Showing posts with label underlying objective. Show all posts
Showing posts with label underlying objective. Show all posts
Sunday, August 01, 2010
El Duende and underlying objective
Curious, I consulted the oracle of Palo Alto, which sent me to the Wikipedia. What I found was electrifying. The whole article is worth a read, and is quite short, but here are some highlights:
The meaning of duende as in tener duende (having duende) is a rarely-explained concept in Spanish art, particularly flamenco, having to do with emotion, expression and authenticity. In fact, tener duende can be loosely translated as having soul.
El duende is the spirit of evocation. It comes from inside as a physical/emotional response to music. It is what gives you chills, makes you smile or cry as a bodily reaction to an artistic performance that is particularly expressive. Folk music in general, especially flamenco, tends to embody an authenticity that comes from a people whose culture is enriched by diaspora and hardship; vox populi, the human condition of joys and sorrows.
According to Christopher Maurer, editor of "In Search of Duende", at least four elements can be isolated in Lorca's vision of duende: irrationality, earthiness, a heightened awareness of death, and a dash of the diabolical. The duende is a demonic earth spirit who helps the artist see the limitations of intelligence, reminding him that "ants could eat him or that a great arsenic lobster could fall suddenly on his head"; who brings the artist face-to-face with death, and who helps him create and communicate memorable, spine-chilling art. The duende is seen, in Lorca's lecture, as an alternative to style, to mere virtuosity, to God-given grace and charm (what Spaniards call "angel"), and to the classical, artistic norms dictated by the muse. Not that the artist simply surrenders to the duende; he or she has to battle it skillfully, "on the rim of the well", in "hand-to-hand combat". To a higher degree than the muse or the angel, the duende seizes not only the performer but also the audience, creating conditions where art can be understood spontaneously with little, if any, conscious effort. It is, in Lorca's words, "a sort of corkscrew that can get art into the sensibility of an audience... the very dearest thing that life can offer the intellectual." The critic Brook Zern has written, of a performance of someone with duende, "it dilates the mind's eye, so that the intensity becomes almost unendurable... There is a quality of first-timeness, of reality so heightened and exaggerated that it becomes unreal...".[1]
Lorca writes: "The duende, then, is a power, not a work. It is a struggle, not a thought. I have heard an old maestro of the guitar say, 'The duende is not in the throat; the duende climbs up inside you, from the soles of the feet.' Meaning this: it is not a question of ability, but of true, living style, of blood, of the most ancient culture, of spontaneous creation.""Everything that has black sounds in it, has duende." (i.e. emotional 'blackness')
"This 'mysterious power which everyone senses and no philosopher explains' is, in sum, the spirit of the earth, the same duende that scorched the heart of Nietzsche, who searched in vain for its external forms on the Rialto Bridge and in the music of Bizet, without knowing that the duende he was pursuing had leaped straight from the Greek mysteries to the dancers of Cadiz or the beheaded, Dionysian scream of Silverio's siguiriya."
"The duende's arrival always means a radical change in forms. It brings to old planes unknown feelings of freshness, with the quality of something newly created, like a miracle, and it produces an almost religious enthusiasm."
"All arts are capable of duende, but where it finds greatest range, naturally, is in music, dance, and spoken poetry, for these arts require a living body to interpret them, being forms that are born, die, and open their contours against an exact present." [1]
– García Lorca, Play and Theory of the Duende
Reading this article started to stir up my bodily humors: adrenaline, bile and testosterone in equal parts. This duende seems to be a great description of what we attempt to bring to our work in class by articulating an underlying objective for the character. There are so many great things in the piece above, but particularly appropriate to the class is the thing about duende "creating conditions where art can be understood spontaneously with little, if any, conscious effort." In the first class of the ten weeks, I always point to a passage from the first chapter of Boleslavsky's book, where Boleslavsky informs the actor that their work must be such that those watching must "know and feel immediately" that what the actor is doing is more important than whatever the spectator was preoccupied with in the moment before the actor began. It seems that for this recognition to be immediate, it must be pre-cognitive: it must speak to the intuitions and instincts of the spectator.
If duende is so elusive and norm-defying, why do we try to get at it with technique? Well, the truth is that I can make a few points about what an underlying objective is or isn't, but at a certain point, the actor has to move beyond the rules and, by fusing herself to the role, wrench the answer from deep within. She is almost required to become a poet for a moment, or at least to touch the poetic spirit the writer has imbued the work with. Yes, it's frustrating, but if it were merely a matter of a few simple rules, I guarantee the duende would never appear. Articulating an underlying objective does not guarantee the appearance of duende; indeed, it is clear that nothing ever could. But it creates a condition of receptiveness; the actor makes herself into a vessel and waits to be filled.
