At Long Last, A Post on Joseph N. Welch
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Showing posts with label acting technique. Show all posts
Showing posts with label acting technique. Show all posts
Thursday, August 05, 2010
take it from Travis
Sunday, July 11, 2010
rethinking "motivation" with Sebastian Junger and Rachel Maddow
MADDOW: Sebastian, let me follow-up with you on that. You have said that you don‘t think society understands war very well. Obviously, you have a book out now called “War” that‘s based on your time with these soldiers as well.
You said, “If society is going to solve the human problem of war, they have to figure out what it is about combat that attracts young men so much that they‘re willing to risk their lives to go back out there to get it.”
After spending all of those months with second platoon out in the Korengal Valley, do you feel like you‘re any closer to figuring that out?
In the terms of my acting class, Rachel is asking for the underlying objective of the soldiers, the Stanislavsky 2.0 version of the old concept of "motivation". She wants to know what it is that they need so badly that they will volunteer for multiple dangerous tours of duty in the treacherous terrain of war-torn Afghandistan.
Junger's answer is good:
JUNGER: You know, I think I am. We were at a very remote outpost on this hilltop that we were getting attacked three or four times a day sometimes. The guys - you know, when they come back, they often - they want to back - when they come back to society, how can they want to return to that hilltop into combat?
Society thinks - often, people think that it‘s a question of adrenaline - an adrenaline addiction. I think what they‘re really addicted to essentially is brotherhood, an otherwise very healthy impulse that is taking place in a very unhealthy place.
And I think if society understands that, they won‘t - it won‘t be pathologized(ph) so much and be understood on its own terms. And maybe society can provide that sense of inclusion and brotherhood here rather than in combat.
Got that? Brotherhood. Not adventure. Not patriotism. Not money. The soldiers are seeking a particular kind of connection or belonging with other soldiers, that they apparently see as most obtainable on the front lines of war. In the class, we are constantly in the process of peeling back the layers of the more superficial accounts of human motivation to get to a particular, immediate expression of the human need to form meaningful and lasting ties to others.
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Sunday, July 04, 2010
until you've walked a mile in his shoes
We take our ambulatory capacity, that is, our ability to walk, very much for granted. Our ability to change where we stand at will, quite literally, is one thing that separates us and all the other animals from plants. With that ability comes the ability to approach someone for sex, or to attack them, or to just seek a little companionable society. The ability to change our spatial relationships at will is a fundamental feature of all human society. Because of this feature, for example, we can define certain property as ours, and have others evicted from it if we choose. They don't have the right to stand on our property if we don't allow it.
All human relationships come with some notion of how physical space will be occupied together. The famous Seinfeld episode about the "close talker" exemplifies this vividly. A mother and child enter in an embrace that obliterates the space between them readily, but two grown men who are not related to each other may do so only seldom. So where we physically stand in relation to others is inextricably bound up with the nature of our relationship to them
"Until you've walked a mile in his shoes" might be parsed "until you have moved in and out of the various (physical) relationships with others that he typically undertakes." Or, until you have stood in relationship to others in the way that he has. While the last sentence can be understood metaphorically (closeness in the sense of emotional closeness, by the way it is no accident that we use this spatial metaphor to analogize our connections to others), it can also be understood physically, for the reason that I have already articulated: our ties with other people include agreements or contracts, if you will, about how we will occupy space together: what is too close, what is not close enough, under what circumstances these parameters change, etc.
The Japanese director Tadashi Suzuki, whose actor training techniques have enjoyed a vogue in the last decade in this country bordering on the cultish, recognized the primacy of the feet as defining the actor's relationship to the ground and, therefore, to the space around her. His fundamental exercise involves rigorously stomping the ground by isolating the muscles of the legs and abdomen, to "awaken" the lower body of the actor. However, the importance of placement in space is well-understood within the Stanislavsky tradition as well. In A Challenge for the Actor Uta Hagen discusses the concept of "destination" in her chapter entitled "animation". "The reason for movement is destination" she proclaims. The simplest possible gloss of this is that when we move, we have reason to (i.e. not because the script or the director says we move at that point.) Or: when we move, we are going somewhere. Or It is the fact that the beginning of this impulse to move involves a psycho-physical orienting of ourselves towards where we are going and what arrival in that place promises us that gives this somewhere its importance for us as actors. This idea was dramatized in a superb manner in the movie Donnie Darko by the ectoplasmic streams that Donny starts to see emanating from the chests of those around him, as I have written previously.
