Mother of Invention Acting School - Hollywood/Los Angeles and San Francisco

november falls flat

2009-11-11T00:49:00.000-08:00

For years now I have made it a rule of my blogging that I don't talk smack about local theater productions. If I like them, I write about them, and if I don't, I say nothing. There are a variety of reasons for taking this position, which I won't go into here, except to say that I am primarily an educator, not a critic. But suffice to say, my resolve is wearing thin. And ACT seems to be doing well enough that I am no threat to them or their viability as an institution. So I am breaking my silence about the recent production of November by David Mamet that I saw there.

Full disclosure: the set designer, Erik Flatmo, is a friend of mine, and I went to grad school with Rene Augesen, who plays the speechwriter in the play. I thought Erik's work was gorgeous, even if I missed the spectacular finale because I didn't stay past intermission. Rene acquitted herself well enough, I thought. The two supremely disappointing things about this afternoon at the theater were the leading actor and the play.

Mamet is no favorite of mine, but what happened, Dave? There was a poisonous pleasure to the swagger and betrayal of Glengarry Glen Ross, but that is a thing of the past. Mamet wants to be taken seriously as a writer of comedy, and the result is much ado about nothing at all. A protracted gag about the pardoning of turkeys? (And what kind of electoral timetable, pray tell, has turkeys being pardoned BEFORE the presidential election?) Whaaat? And the rendering of the figure who seems to be some kind of George Bush figure is so clownish and simplistic that I started to feel irritated that I was starting to feel indignation for Bush, and for myself. Am I supposed to believe that the former President was anything like that? Why extreme caricature, when accurate portraiture would have been much more devastating? Not funny, not politically incisive or illuminating, just a chance to allow audiences to pat themselves on the back for their infinite superiority to such a buffoon. In a word, pandering.

The leading actor adds insult to injury. He has timing and plays the role expansively, commandingly, but there is no insight into why someone would need to comport himself in this way. There is nothing that invites us to care about this man in any way at all. His unapologetic boorishness wears thin very quickly, so we assume there must be something more in the offing. Alas, there isn't.

What was even more disturbing was that at the preview matinee I attended, the theater was packed with patrons who were yucking it up at this tedious display. I won't specifically identify the demographic, as I don't want to offend anyone, but here's a hint: it was a matinee. So, it seems, ACT is mounting productions which are artistically bankrupt, and finding an audience for that! The circle is complete! Alack and alas, this is my experience of regional theater in this country generally. Institutions need adults to run them, to see that the mortgage is paid, to make the schedules and budgets and spreadsheets and raise money, but somehow, the juice and the life and the integrity and the passion and the madness and the bloodiness of real theater gets lost in the shuffle. I'm not saying it has to be this way. I think there are regional theaters that avoid this fate. But they are the exception, not the rule. Our artistic life, as a civil society, I fear, is in as ruinous a condition as our economy. Where will it end?

I completely agree with this

2009-11-08T21:44:00.000-08:00

review of A Serious Man, by Christopher Orr in The New Republic:

The film is often quite funny, especially when it casts a knowing eye on the rituals of middle-class Jewish suburbanhood at the very moment when they were about to have the generational rug pulled out from under them. (It is no coincidence that the movie is set at the time when Joel and Ethan were themselves coming of age.) And there are moments of genuine tenderness as well. But humor and empathy alike have trouble flourishing in the grim narrative soil the Coens provide, in which every cosmic joke is a black one. As Ethan explained in an interview, “For us, the fun was inventing new ways to torment Larry.” Over time, though, the fun becomes theirs alone. The game is too apparent and, for all the Coens’ craftsmanship, the accumulation of insults becomes deadening.

Everything I said in my previous post, comedy is very serious business, on Tarantino's Inglorious Basterds, applies to this film as well. The son in A Serious Man was the only one who I consistently felt viscerally connected to. Michael Stuhlbarg is talented, but he ultimately didn't embrace Gopnick's desire to be a serious man, didn't TRULY take it to heart, so there was an element of distance and comment in his performance ("See Gopnick be verklemmt" hahaha). As a result the highs were not as high as they could be (the son's Bar Mitzvah), and the lows were not nearly low enough: the occasions when he is supposed to "break down", like in the lawyer's office, did not kick me in the stomach in the way I wanted and needed to be kicked. And in the end, the film just doesn't add anything to the question of why bad things happen to good people. And the fact that God only knows why is not enough for the brothers Coen to take to the bank.

Better luck next time, fellas.

degree of difficulty

2009-11-03T00:50:00.000-08:00

Sometimes I think the best thing that I can teach anyone about acting is how difficult it is to do it well, not so they will feel discouraged, but so that they will never become complacent. Good actors make it look easy, and it often doesn't seem like it requires any specialized knowledge, just walking and talking and not bumping into the furniture, as Spencer Tracey famously quipped. But the grace that a good actor exhibits in performing a role well is either the product of a freakish natural talent that almost no one has, or the result of hard work and sustained imaginative and intellectual engagement. And even the freakishly talented ones need help in shaping a performance, even if they supply regular flashes of brilliance at particular moments.

In promoting my class, I do have to put messages out there about the power of the approach that I teach, and there is power in it, without a doubt. But that power doesn't remove the difficulty of acting. That is a disappointing discovery for many. But as frustrating as the difficulty may be, it is the challenge of facing that difficulty that prompts us to stretch ourselves beyond our previous capabilities, to achieve what would have previously been out of our reach. And that means that the difficulty is nothing that anyone should want to avoid or be rescued from. "We must do what is difficult because it is difficult", the poet Rilke wrote. I am happy to show people what acting involves, to point them in the right direction, give them tools and procedures to follow, and to help them along the way. But I would never want anyone to think that I am here to make things easy. I'm not that kind of acting teacher.

the balloon boy's parents met where?

