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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.
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.
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