In the approach that I teach, we search for a need for the actor to embody and pursue in a scene, which then prompts her to seek certain outcomes that promise to gratify this single need, both in immediate and in long-term ways. What it is essential to keep in mind is that these outcomes nearly always involve changes in the physical proximity to other characters or to things. As actors, we are very focused on what we are saying, our lines, and the temptation is to think of where we are standing or sitting or lying down in the scene as "the place where we say these particular lines." So while we put a lot thought into understanding the relationship between what we are saying and what we need, it's easy to forget to consider the relationship between where we are standing (or sitting, or lying down...) and what we need. The failure to come to this can devolve into actors devolving into very animated talking heads. In real conversations, we have a particular physical outcome in view, and if that outcome involves movement, then we prepare ourselves physically for that movement, or to respond to some expected or feared movement. The awareness of the destination of the expected movement invites a partial orientation toward the destination in question, even as we may continue to interact with another character, and be partially oriented towards him or her.
Consider, as we did two days ago, Blanche's first appearance inStreetcar. I (Blanche) have to ask the two strangers on the steps for information about my sister and for assistance accessing the house, but after my long journey from Laurel lugging a trunk with everything I own in the world, the destination of the Stella's apartment, where I might hope to catch a few moments alone to have a few quick drinks to relieve my stress and anxiety and compose myself, is very "hot". So hot that Williams makes it clear that once I access the apartment, I cannot avoid offending Eunice in hustling her back out of the apartment. So in the scene with the two women, once it becomes clear where Stella lives, I will be physically preparing to go there, even as continue to engage with them. This is the real importance of the concept of destination: even as we engage in dialogue, our bodies must remain alive to the movement that the situation may call for, either because a window of opportunity opens, or some threat or danger makes itself manifest that we need to act to squash.
I can remember one of my mentors at the Yale School of Drama, Evan Yionoulis, talking about whether certain actors she had encountered "had destination." It's now clear to me that what she meant was not only that the when they moved, they knew where they were going, but also that as they spoke, they were physically alive to the possible movements which could at any time become necessary given the situation (necessity being the mother of invention, don't forget!)
For an actor to "have destination", she needs to understand these things. This is the cognitive side of "having destination": she needs to be mentally alert to the physical ramifications of the development of the scene. However, there is a physical side to this as well. To truly "have destination", impulse needs to be free to flow from the Pilates core of the actor, where the need lives, down through the hips and all the way down into the legs to the feet. Well, that's easy, right? Not so fast. When we are acting, we are aware of being watched and judged, and therefore, tension can be introduced into our bodies because of this awareness. We can easily carry this tension in our legs, and, even more probably, in our hips. There is so much shame in our society around the things we do with our hips (have sex and rid ourselves of bodily waste) that tension in this area is extremely common. An Aexander technique teacher I encountered told me of a student of hers who proclaimed "Life is a butt-clenching experience!" There are few more humiliating scenarios than one involving incontinence. Tension in the pelvis are well-nigh universal. Such tensions obstruct constipate, if you will) the flow of need-driven "energy" into the legs. Without this energy, the actor's lower body ca easily check out. Tension in the various joins of the legs can compound this problem. The actor can develop a tendency to grip the floor with the feet, which can lead to becoming rooted to the spot and making movement require more effort than it would if the actor were poised to move.
Ultimately, we want to play both ends against the middle. We want the cognitive awareness of the possibilities for movement to merge with habituated physical freedom in the pelvis and legs, so that the distinction between body and mind virtually disappears. I tell students often that acting is a body-mind trick. It's a particular combination of physical and mental engagement on the one hand, and physical and mental receptiveness and relaxation on the other.
Talk about walking a fine line. And in someone else's shoes, to boot (heh!). It's no mean feat (sorry, I can't stop!), but one worth striving for.
Thursday, November 12, 2009
the single biggest mistake that actors make in approaching a scene
Let me explain.
