Things, arranged.

The Studio Seattle

After decades as a professional director of television and theatre and university professor of drama, I am now embarking on a new venture.

The Studio Seattle is a place where actors can go deeper, challenge themselves, explore more and improve their craft with a focus on getting actors ready for the real profession.

There is a vibrant and dynamic acting community in Seattle, but there is a dearth of instruction from teachers who have actually worked at a national level. I'm talking prime time television and nationally ranked professional theaters along with top-ranked MFA actor training programs.

I've been there. I know what it takes. 

If you are interested in taking your craft to the next level, check out The Studio Seattle's workshops and classes. And yes, I have a blog there about acting, too.

Because there is no substitute for real experience.

The Sameness of All Things

 

The date is February 4th, 2018.

The event is the National Football League championship gama, AKA The Super Bowl.

The moment is when a Dodge Ram advertisement airs during the broadcast.

The ad is a collage of images of the Dodge Ram truck, supported by the voice of Martin Luther King Jr. delivering his iconic speech about the nature of 'Greatness'.

The message is clear: The Dodge Ram truck is equivalent to an entire race striving to overcome incredible historical, political, social and judicial oppression by embracing personal greatness.

In this moment, the long and tragic road America has been traveling, where everything, everyone and every aspect of American life becomes a commodity reaches its final destination as a place where only the bottom line exists.

We, as a nation, now agree that everything is the same, and everything that is the same is also for sale.

Totalitariam regimes and empires of the past have been overt about their insistence that all that exists has some fealty to the dominant power structure. Rome, The Soviet Union, pre-capitalist China to name a few of the well known. To render unto Caesar what is Caesar was to acknowledge who really owned everything. To serve the state and the party was the patriotic duty of every Soviet citizen. To declare unwavering commitment to Chairman Mao and the Communist Party was to be an upright citizen.

Now, in early 21st century America, to accept that persons, bodies, lives, thoughts, politics, deeds, ideals, principles, beliefs, cultures and all else are indeed commoditites in service of profit and power is to be a patriotic American. 

All the faux hashtag "movements" that inundate our lives, all the identity politics and culture wars that inform our existence are simply the by-products of this commodification phenomenon. The most vivid example of this is those in Hollywood who have allowed themselves to be bought and sold as products now wearing a certain color or lapel pin to awards shows where their self-commodity narcissism is celebrated on television by America. 

The question now is: whence goeth a nation when everything has been sold?

Imagining the Authentic

Actor:

A paradox exits in the acting process that lives in a Dialetic:

What you are in, the story, is not real.

What you must do to make this story impactful is to be real (authentic).

The bridge across the paradox is the imagination, which resides not in conscious effort, but in the subconscious.

The subconscious - the deep wellspring of our true creativity.

All the conscious elements of the craft, from text to stage to scene partner, to director, to costume, to lights, to scenery, to audience must become servants to your imagination, which emerges when the subconscious is free to interpret and respond to the world you present it.

That means self-consciousness is the first thing that must be eradicated from your work.

Manufactured emotion

Planned outcomes

Expected responses

Indicated states of being and action

Showing instead of Doing

Attention to yourself and what you are doing vs. attention to the other person.

All of these barriers, and the myriad others that come along with them, are aspects of the conscious mind "performing" a role.

Breask down these barriers in order to allow your true creativity to inform your work.

To me, that is at the core of Stanislavsky's "Magic If".

What is an Actor?

The other day a friend who had no connection to the dramatic arts asked me a simple, but ultimately puzzling question.

"What is an actor?"

Of course, the simple answer is: "Someone engaged in the art and craft of acting."

The complicated answer took some time to sort out.

Once one moves past the basic premise that an actor is someone who acts, there is a confluence of factors that affect a more nuanced definition.

Some of these include the obvious: whether someone makes a living wage acting, whether someone is acknowledged by some level of industry, profession, press and/or audience as an actor, whether someone is able to act in the structures of fim, television, theatre, etc. where actors typically are found.

However, I choose to define an actor in a very different way.