Not bad for a Sunday night, n'est-ce pas?
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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Saturday, February 06, 2010
vulnerability and the actor
As I wrote previously, I am currently reading Jeremy Rifkin's book The Empathic Civilization, and find it constantly...arousing, not sexually, but spiritually. So I want to share some of the juicy morsels that I come across as I read. Here's one:
If freedom is the ability to live out the full potential of one's possibilities and if the measure of one's life is the intimacy, range, and diversity of one's relationships, then the more vulnerable one is, the more open he or she will be to creating meaningful and intimate relationships with others. Vulnerable in this sense does not mean being weak or a victim or prey but, rather, being open to communication at the deepest level of human exchange.
Real courage...is allowing oneself to be exposed--warts and all--to another person. It is the willingness to place the most intimate details of our lives in the hands of another. To be vulnerable is to trust one's fellow human beings. Trust is the belief that others will treat you as an end not a means, that you will not be used or manipulated to serve the expedient motives of others but regarded as a valued being.
This is at the heart of what acting is and what we value actors for. Great actors are able to engage in the mimicry of their fellows in a way that doesn't merely reproduce their behavior, but also lays bare this vulnerability in a way that is palpable, immediate and undeniable. They bear witness to our interdependence and our capacity for reconciliation and harmony. They confront us with what we all share: a deep, visceral, unquenchable longing for connection, belonging and play.
This is why I call the "underlying objective" is the touchstone of what I teach. As actors we must learn to bring our own vulnerability to bear on the circumstances of the imaginary people we portray. By struggling (and I mean struggling, it wouldn't mean much if it were easy to find) to articulate the need which the actor can recognize the most urgent priority of the person they are embodying, in their own visceral and direct words, the actor forges a connection with the humanity of the character that can serve as the basis for everything they undertake in the role.
There is a Zen koan (or riddle) which says "The ten thousand things return to the one, what does the One thing return to?" For the actor, it is her underlying objective, the thing that she is asking for at every moment, her most urgent priority and purpose.Sacred Heart image by
Friday, December 18, 2009
ivana chubbuck and objective
So far so good. The innovation created by David Hammond at Yale, and developed by Mark Brokaw and Evan Yionoulis, was to distinguish between two kinds of objectives: plot objectives and underlying objectives. The "plot" in plot objectives refers to the plot of a story or play or screenplay: a character's plot objectives are the changes in the world that she wishes to bring about. A plot objective expresses the way in which a character wants to change some piece of their world. Plot objectives might include getting you to buy my house, to accept my marriage proposal, to stop playing the drums at night in your room so I can have some peace and quiet, or to join me in robbing a jewelry store. All of these involve my attempting to change my circumstances for the better, or, put differently, to solve a problem. Pursuing a plot objective activates those parts of an actor that are involved in solving problems: the mind, and to some extent the heart, as often solving problems involves influencing others emotionally.
What these teachers at Yale recognized, though, is that the mind and the heart is not all there is. There is also the gut. In the gut lives the appetites, and also, our capacity for locomotion, for fight or flight (in the hips). It's entirely possible for an actor to be engaged as a problem solver, in the head and heart, and to be asleep in the gut, at the visceral level (viscera is Latin for the guts, quite literally, the bowels, so to eviscerate someone is, colloquially, to rip them a new one).
So these teachers recognized that a conception of objective as a problem that you need to solve, a change in the circumstances surrounding you, is incomplete, by itself. Solving these problems is important -- that's part of the fascination of stories, is seeing people contend with adversity. But we as spectators are not going to be viscerally engaged by this problem-solving alone.
Unless.
We conceive of another type of objective. Let's call it the "underlying objective." The underlying objective is is the NEED that lives in the belly, the proverbial fire in the belly, that drives us to enter into the fray, influence people, and solve problems. It is the motor that drives us forward, the motor of appetite, hunger, need. My teachers recognized that the underlying objective was the thing that impels us to take up plot objectives, and then to put them down in favor of other plot objectives. The underlying objective is the need which stays constant, even as circumstances shift and plot objectives change accordingly. One of the consequences of this is that the underlying objective is not phrased in a way which involves another person, because other people are part of the circumstances in which we find ourselves, and so an objective that involves another person will be some form of a plot objective. If my underlying objective is to get "respect as a true healer", then the plot objective "getting you, my client, to confide in me, your therapist" will give me a piece of the underlying objective, but the underlying objective is something that exists in me APART FROM who or what is around me. The changes I will seek to bring about in the world (my plot objectives) are ways of getting my underlying objective met, of ANSWERING that need. We always look for the need to be met from others, but naming the need itself is saying something about us, not about what we want other people to do.