Anyone who hangs around acting classes for any length of time will learn that drama is conflict. That's what makes it engaging: people are fighting, values are clashing, wrongs are being confronted, words are being had. However, the recognition that a scene that an actor is working on entails conflict is a very, very preliminary recognition, and a dangerous one to try to take to the bank. If you do try to take it to the bank, you come up with an account of the scene that sounds like this: "everything would be great if the other person would STOP DOING that really annoying thing that they are doing. that annoying thing that they are doing is causing all the problems, and if they would just STOP THAT, just GIVE IT A REST, we would all be just fine." What's the problem with looking at a scene in this way? Well, in this version, the other person is producing some kind of negative condition or circumstance, and your job is to STOP THEM. If your relationship with the other person is defined by shutting down their negative noise, then you are engaged in shutting them down, not in obtaining something positive from them, some kind of value. So you are not seeing them as someone who has something to offer you. If you do not see them as someone who has something to offer you, you cannot need something from them. And if you cannot need something from them, you cannot be vulnerable to them. And vulnerability is what it's all about. It's the whole game. As audience members, we are arrested and compelled by raw vulnerability. It's relatively rare that we see this, in the theater, on films, or on television. When we do, it is truly inspiring and memorable. We do not soon forget it.
Let's give an example. Suppose we are playing Blanche in Streetcar. In the first part of the play, we will see Stanley as uncouth, coarse, abrupt, and inconsiderate. If we describe what we are pursuing as "to stop Stanley from behaving like a barbarian or a jerk", then we are engaged in shutting down what we take to be Stanley's defining behavior. No one watching this is likely to find it compelling or urgent on its face. However, if we define what we are doing as "get Stanley to prove his respect for me as a true woman, a woman among women", then we see him as having something yummy to offer us (respect!), something we can thrive on, something we value. The important point it how we SEE Stanley and how we describe the way in which we are trying to influence him. If we do so in a way that opens our eyes to the potential value to be had from him, from the yummy stuff he can send our way, then we have a scene going. A scene that people will be glad they paid money for, will remember, will be inspired by, will talk about to their friends, will generate buzz about. Nothing the matter with that.
Sunday, March 29, 2009
the viewpoints mystique
As the summer wore on, though, something became clear: one "viewpoints" exploration looked a lot like the next one , and the previous one as well. The person moderating the exercise could introduce various stipulations, but sooner or later, a monotony crept in. The reason for this, I would maintain, was the underlying arbitrariness of the unfoldings. A relentless series of surprises of more or less the same kind, is still a relentless series. And a relentless series of anything grows wearing at some point. A college friend of mine who entered the Columbia Graduate acting program under Bogart, but later dropped out in disgust, dubbed the viewpoints "aerobics for dramaturgs." And I think that about hits the nail on the head.
A year later, I was interning in New York at Mabou Mines, a downtown theater collective that dates back to the 1960's. The original members included Lee Breuer, Phillip Glass, JoAnne Akalaitis, Ruth Maleczech and David Warrilow, all of them titans in the history of downtown New York theater. It was the early nineties at this point, and many of the original members were gone, and the collective was scrambling for a new vision or a way forward. In collaboration with the Public Theater, which at that time JoAnnne Akalaitis was running, Mabou Mines produced Bertolt Brecht's enigmatic, early play In the Jungle of Cities, and hired Anne Bogart to direct it. Anne was a very hot item right about then, her recent departure from Trinity Rep notwithstanding, and there was a good deal of excitement about the potential synergy of Anne Bogart, Mabou Mines and Brecht. The excitement, sadly, did not bear fruit.
The production was widely panned, although it did have its defenders, and it had some fine performances as well. It had Ruth Maleczech, a titanic force of nature and a phenomenal actor, but she was in a relatively small role. It had Fred Neumann, a man whom none other than Samuel Beckett had entrusted some of his prose pieces for adaptation to the stage, also a tremendous actor. And it had a wonderful, recent graduate of the NYU conservatory named Fanny Green, who acquitted herself splendidly. But on the whole, the productions failed, and there was a simple reason for that sad fact.
Frank Rich nailed the reason for this in his New York Times review of the production;
Since most of the large supporting cast is as smart-alecky in voice and gesture as Mr. Arrambide [the lead actor], the jungle of Ms. Bogart's Chicago is less a savage industrial wasteland out of Upton Sinclair than a benign absurdist cartoon, a rather sexless retread of R. Crumb.
