if the coughing were an involuntary way of complaining to the actors about their inability to enthrall.
And an actor who is truly, viscerally, engaged in what he or she is doing, truly absorbed in his effort to affect those with whom he interacts and with the vulnerability that underwrites that effort, will not be mindful of his lips and whether or not they need moisture. Occasionally, perhaps, you will see a fully engaged actor lick his or her lips, but it is not a habit or a mannerism that happens repeatedly. Gosling, in this movie, licks his lips constantly. The lip licking is the actor's preparation to say a line, not the character's preparation to speak. Gosling also does a lot of face-scrunching.
There were some other actors who did magnificant work, most notably Theresa Russell, Heather Goldenhersh, and Elizabeth Reaser. They act circles around Gosling. The second DVD I got from GreenCine is Lars and the Real Girl, which also stars Gosling and in which he got critical accolades. It will be interesting to see whether he is good in that. It's possible that I was taken in by his charisma in Half-Nelson, but it's also possible that he had an easier time finding that character in himself. Given his role in The Believer, that would not be difficult to understand.`
Sunday, April 11, 2010
Zen and the Art of Archery and the art of acting (not to mention the art of teaching acting)
What Zen instructs is that learning is not about the outward manifestation of a skill, but the inward journey through the self. On several occasions the Master leaves Herrigel to struggle hopelessly and heroically with the fiendish difficulties of drawing a bow correctly, only giving him helpful hints when he has reached the point of desperation. Why won’t he tell him these things earlier? Herrigel asks. Because he has to exhaust all the possibilities for himself before he would be ready to take in what the Master has to say. And isn’t this the truth? How many times have I told students what they need to do, only to be met with blank stares or the insincere gestures of over-anxious acceptance. The truth only makes sense when we are ready to hear it, and not a moment before. We have to work things out for ourselves. It takes Herrigel a further two or three years to figure out the ‘right’ moment to loose his arrow, the moment when his hand will fall easily away from the bowstring, without jerking backwards. The long process to reach this point not only teaches him much that is wordless about feeling the task in hand, but it prepares him for the understanding that mastering an art like this is a spiritual activity, not one governed by tricks and predicated on the easy joy of achievement.
I especially like this part:
The truth only makes sense when we are ready to hear it.
There is a Zen parable about a teacher and a student. The teacher is pouring tea. He pours the tea until the cup overflows, and keeps pouring. The student, astonished, asks "Master, what are you doing?" The teacher replies "This cup is like your mind. How can I put anything into it when it is already full?"
Students who come to the class with genuine curiosity and eagerness to learn, and who are prepared for, and undeterred by, difficulty and failure, are the ones who succeed and are the most rewarding to teach, and the ones who make the most progress.
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