Things, arranged.

The Actor's Ego: Always the Greatest Barrier to Creativity

In training the professional actor, I have found that the single greatest barrier to true creativity is the ego.

Not in the selfish sense, although that is often a large part of the problem, but more in the sense of why, how and in what ways the ego manifests itself in the following:

Fear

Self-doubt

Need for praise

Need for criticism

Need for attention

Protection

Defenses

Stifling risk

Lack of focus

In each discipline of applied arts, the student is asked to submit to the great truths of a craft long before they are encouraged to express creativity.

Painters learn to draw correctly.

Musicians play scales to prove correct technique.

Dancers take class until fundamental technique is commanded.

Writers discard their own writing in a search for something more.

It is a strange phenomenon that the actor is the subject of the creative act itself. By definition the actor has to believe that they are worth watching, that they have something to show in themselves to the world. The paradox is that until the actor stops believing this, no real training in the craft can occur.

That is why actor training occurs in stages.

Stanislavsky correctly described the first phase of actor training as THE WORK ON THE SELF.

How can an actor begin the process of identifying the ways in which their ego manifests itself as barriers?

By first establishing a clear relationship between the self and the work, which must be seen as a distinct entity outside of the artist.

The work has needs. Those needs must become what the beginning actor agrees to be in service of.

Serve the work. Because is it greater than the self.

When you feel the manifestation of ego emerging, stop before you let it become the issue, and ask yourself: "What does this have to do with the work that needs to be done?"

The right answer is, NOTHING.

One cannot pretend the ego is not there. Like a giant sentinel, it waits to respond to circumstances on your behalf. It will protect you.

But in protecting you, it also prevents you from learning, from growing, from ultimately finding a way to master the ego.

The ego does not want to be mastered. It wants to be the master.

This battle is a crucial one for each actor in training to fight on their own, and with a strong teacher.

Win this battle and the road to true creativity will reveal itself.

The Night of the Twentieth

In Joshua Sobol's 1975 play, a group of idealistic young Jews experience a night of existential crisis as they prepare to move into settlements in Palestine during the 1920's. This was the beginning of the Kibbutz movement, which would have lasting repercussions that still permeate the Israeli national consciousness to this day.

The University of Washington School of Drama recently presented a reading of THE NIGHT OF THE TWENTIETH at the Jones Playhouse as one of the events surrounding Mr. Sobol's residency at the University of Washington this spring where he is teaching playwrighting.

The play poses difficult questions about the Jewish diaspora, settlements, statehood and identity. The young European Jews who went to Palestine during the 1920's were caught up in the post world war political and intellectual upheavals of the period.

Not one to shy away from the complexities of history, Sobol ends the play with the character of Moshe declaring that the group will venture forward into the future and the settlements, but with no real understanding of what they are doing and what the repercussions will be.

After the reading, Sobol fielded questions from the audience, and ended the evening recalling another Jewish playwright who emigrated from Germany to Palestine in 1934 who stated that until the twentieth century, Jews had been performing in plays all over the world, mostly in the genre of comedy. Now in the middle east before world war two, he prophesied that the new genre from that time forward would be drama.

 

 

Sport and Art

Discipline, practice, sacrifice, work beyond one's comfort zones, the surpassing of one's limitations, risk, form, technique, drive, creativity and will.

Making Art is a lot like making Sport.

Actors can learn a lot from athletes.

The daily routine, the endless hours of practice and training and ultimately the abandon with which the athlete ultimately plays the game.

I'm not sure when the discipline of music and dance got lost in the discipline of the actor in training.

I think perhaps the Actor's Studio had a lot to do with it. The inaccurate reliance on inner truths without respect for the outer form, both physiologically and dramatically speaking, has permeated today's actor training with a strange laziness.

The greatest dancers still take class. The greatest musicians still play scales. The greatest athletes still train and train and train.

When did acting as an art become so entitled that these concepts seem foreign to acting students?

Perhaps somewhere along the way the notion that acting is mostly about having fun, being creative, letting it all hang out etc. became the norm.

My students do not come early to class and prepare unless I order them to. They do not stay after to work, even if I wanted them to. They have a great deal of trouble with focus and concentration.

Especially when it is not fun.

Creativity is a continual movement of the self to the work and back again, and the path of that movement is paved with self-discipline.