Ms. Bogart does not dream big. She is so cautious that she minimizes the seedy Chinatown fantasized by Brecht, perhaps out of fear that a contemporary audience might be offended by the author's tongue-in-cheek use of old Charlie Chan ethnic stereotypes. (Even Shlink's Malayan identity is all but obliterated.) As bold esthetic sensuousness is missing from this "Jungle," so is most of Brecht's raw pain at discovering man's "infinite isolation." Far more care is devoted to the busy deployment of two moving men whose endless shifting of a few sticks of furniture typifies the evening's pedantic illustration of Brechtian stagecraft.
I was in a lot of those rehearsals, I was friends with the backstage interns who handed off and received that furniture from the actors on stage, and I can say that Frank Rich is absolutely right. Bogart did spend hours in those rehearsals painstakingly choreographing the movement of the furniture movers. But it gets worse. She had an assistant director for the production who was the development director (grantwriter) for Mabou Mines, an aspiring director himself, with whom, to my knowledge, she had not worked previously. When one of the actors would have a question about the scene involving, you know, their relationship to other characters in the scene, their needs or desires, or the outcomes they were seeking, she would motion the assistant director to run down and chat with them.
Now, getting to the essence of any scene is a challenge. Brecht's play is especially enigmatic, and it really takes someone with an overarching vision to help actors connect the dots. Someone like a director. Regardless of how helpful this assistant director's insights were, it's a terrible signal to send to the actors that their concerns, their legitimate concerns about how to act their roles well, are to be relegated to an assistant. They must NOT, under any circumstances, be allowed to interfere with the machinations of the director as the string-puller of the uber-marionettes.
Bogart reaped what she sowed. The production flopped. But worse than that, she left the lead members of Mabou Mines with a profound sense of betrayal. "We got taken" Ruth Maleczech said in the office on Ninth St, months later. She then proceeded to perform a spontaneous, derisive parody of "kinesthetic response", one of Bogart's most hallowed viewpoints.
This anecdote perfectly illustrates both the appeal and the danger of viewpoints. People who are studying acting want desperately to be initiated, to be shown the true secrets of doing compelling, memorable work. However, finding someone who can really help them with that is never easy. They may encounter a gifted teacher at school, college, or grad school, but eventually, they leave that institution, and are faced with finding someone who can help them continue to develop. The teaching of acting can be maddeningly insubstantial, ethereal even, and so often aspiring actors despair of finding someone who can help them make sense of it all: what to do with their minds, their bodies, their feelings, the text. It can seem to be impossible to find an approach that works with all of these elements together.
Viewpoints makes a false promise: put your money on the "physical". Anything that deals with the inner life or intention or yearning or longing smacks of dated, naive aberrations from Lee Strasberg's 1950's New York. Use viewpoints and focus on the physical, the acolytes are told, and let the rest take care of itself. And so the actor is introduced to this series of relatively simple "viewpoints" that are concerned with an actor's physical relationships with others in a space: how far away or close they are to each other, the shapes of their bodies, the mimicing of what others in the space are doing, the contours of the space itself, and potential responses to the gestural exhibitions of others. Follow these simple steps, and you, too, can be a "physical" actor.
The appeal is in the concreteness of what viewpoints is pushing, and in its relative simplicity. Through my years of training at the Yale School of Drama and at Duke before that, I watched it happen again and again: actors would be presented with a concrete skill to master, whether it was the "ask" list of words, in which the pronounciation of the short "a" sound varies across British and American dialects, or fencing, or scansion, or stage combat, or, yes, viewpoints, and they leaped at the promise that mastering this very concrete set of more or less mechanical rules, a set of rules that was divorced from things like judgment, intuition, and imagination, would somehow accredit them as actors. I can empathize with the impulse: learning to act well is not easy, even with the help of a caring and insightful teacher. But the promise, my friends, is a false one.
Any good acting teacher, like any good yoga teacher, or any good Alexander teacher, or any good Zen teacher, wil tell you, in one way or another, that it is all about body-mind integration. Viewpoints promises to make accessible something that DEPENDS on this integration of body and mind, i.e. acting, by focusing on the merely physical, and in a totally superficial way. I had a great piano teacher growing up, Linda Calligaro, and she insisted that you do NOT develop independence of the right hand and the left hand by practicing one hand at a time. Learning the part of a piece of music one hand at a time could be useful as a preliminary, but no gains would be made in achieving the INDEPENDENCE of the two hands by practicing one hand at a time. For that, you had to try to do the much more difficult challenge of playing with both hands at once. It's all about coordination. As so is acting. It's about learning to simultaneously direct your attention to people or things, sometimes ones that are present, sometimes not, use your voice, use your body, remember your lines, and an whole lot more. It's what Barack Obama has referred to as walking and chewing gum at the same time. It's rubbing your tummy and patting your head, jumping on one foot, naked, while speaking a bit of text that means everything to you in a way that honors both the punctuation and the need to preserve the integrity of the whole thought. Viewpoints, sadly, makes things just way too easy, and tries to make a virtue of that.
