Showing posts with label acting class san francisco. Show all posts
Showing posts with label acting class san francisco. Show all posts
Thursday, April 16, 2009
we don't know what we know
.
Then it dawned on me: Church and Market is close to the Castro, and there was some part of me that was looking forward to ogling, and being ogled by, the other gays at the Church and Market 24. But the funny thing is, my thoughts prior to the coaching session materializing about going to the gym had had nothing to do with this: I had been dreading the hour on the bike and the accompanying discomfort of the bicycle seat, the ennui, the CNN rightwing spokesmodels on the monitors with close spationing that didn't work as often as it did, and hoping the podcast I had in my iPod would make the time go by. I wasn't aware of contemplating potential eye candy ogling. And yet, somehow, I was banking on that prospect, because when it was potentially yanked away by the prospect of going to Potrero instead, I found myself mentally bemoaning that loss.
The point is that we have instinctual, preconscious ways of weighing prospects, possibilities, people, relationships, and courses of action. This is a big reason why the work of finding appropriate objectives to pursue is as challenging as it is: our real investment in our world and our practices and activities is often grasped only at this preconscious level, and yet grasping these things is often precisely what is necessary to unlock a scene. When it is our own world, we understand these things instinctively and, of course, require no explanation, except, perhaps, in situations where we find ourselves inclined to conduct ourselves in way we neither understand nor desire. But when embodying a character in a fictional world, we don't have the same automatic understandings, and often need to work things out in order to fully enter into them.
And that, my friends, is what they pay me the big bucks for.
(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.)
Sunday, January 25, 2009
something elemental and honest and true and authoritative.
Recently, I heard a story about the classical singer Thomas Quasthoff. Thomas is a soloist who sings with the leading conductors the world over, but here is one thing that makes Thomas's story so remarkable:
He was born, almost fifty years ago, in Hildesheim, Germany. While his mother was pregnant, she took the drug Thalidomide to combat morning sickness. As a result, Quasthoff was born with severe defects - shortened arms and legs, missing fingers. Even now, he stands only about four feet tall.
He gets high praise from the critics,like Anthony Tomassini of The New York Times":
TOMASSINI: "It's a warm, rich, full, robust sound. There's just a sense of something elemental and honest and true and authoritative. You sit up and listen when he sings."
Elemental and honest and true and authorative: what a great description of what we strive to achieve in class at Mother of Invention. In session 1, I always read a passage from Boleslavsky's Acting The First Six Lessons, in which he describes the challenge of the actor to a young student: he tells her she must be able to make the audience forget whatever is important to them in their life, and believe that what is happening to her is much more important, in other words, "to sit up and listen."
Also, see what a colleague says about him:
Tenor Michael Schade frequently performs in duo recitals with Quasthoff. He says he's impressed by Quasthoff's ease as a performer - how he can turn a large concert hall into an intimate parlor.
SCHADE: "Thomas walks out onstage and, like in life, you have the feeling that you've always known him. And he looks at his audience - you have a feeling that he looks everyone in the eye - and there's sort of an excited hush that happens. And you suddenly have the feeling that, due to this masterful control that actually Schubert himself, or Brahms or whoever he's singing, is actually talking to you, in persona.
He looks everyone in the eye: I also remind everyone in session 1 that the eyes are the windows of the soul. And the fact that Quasthoff, according to Schade, appears to channel the composer is also very important to us at Mother of Invention. Necessity is the mother of invention, according to Plato, and when we act, we in some sense are attempting to connect with the same need in ourselves that the writer was touching in herself when she wrote the text.
I downloaded a Quasthoff album, first chance I got. Classical is not really my thing, but when experts the world over are characterizing Quasthoff in this way, I thought it was worth a listen.
Here's a link to the story on PRI:
http://www.theworld.org/?q=node/24041
(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.)
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