For me, the answer to the question: "are you an actor?" can be measured by a series of pretty basic self-examinations.

 - An actor engages in their art and craft every single day of their existence. Like an athlete or musician, rigor and discipline are a part of the profession. If you don't read a play, study other actors, work on something or explore aspects of the world that inform your creativity and acting each and every day of you existence, you are not an actor.

 - An actor does not define themselves through external results. They only define themselves in terms of their relationship to the work. Agents, managers casting directors, acting teachers, friends, family, lovers and strangers all see the actor through their own skewed vision specific to who they are. If you think you are what others tell you you are, you are not an actor. 

 - An actor understands that rejection and failure are all necessary aspects of a larger life journey, just as successes and accolades are, and treats both as distractions, not definitions. If you believe you have failed, and you believe you have succeeded, you are not an actor.

 - An actor knows that they are the sum total of their craft, and treats their mind, body and spirit accordingly. Mental discipline, physical discipline and spiritual discipline are the foundations of artistry. If you think otherwise, you are not an actor.

 - An actor does not wait for the profession to come to them. An actor engages in their art and craft when and where possible and even where it is impossible, because that is who they are. If you are waiting to act until invited to do so, you are not an an actor.

In conclusion, I would suggest to those who are not actors to stop pretending that you are, and to stop telling people that you are. There are a lot of real actors who have made a true commitment to an honored art form who you are making look bad.

To those of you who have lost their way, for whatever reason, I would suggest you look hard in the mirror and decide. Life's too short to keep pretending. It's not worth it.

To those of you who are living the life of an actor, whether you are in a mansion in Beverly Hills or a barrio in some godforaken village somewhere, I salute you. You are the bravest of the brave, and there are many of us who admire your courage and your passion. You know who you are, and that is enough.

Are you an actor?

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.

 

 

Yellow Fever

 

 

LINKED CHINKS

Two very different but connected events have occured over the past few weeks involving Asian Americans.

One, the national and international fascination with New York Knicks basketball player Jeremy Lin.

The other, a conference held by American theatre professionals to discuss the  under representation of Asian Americans in American theatre.

Regarding the Lin events, one has to recognize that if a great part of the fascination with this player is his Chinese heritage, then it goes without saying that his heritage will have a lot to do with his inevitable unraveling. Why inevitable? Because this is America, where we invent celebrity, and we also insist on tearing apart our own inventions when they disappoint us. Perhaps it is a way of blaming someone or something else for our own shortcomings. It is simply a fact that Lin's ethnicity plays a role in this.

The theatre conference wasn't the stuff of sports radio or tabloids, but rather a studied affair where some of the intelligensia of American theatre pondered the serious question of diversity.

The link between these two events isn't as obvious as you might think.

Of course, the subject of Asian Americans is the common thread, but it is my contention that the true link here is a massive failure of imagination.

IMAGINING RACE

At the theatre conference, there were discussions and declarations by people like David Henry Hwang, Bart Sher and other notable figures. The august group decried the low percentage of roles for Asian actors in theatre. They suggested revolution, evaluations, statistical measurings. They pontificated on accountability, inclusivity, integrity. There were reasons, culprits, biases. There was a problem, out there somewhere.

ESPN this week took measures to fire an employee who posted the headline A CHINK IN THE ARMOR on their mobile website, and suspend an anchor for using the same phrase. In an apology posted on their website, ESPN states: "

"We again apologize, especially to Mr. Lin. His accomplishments are a source of great pride to the Asian-American community, including the Asian-American employees at ESPN. Through self-examination, improved editorial practices and controls, and response to constructive criticism, we will be better in the future."

Again, the venerated sport broadcasting leader found culprits, dealt with them, and then claimed the high road. There was a problem in here, somewhere.

But the high road has a strange quality to it: note that Mr. Lin's "accomplishments are a source of great pride to the Asian-American community, including Asian-American employees at ESPN."