Viewpointa can have a value as part of an actor's training. It is definitely valuable for an actor to have a dynamic understanding of space and his or her relationships to others in that space, and the way she can use his body in relationship with the space and the others with whom she shares it. Too much of this awaremess, though, is NOT a good thing. These concerns are essentially the purvey of the director (viewpoints evolved out of dance composition principles), as they involve the "big picture". And being too aware of the "big picture" can be a major stumbling block for the actor: when he is thinking about that, he is thinking about what he, and everyone else, looks like, and is therefore the very definition of self-conscious. Viewpoints also tacitly encourages cleverness (or "smart-aleckeyness" as Frank Rich put it), and seeming clever has nothing to do with being vulnerable. So a LITTLE bit of viewpoints goes a long way. Some viewpoints proponents will no doubt say that their technique is not intended to replace "inner" work, but my experience with Anne Bogart, and Frank Rich's etimation of her work, shows that that is not the case.
The only way I can imagine viewpoints being valuable is as a kind of basic awareness of space and its possibilites. Though I have heard tell of scene study classes that attempt to incorporate viewpoints as part of the working process, I am very, very skeptical. Getting the attention of the actor on to the right things is difficult enough, and viewpoints is an invitation to focus on many of the wrong ones.
But whatever merits viewpoints may have, it is NOT a substitute for a real approach to the difficult terrain that belongs to the actor: the domain of dreams, fears, needs, outcomes, interventions, confrontations, and intuition, as well as the body and the voice. And like Mrs. Calliagaro said, the real work begins when you are practicing using all of these things at one time. Is it difficult to work with these thing all together? Yes. Is there only one way of doing it? No. Is finding an approach to dealing with these things necessary for any actor who wants to sustain a creative life in acting in film or theater? Absolutely. The only way out, a wise man once said, is through. That's a viewpoint you can believe in.
(This post is from the blog of the Mother of Invention Acting School in Los Angeles and San Francisco (www.utteracting.com): an acting class in Los Angeles and San Francisco for serious, motivated students.)
Friday, March 13, 2009
the trouble with Meisner
I'm a Meisner-trained actor looking for
a scene study class with a minimal focus on technique. Coming
from a Meisner background, I want the class to be more about the
interaction between the actors, and staying truthful
moment-to-moment and less about script analysis.
This person's Meisner teacher had instilled in him a suspicion, a fear, a paranoia even, of "technique" and "text analysis." The first thing to say about this is Meisner is itself a technique. Techniques are nothing more than ways of approaching things, and they are nothing to be afraid of.
But beyond that, this teacher had imprinted upon him a prejudice about text analysis that is more disturbing. I once spoke to one of my mentors at Yale, Evan Yionooulis, about Meisner. Evan chaired the acting program at Yale for five years. What she said is that Meisner is great for learning to "take it off of the other person", but not so great for learning organizing principles of working on a scene or a role. "Organizing principles" has an abstract sound to it, but what she meant by that term was this: a set of priorities, when approaching a scene or a role. Or, a set of questions which point you toward the significant and urgent elements of the character's situation, elements that will unquestionably impact how you play the scene, such as: what do I most need? What do I expect to happen next, best-case and worst-case? What are my strengths? What are my vulnerabilities? What are the greatest losses or failures I have suffered? Who is the person I am interacting with to me? etc. Such questions often strike students initially in my class as not terribly challenging, but as we discover in the scene work again and again, being able to frame compellingly and appropriately for yourself things like who you are in a scene, what you expect, and what happened in the past are critical in rising to the challenge presented by any scene and embracing the imaginary circumstances involved.
The phobia about "text analysis" bespeaks the actor's perennial fear of being "in her head". And certainly, text analysis undertaken wrongly, as, for example, an exercise in literary criticism, will land an actor in her head. But that is exactly why it is appropriate for an actor's training to include a procedure for how to approach the text involved in a scene and a role, and how to work towards identifying what is essential to it.
