Showing posts with label Jeremy Rifkin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jeremy Rifkin. Show all posts
Friday, May 28, 2010
must-see acting TV
(if you just see HTML below, click the headline above to watch the video on my blog)
H/T Ari K
Saturday, February 20, 2010
getting under your skin was never like this
Blow.
Your.
Mind.
And in case you're lazy, here is the money passage:
"So, here again you have neurons which are enrolled in empathy. Now, the question then arises: If I simply watch another person being touched, why do I not get confused and literally feel that touch sensation merely by watching somebody being touched? I mean, I empathize with that person but I don't literally feel the touch. Well, that's because you've got receptors in your skin, touch and pain receptors, going back into your brain and saying don't worry, you're not being touched...
But if you remove the arm, you simply anesthetize my arm, so you put an injection into my arm, anesthetize the brachial plexus, so the arm is numb, and there is no sensations coming in, if I now watch you being touched, I literally feel it in my hand. In other words, you have dissolved the barrier between you and other human beings. So, I call them Gandhi neurons, or empathy neurons.
And this is not in some abstract metaphorical sense, all that's separating you from him, from the other person, is your skin. Remove the skin, you experience that person's touch in your mind. You've dissolved the barrier between you and other human beings. And this, of course is the basis of much of Eastern philosophy, And that is there is no real independent self, aloof from other human beings, inspecting the world, inspecting other people. You are in fact, connected not just via Facebook, and Internet, you're actually quite literally connected by your neurons. And there is whole chains of neurons around this room, talking to each other. And there is no real distinctiveness of your consciousness from somebody else's consciousness.
And this is not mumbo-jumbo philosophy. It emerges from our understanding of basic neuroscience."
Those of you who follow my blog know I have been reading Jeremy Rifkin's The Empathic Civilization,in which the critical role of mirror neurons are discussed at length.
H/T The Flux Theatre Ensemble Blog
Saturday, February 13, 2010
more Rifkin: the need to belong
Many of the renegade psychologists of the 1930s and 1940's thought differently [than Freud]. They argued that children are born with a reality principle, and that principle is to seek affection, companionship, intimacy, and a sense of belonging. The search to belong, they suggested, is the most primary of all drives. Society often tempers or represses the drive for affection and intimacy to serve socially constructive ends, but it remains the essential nature of human beings.
That's about the size of it. It is the recognition that the search for belonging and connection is the basis of EVERY SCENE is what is still not widely grasped in many acting approaches today. As Americans, with our national story of rugged individualism and frontier self-reliance, we can have some difficulty with this at first. We are, though, in the final analysis, mammals, and mammals are herd animals. When we get down to what is primitive, visceral and essential for us, it is the need to belong: to belong as a son, a mother, a teacher, a cool kid, a person of conscience, an artist, an athlete, a benefactor, there are many different kinds of belonging we can seek, but belong we must. This yearning, this passion, this appetite for belonging is the source of the energy needed to live our lives. It is this drive that is the "motivation" that acting teachers of past generations were reaching for or groping for. It is vitally important for us, and we know it is vitally important for others as well, and the fact that we know we each have it to give and receive in distinct ways gives us the clout to negotiate with others and fight for what we need. It is, at once, our greatest liability (we are miserable if we suffer from a great deficit of it) and our greatest resource (we can bestow belonging and appreciation others, and receive this appreciation from others). Acting is learning to make this need palpable and visible as we present the push and pull of these negotiations and struggles across every conceivable context. Now that's what I call a vocation.
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
what I'm talkin about
The evening of December 24, 1914, Flanders. The first world war in history was entering into its fifth month. Millions of soldiers were bedded down in makeshift trenches latticed along the European countryside. In many places the opposing armies were dug in within thirty to fifty yards of each other and within shouting distance. The conditions were hellish. The bitter-cold winter air chilled to the bone. The trenches were waterlogged. Soldiers shared their quarters with rats and vermin. Lacking adequate latrines, the stench of human excrement was everywhere. The men slept upright to avoid the muck and sludge of their makeshift arrangements. Dead soldiers littered the bodies left to rot and decompose within yard of their still living comrades who were unable to collect them for burial.
As dusk fell over the battlefields, something extraordinary happened. The Germans began lighting candles on the thousands of small Christmas trees that had been sent to the front to lend some comfort to the men. The German soldiers then began to sing Christmas carols--first "Silent Night," then a stream of other songs followed. The English soldiers were stunned. One soldier, gazing in disbelief at the enemy lines, said the blazed trenches looked "like the footlights of a theater." The English soldiers responded with applause, at first tentatively, then with exuberance. They began to sing Christmas carols back to their German foes to equally robust applause. A few men from both sides crawled out of their trenches and began to walk across the no-man's-land toward each other. Soon hundredss followed. As word spread across the front, thousands of men poured out of their trenches. They shook hands, exchanged cigarettes and cakes and talked about where they hailed from, reminisced about Christmas past, and joked about the absurdity of war.
And it goes on from there.
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