This bizarre statement helps get to the essence of what I mean by a failure of imagination. Are Lin's accomplishments a source of great pride to Asian-American community? Did ESPN speak to every Asian-American community member about this? Exactly where is this Asian-American Community located? Do I need a special pass to get there? I have been an Asian-American, I suppose, for over 50 years. Why haven't I ever been shown this community? Asian-American employees of ESPN? Really? Where? IT department? Are they all really, really proud of Jeremy Lin? Even the ones who like math better than hoops?

American theatre practitioners wonder why there aren't more roles for Asian actors. When you examine the body of plays produced over the past decade in American theatres, one possible explanation appears. American playwrighting, as a genre, is still trapped in a kind of quaint realism that hearkens back to the 1950's. Although they won't admit it, most American playwrights in the so-called mainstream are actually writing television and film scripts. Literal stories that take place in a literal context with a literal interpretation. Sure, perhaps a ghost/voice/image or a wall or two shift here and there, but still. It's almost as if the work of Peter Brook, who every one of us in the profession venerates, never existed. Broadway is the American Theatre Mall of Revivals, where the biggest theatrical question is who will "re-invent" this year's retread? The current mainstream American stage by and large is a clear representation of how our nation thinks about itself: tiny, isolated pockets of marginalized experiences filled with anxiety and self-loathing. Nostalgia mixed with an urge for re-inventing history.

It has been said by some worthy political thinkers and historians that we are now in the "Era of Small Deeds". Once the U.S. Presidency become inhabited by small men with small ideas and small intellects after the fall of Nixon, we entered this era. From Ford to Obama, a parade of men whose singular shared trait is timidity of spirit and puniness of chracter, born from the over-entitled generations that followed the end of WWII. Is it any wonder that as we look around us, we see the Trumps and Murchochs and Gates's of our world and wonder in alarm at their limitless shallowness?

This is not to say that there isn't strong imaginative work going on out there in the arts.  From Mee to Gurgis to the Wooster Group to TEAM, an American theatrical re-imagining is indeed there, but in regional theatres from Seattle to Miami and LA to NY, the rank and file of Amercican mainstream theatres lives in a twilight of existential indentity crisis that is deviod of theatrical energy and imagination.

How can we change the way ethnicity and culture are perceived in America when our leading artists and producers remain trapped in a theatrical aesthetic that uses tired cliches of Race and Identity in its vocabulary? The ridiculous and petty arguments over so-called "Color Blind Casting", "Cultural Authentication" and "Cultural Diversity" belong to the 20th century. As long as we keep pretending that we don't see Race sometimes, but we should see Race other times, and sometimes you see at and you don't, or don't but then should, we remain trapped in a paradox of our own making.

Can we ever imagine an American theatre that actually asks its audience to use its imagination? Can we ever consider the theatrical space as a place where imaginative leaps occur that transcend the semiotics of literalism? Are there potentional structures of thought the theatre can explore that allow our audiences to marvel at a person's humanity first, and their ethnicity and gender last? Will we ever get beyond statistics and benchmarks, program grants and initiatives in order to deal with Racial inequity?

These are the same questions I would ask ESPN, in relation to their field of sports coverage. By fueling the frenzy over Jeremy Lin and his ethnicity, the entire institution bought into a terrible truth about America: no matter what, Race matters. Race sells. Race gets ratings. Then, when one of their employees crosses the line, they immediately deal retribution and issue an apology.

This is the same taunting syndrome that occurs in political campaigns. If U.S. Senate candidate Pete Hoekstra could have, he certainly would have. He was simply checking to see what the temperature out there was. Americans when polled reject negative political advertising, but respond to them enthusiastically when they air. Why wouldn't he try to go there?

Why did that ESPN employee go to far? In America "Chink" is a derogatory term. In the context of the sentence "A Chink in the Armor" it works as a reference to Race and to a break in something uniform. I wonder if you can equate a Chinese person to being a break in something uniform as well, following this semantic logic?

So, what made the statement cross the line is the use of the word "Chink". Because it is offensive? The question is: Who made the line? Who decides when it is crossed? When an entire institution is selling advertising, getting readership and viewers by exploiting the very subject that was the cause of the offense, who is really to blame for crossing the line? Finally, did that employee cross the line, or was he pushed?