I have had students in my class who are either taking Meisner classes concurrently or have taken them in the past. They complain about the way in which certain words are used in Meisner classes almost talismanically, without explanation, like "listening" or "doing". The idea is that a good actor "really listens" and "really does", but to say more about what is meant by this is to betray or profane a sacred mystery. Some students are fine with refusal to explicate, and can learn what is meant by these terms by following the way an instructor praises or doesn't praise students' work in the repetition exercises. And to be fair, the teaching of acting is always going to be in part an experiential affair: books on acting can be great, but they can never suffice all by themselves. Helping the observers in the class see the important things and understand them is inevitable part of a good class, no matter how you slice it. But there is a difference between refusing to explain ANYTHING and a willingness to enlighten when and where it is possible. I think many Meisner teachers tend towards the former.
Another quagmire that can develop in Meisner classes is that as the repetition exercises unfold, INITIALLY the emphasis is on receiving from the partner and answering him or her, but then, as the weeks go by, a premium starts to be placed on repetition exercises where an emotional escalation takes place. Students then begin to work for this type of display, and the focus becomes totally wrong. Any acting teacher worth his salt, Meisner or not, will tell you that the emotion in an actor's work is a by-product of engagement with others. When the emotion experienced by the actor becomes the focus of the actor's attention, she is experiencing HERSELF having the emotion, rather than experiencing the partner and the scene. The histrionic displays can be impressive, but they are a colossal red herring. That is just not what it's about.
Meisner is a great approach to study, no two ways about it. Properly taught, it is a great way to learn to put your attention on your partner. However, it has limitations and dangers, like any technique, and in the hands of an untalented teacher, it can be worse that no technique at all.
I met a Los Angeles talent agent not long ago who said that he didn't need his people to be good, he just needed them to be able to "carry on a conversation in front of the camera". That was what it took to get work in the acting chops department. And Meisner can be a great way for people to learn to talk and listen naturally. But there is a lot more to acting than talking and listening naturally. You don't get memorable and inspiring performances without a solid measure of boldness, insight and imagination as well. A technique that helps orient the actor toward the secrets of the scene carefully planted by the writer in plain sight, and invites the actor to use these secrets to enliven his imagination, helps him become not just a credible presence in front of the camera or on stage, but a luminous one.
(This post is from the blog of the Mother of Invention Acting School in Los Angeles and San Francisco (www.utteracting.com): an acting class in Los Angeles and San Francisco for serious, motivated students.
Friday, July 25, 2008
the poet and the adman
In The SF Chronicle today, there was an article about this new cable TV show called "Mad Men." I don't have a TV, so this was the first I had heard of it. The reviewer was extrenely keen on the show, whose protagonist is a Madison Avenue cat in 1960 who is oblivious to the fact that the world is changing around him, but senses that something is not right between himself and his world. The reviewer relates this one incident in which our hero is hiding out in a bar at lunch time, and has an exchange with a guy sitting there reading a book of Frank O'Hara poems. The main character suspects he's been snubbed when the guy with the book tells him he doesn't think he would like it-- admen don't go in for poetry, right?
It's funny, because in the class I am always insisting that students find visceral ways to describe what they (as their characters) are pursuing in their scenes. I explain that the viscera are the intestines, the guts. And that I want people to speak as plainly as they can about what they are pirsuing. We try to avoid what I call "Oprah talk." But getting down to a visceral way of talking about their scene work can be elusive for people. This is inevitable, because getting visceral means getting real and getting crucial (the CRUX), and it has to be earned. But recently I found myself telling the students that if they wanted to get visceral, look at the language of advertising, of taglines. "Got milk?" "Think different" "You're not really clean until you're ZEST-fully clean." Or my very own "Because a killer instinct is a terrible thing to waste." The folks who come up with this kind of copy meant to send millions of people running to the store to buy whatever the product in question is know that they have no choice but to be direct, simple, visceral. Failure is the alternative. I think that in advertising there is a powerful understanding of the efficacy of language, especially plain language, but because we are all immersed in it, it can be hard to perceive. But all of this is to say that the adman and the poet, who also understands (we hope!) the visceral potential of language, are really just two sides of the same coin.
--Mother of Invention Acting School
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