It is interesting to me that the athlete expects discomfort to be a part of the road to excellence, but the typical acting student avoids discomfort at all costs.

In my opinion, avoiding discomfort in growth is to avoid growth at all.

 

 

Patricia Racette as Butterfly: Power, Artistry, Commitment.

Last night Seattle Opera's opening night audience for Madama Butterfly bore witness to artistry at its highest level.

Patricia Racette, the current Queen of Puccini in the opera world, brought a rare performance that was riveting in its emotional power, captivating in its characterization and astounding in its operatic soprano mastery.

Racette is a rarity among great sopranos. She is also a great actress. The attention to detail, the finely wrought character, the specificity of moments all combined to create an unforgettable night at the opera.

Seattle Opera continues to find new ways to bring great art to new audiences. The performance in McCaw Hall was also simulcast for free to 8,000 at Key Arena.

Brava, Dame Racette, Bravo Seattle Opera.

The Beta-fication of the Male Actor in America circa 2012

Above: The iconography of the American male movie star between 1950 and 1965. Alpha male, transcendent of genre and period, always willing to take on the epic themes and roles. Was convicing hoisting a martini or a broadsword, wearing a suit or sandals.

Below: The iconography of the American male movie star circa 2012. Beta male, stuck in the roles of victims and sufferers, unable to play any role that requires the emotion and intelligence of classic Greek drama or Shakespeare, only convincing at a hair salon.

Don't get me wrong: a actually have a lot of respect for Mr. Brody's work (some of it). I just couldn't find a more fitting example of a cultural phenomenon if I tried.

Yes, you will say: what about Matt Damon, Leo, etc.

To which I respond: what about them. Have you looked at the kinds of roles played by Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas, Robert Mitchum, Richard Widmark, etc. etc. etc.? Let's see Matt Damon don a pair of sandals and take the city of Troy.

Wait. Brad Pitt tried that. We all know what happened there. Malibu Beach Party East, at best.

The point is, the great roles from Oedipus to Richard III to Hamlet to any part that deals with epic themes and ideas requires a kind of male actor who can embody some element of the epic.

When asked why he was the only French male movie star known internationally, Gerard Depardieu quipped: "Because I am the only one of them who is a man, who can take a punch."

Let's add to this the shame that when a historical role of epic size comes along, it is almost always filled by a Brit/Australian/non-American actor who can bring the necessary gravitas to the role.

Think Russell Crowe in GLADIATOR. You really want to see Adrian Brody, Matt Damon or DiCaprio in that role? Only if you wanted to make a comedy.

One of the factors in this phenomenon is acting training in the US. The system of professional actor training programs for the most part in America produces emotionally stunted, physically doughy, self-entitled and insecure actors who lack the basic mental and physical toughness to survive a college pick-up basketball game, let alone the great roles of stage and screen. Much of this is because most actor training programs were formed by the generation what ran away from everything. The former counter culture that became the foundations of our current arts culture.

So, we find ourselves in the generation of the Beta Actor. Kind, gentle, thoughtful, deferring, emotional, sensitive.

I would just hate to get caught in a stage fight with one of them at my side....they'd ask me what their motivation was.

BACKSTORY: The Filmmaker's Vision on UWTV

I just finished shooting the 13th and final episode for season 2 of Backstory: The Filmmaker's Vision for UWTV.

Over the course of the season, I met and interviewed filmmakers who ranged from a 16 year old high school student to an intrepid documentary filmmaker who imbedded herself in the middle the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to make a film about peace.

I also had a chance to sit down with the Oscar winning c0-director of UNDEFEATED.

From film festivals, distrubution, animation to documentary, narrative and even the abstract, we covered the latest in filmmaking that is northwest based and connected to the University of Washington.

Here's to next season!

Merah's Media Madness

Apparently Merah had rigged a video camera to himself when he went on his killing spree in Toulouse.

He also had been watching video of beheadings and other such materials on his home computer via the internet.

In other words, much of his world was defined by media images. He knew he would also become a part of the reality/fiction of modern media mayhem when he holed himself up in his apartment to await the inevitable.

He was 23. From the time he was able to process the images, he was immersed in them as a child. Fed by the global disinformation glut, nurtured by the unbridled anarchy of information availability, Merah bore witness to himself as media celebrity even before he comtemplated the terrible acts he would eventually perform.