THE FORBIDDEN CITY

As a society, a culture, a nation, we are obsessed with Race. We have to be, given our unique identity as a nation that is a nation of ideas, not ethnic tribal unity. Some of use pretend we are post-Racial, some of us use Race to divide and conquer, some are in denial about Race, some use Race to profit if they can.

It is my contention that much as the way we build God/celebrities out of clay figures and them dash them to pieces on the rocks of our own disappointment, we are a nation obsessed with our own love/hate relationship with Race. We use it, deny it, exploit it, refuse it, kill and will be killed over it, come together and heal over it, fall apart and are in shame over it.

We are all complicit in the failure of the American theatre to move beyond Racial cliches, and we are all complicit in calling Jeremy Lin a chink.

Until our imaginative selves can imagine a different context to view a human being, we will always be trapped in out own kind of literalism: what you see is what you get.

As long as there is a tension in regarding authorship and ownership of the subject of Race, our national self-identity will be conflicted. One group's fear fuels another group's manipulations. Another group's denial stokes yet another group's militancy. And so on, and so on, the dialectic continues.

Breaking this cycle requires a collective evolution of imagination. Until then, I am proud to be Asian American, except when I'm told I should be proud to be Asian American, then I resent that you pointed out I am Asian American, and that's that.

Uncle Seagull and the Cherry Sisters 1

A periodic update on my new project to be presented in Edinburgh 2012.

This project will take a year to bring to fruition, so these blog entries are a kind of working journal for new developments and the rehearsal process.

UNCLE SEAGULL AND THE CHERRY SISTERS

a work for theatre / cinema by Andrew Tsao

THE BACKGROUND

The common comedic/tragic theme underlying the four great plays of Anton Chekhov is the problem of loss.

The Seagull: loss of innocence and creativity.

The Three Sisters: loss of identity.

Uncle Vanya: loss of value to society.

The Cherry Orchard: loss of a way of life.

The plays are filled with gentle humanity and a wicked sense of folly, yet their prescient identities are clear.

America in 2012 is undergoing a wrenching process of self-destruction.

Our very purpose for being is lost amid the howling destruction of our society by rampant capital, big-box store politics and the de-evolution of every single aspect of our lives into commodity.

Chekhov wrote his great plays around the turn of the last century.

A complete re-ordering of the world followed his death: World War I, the murder of the Russian Tsar, the end of the British empire, etc.

What reordering of the world is at hand for us now? Surely things cannot continue to go on this way.

We should ask the question: what is this place called America after we can no longer state what it is?

THE STORY

In the SALOON AMERICANA somewhere in the world, these events take place:

The man who has been living in the building for the last twenty years with his mother and daughter is facing eviction because of the real estate crash.

Three sisters who work in the saloon as a musical act with their brother are faced with unemployment when the place is closed.

A fashionable woman from Paris returns with her family to the neighborhood she left behind, only to find that she is penniless and must sell her share in the building to a corporation.

 A writer tries to put on a serious piece of theatre in the saloon in order to remake its image in the neighborhood, but his mother and a young actress become impossible creative partners.

 A troop of soldiers return home from the wars, only to find after a brief respite that they are called up to another war.

 There is a fire.

 There are riots nearby, either political or economic or criminal or all of these.

 Corporate speculators arrive to assess the value of the building and size it up for becoming a shopping mall with parking lot.

There is music from the band at times.

Money becomes valueless.

There is a gunfight.

There is a rehearsal for a play.

There is a great deal of drinking.

Everything imaginable is for sale

There is dancing, perhaps even a fistfight.

At the end of the piece, the saloon is closed, and the characters are sent off to other destinies. The audience is also asked to leave, and the last one out turns off the lights.

THE ELEMENTS

Cinema and television projected and on monitors.

14-20 performers.

Five piece rock band.

Venue that doubles as bar/restaurant/café that can be transformed into SALOON AMERICANA. This piece should not ever go near a place designed as a theatre.