This distinction between plot objective and underlying objective is very powerful, and it is not simple. I realize I have provided only a very preliminary sketch of it here. And I don't intend to to try to say too much more about it here, because I believe that a classroom setting is where it can be best presented and understood. Without the context of a scene and actors to work with, there is a limit to how much can be made intelligible about it. But I think I have said enough to be able to make clear what Ivana Chubbuck gets right (not that much), and what she doesn't (quite a bit).
She does say "Always Make the SCENE OBJECTIVE about Relationship, Don't Play the Plot", and with that, I am in 100% agreement. And she says that a scene objective (which is another form of the underlying objective, any distinction between them is not important here) should not be "rational" or "cerebral", that it should be "basic", "needy", and "primal". I'm down with that. She also says the scene objective doesn't change-- that's good. And that every scene has one, good too, and that it is an actor's most important tool. But that's about where my agreement with Ivana Chubbuck ends. I fundamentally disagree with her on her criteria for what makes an underlying objective. I don't want to do a big recap of her criteria for picking an objective, because I think it is mostly foolish. So I will focus on one important point: she says the scene objective (or underlying objective) should be worded in a way that requires a response. From her examples of what that would look like, I am going to go through a list of "good" scene objectives (underlying objectives) that she provides, and say specifically what I think is wrong with each of them.
- "To get you to love me"
The problem with this is that it describes what we want the other person to DO (love us). We want, with an underlying objective, to say what it will mean to us or give us if the other person loves us. It will give me my...(something). By knowing that we need our (something), we can constantly be monitoring in the scene to see whether the other person is giving us our "something", we can HARVEST our "something." To get the other person to love you? So what if they don't? THAT is the question an underlying objective needs to answer.
- "To get you to give me a job"
Plot, the whole plot, and nothing but the plot. This is nothing but an attempt to impact our circumstances, our situation in the world. It says nothing about what is AT STAKE in the situation, what it will cost us if we don't get the job, what we will GET if we do get the job. Chubbuck might argue that this is addressed in what she calls the "overall objective", but she muddles things badly by saying that the actor should not play the plot in the scene objective, and then suggesting...wait for it...PLOT OBJECTIVES...as scene objectives. She speaks of the need to get beyond the plot to the relationship, but her scene objectives ARE the plot.
- "To make you validate me"
In my class, we call "validate" "the V word." I write off "validation" as what I call "Oprah talk", which is a particular form of what Chubbuck calls the "rational" and the "cerebral". Validation is not a part of our everyday ways of describing our needs. Can you imagine any advertiser (advertisers understand all about language and the visceral) asking you to see a movie described as "one man's quest for validation"? I didn't think so. Also, we don't look on validation as a very legitimate thing to pursue: someone who needs a lot of validation is considered needy, insecure. Not buying it.
- "To make you my ally"
At the risk of sounding like a broken record, an objective that gets beyond the plot, whether you call it overall, underlying or scene, needs to not be phrased as a way of changing our circumstances, as changing our circumstances IS the definition of the plot. An objective that goes beyond the plot is something you can HARVEST in pursuing your plot objectives. What will you get if you make the other person your ally? Not only what will you be able to accomplish if you make the other person your ally, but what will it mean about you that you succeeded in making someone your ally? That is getting beyond the plot.
I think I've made my point. Chubbuck talks a good game about the need to move beyond the plot, that is, beyond problem-solving, but her recommendations about how to do that are confused and misleading. Getting the gut activated involves something beyond naming what you want to see other people do, and yet Ivana Chubbuck seems to think it involves precisely that.
Sunday, November 15, 2009
Donnie Darko, Acting Teacher
The video actually goes a step further than Uta Hagen does, by visually suggesting, with the ectoplasm, a connection between Donnie's core (I would have placed the origin of the stream of ectoplasm a bit lower, around the belly, the film has it coming out of the solar plexus) and the place outside himself where he is headed next. The core is the seat of the "underlying objective" or driving need which is the source of the actor's vitality. And in the moment that an actor who is in touch with that vitality identifies a point in space to which he NEEDS to move, his presence expands visibly, the space between him and his destination appears to "filled" with this vitality. It's what the Chinese were talking about with "Chi". Ok, I'm going to stop there, before I start to sound whacky.
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