He knew a long time ago he would be famous.

The how and the why were simply details to be worked out.

Consider that in our instant information world, the idea of context is lost.

A clip, a sentence, a sound bite, an image become the total reality. No longer just a signpost for something else, out of context materials have taken the place of "the thing itself".

A politician says a ten thousand words, but it is the "gaffe" that gets the headlines. Snippets of video content stand in for the whole without question, even though the snippet might be a moment taken from days and days of reality. No matter, the snippet IS the reality.

To exist now is to exist in the media universe of moments, and Merah was bound and determined to exist.

Now, his moment is our reality. He left behind a video record of his fame for us to contemplate.

All we will know of his victims is the moments he made of their deaths.

He had stolen their lives in more ways than one.

 

 

Art and Anxiety

 

 

Soren Kierkegaard had a lot to say about Anxiety.

As an aspect of the human condition, he saw it as different than Fear, which was aimed at something specific.

Anxiety was a sense of something, and at the same time an attraction.

The NYT piece by Prof. Gordon Marino today on the usefulness of Anxiety made me think of the condition the actor faces almost every time he or she is about to step on stage. A sense of dread with a sense of desire.

Many acting teachers ask their students to dismiss, get beyond or "work through" their Anxiety.

I think this is the same thing as prescribing a pill.

Anxiety is innate in the human being. Why, I am not sure, but it seems innate.

Kiekegaard surmised that Anxiety was related to the sense that we might ultimately be 'alone'.

Beyond abandonment or isolation, Kierkegaard's concept of 'alone' has more to do with a sense that one's life and actions ultimately have no meaning or consequence. That no one will care.

So, Anxiety in Art has a lot to do with the "will it matter?" question.

I think Anxiety is a positive aspect of our human order, and I believe it is good for making Art.

I think of Anxiety as a kind of internal bullshit detector. You know somewhere deep down that:

1. You are not prepared.

2. Your work is just ordinary.

3. Your Ego is what you are here to gratify, and you are concerned you'll be found out.

4. You are a fraud, and you will be found out.

5. You'll make mistakes and be judged for them.

Here's the deal: since all the above are already true, can you just accept that and go on with the task at hand?

That's one way of dealing with Anxiety. Welcome it.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/17/the-danish-doctor-of-dread/?ref=opinion

 

With Harness On Our Back

 

As a professor of the dramatic arts, one often wonders if the rarified goal of educational synthesis actually happens with one's students.

That is to say, the seemingly disparate tracks of theatre history, theory, practice, art and methodology belong in individual courses of study, but are meant to come together and transform the student in their creative work outside the classroom.

The University of Washington School of Drama Undergraduate Theatre Society just opened a richly imaginative, passionate and intelligent production of MACBETH this week.

Not just another mounting of a classic play, this production brings together a fine group of creative artists who have dealt with and answered the big questions about the field thay have chosen.

The production features an inspired vocabulary of movement, sound and imagery that springs from these students serious explorations of what makes a theatrical experience for their generation.

Also, the text is clear, strong, vibrant and alive in their confident performances. The director, Julia Sears, is a passionate Shakespearean who believes in the power of language and understands that great theatrical moments in time can be utterly remarkable for an audience.

To see one's students evolve into artists is one of the most gratifying aspects of teaching theatre at the collegiate level. To observe the synthesis of curriculum and creativity that results in a new class of true theatre artists makes all the long hours of teaching worthwhile.

The Supreme Court Agrees to Consider Affirmative Action...Again

Should affirmative action be eliminated?

Should race be considered in the range of college application factors along with grades, community service, personal statements, etc?

I wish we didn't have to, but we can only end Affirmative Action when racism itself comes to an end.

Until then, consider this: since the 16th century up until the 1960s in North America, racial preferences have been a major factor in not only education, but life itself. Over 400 years. From the 1960s up to today, racism has been a spectre American has not been able to eradicate. Anyone who thinks we live in a post-race society is either delusional or simply ignorant.

So, should racial preferences be eliminated? Of course. Elimated from society overall.

Until then, programs to promote the inclusion of all people in order to remedy the inequities of history are not only needed, they are essential to promote the very idea of Justice.