2009-10-31T00:01:00.000-07:00

From the Los Angeles Independent

ABC News' Denver affiliate KMGH-TV reported Friday that the Heene parents met as aspiring actors at the Lee Strasberg Institute of Theatre & Film in West Hollywood, and lived for many years in the greater Los Angeles area

.

See what happens when you study Strasberg?

:)

Although they did manage to fool everyone until the kid blurted out that it was all for show...

acting while carrying half a million dollars

2009-10-30T23:23:00.000-07:00

A student emailed me today, and mentioned having watched a documentary about the making of "Jackie Brown". He says that apparently Tarantino always uses real props, and so the bundle of money in the final sequence of that movie, half a million to be exact, was real money.

I am sure those actors all found it very simple to...invest in that scene.

it's not easy being swank

2009-10-30T16:26:00.000-07:00

In the SF Chronicle today, Hillary Swank affirms the importance of hard work:

Q: Many people probably think of you as the actress who won two Academy Awards. But between "Boys Don't Cry" and "Million Dollar Baby" you made nine movies, and between "Million Dollar Baby" and "Amelia" you made five. Can you talk a little about the mistaken idea that you just take a role, act, win an award - easy as that?

A: I'm so glad you said that, because even with "Boys Don't Cry" people said it was an overnight success. I'd been acting since I was 16, and I won that Academy Award when I was 25. Obviously, it's such a great honor and privilege to have won an Academy Award, and to have two is mind-blowing. Something like that happened off of my doing what I love. But, yes, there's a lot of hard work. It's a constant challenge, fighting for roles that you love. As Clint (Eastwood) says, you always aim for the bull's-eye, but you don't always hit it.

the actors in the hallway

2009-10-29T20:18:00.000-07:00

I arrive early at the space where I teach in LA on Wednesday nights. My classroom is off a hallway that has doors to studios where other classes are taught simultaneously with mine. Invariably, there are actors out in the hallway at a quarter to seven, clutching scripts (or sometimes not) and speaking earnestly to each other, apparently "rehearsing". Thet are all in street clothes, so it doesn't appear that they have given any thought to what they will wear in their scenes. Because they are rehearsing in the hallway, they have no physical environment. In a word, they got nothin. And they know it. And they are about to present that fact to their teacher and their peers, in their class. The resulting anxiety is so palpable you can cut it with a knife. I unlock my classroom and make my way in as quickly as possible, tape my poster up on the door, and then close the door, and wait for my students to arrive. I do my best to shed any of the free-floating nervousness that may have found its way into me as a result of passing through this activity.

My class starts, and 90 minutes in, we take a break. I head out into the hall to run down to the corner store and/or make a pitstop, and there are still actors out in the hall, reading off of photocopies and getting ready for the big moment. I am told that these actors are preparing to read in their "cold reading" class (I'll take that canard up another day).

The misguidedness...it burns. The practices I promote in my class for rehearsing couldn't be further from what is on display in the hallway. First off, I strongly encourage students to rent space to rehearse, rather than rehearsing in someone's apartment, let alone in the hallway before class. The act of formally setting aside time and space to give to rehearsing is very significant, apart from the practical advantages of such an arrangement, which are many. By setting aside time in this way, the actor affirms for herself the importance of what she is doing when she rehearses. She says to herself: "What I am doing when rehearsing is important enough to take steps to assure it gets done well."

When you do that, the creative part inside of you has a way of waking up and taking notice. And then, you never know what might happen. With the actors in the hallway, you always know what will happen: not much.

got waznoo?

2009-10-29T13:07:00.000-07:00

Waznoo is a great list of the happening stuff going on in lA, theater, indie music, film galeries, checkitout!

the conservatory question

2009-10-24T21:41:00.000-07:00

A question that I hear from time to time from serious students is: should I go to an MFA program? As I do when any such life decisions are laid at my feet, I evade. It's just not my call. However, having gone to a conservatory myself, I can make some observations.

First of all, I will say that my three years at Yale were invaluable, and I am very glad I went, and very glad I stayed (although don't think there weren't times when I wanted to leave!).

The second thing I'll say is that although Yale was a great experience, there were parts of the Drama School that were stagnant or deeply problematic. And that is bound to be the case at most institutions.

This brings me to my third observation: when you go to such a program, you are buying the whole enchilada, stagnant parts and all. As long as there is only a stagnant bit here or there, that's probably ok. But if something is rotten in a more substantial portion of the institution (as was the case in my undergrad Drama department experience), you may find that it is more than you can stomach.

A large part of the appeal of these programs is that they relieve you of the obligation to support yourself while attending. A lot of this relief, however, may come in the form of loans. (This is not true of the program at the National Theater Conservatory at the Denver Theater Center: every student gets a free rids PLUS a stipend. My former student nt Dawn Scott is there. Go Dawn!) Investing in yourself through education is something I think is mostly a good idea, but incurring massive piles of debt, in this day and age especially, is not something to enter into lightly.

Another appeal of such programs is that they provide a curriculum, which relieves you of the burden of figuring out WHAT you should actually learn. If the curriculum is well-designed, great, but even at the Drama School, I saw the actors spending a lot of time doing stuff that in the end didn't help them much, and there were much more valuable things that they could have been studying. Remember, when you go to one of these programs, you buy the whole enchilada, the good and the bad. I can't stress that enough.

I think an acting student with a little initiative can forego a conservatory and take charge of his or her own training, and really benefit from doing that. He or she can shop for classes and instructors that serve him, and get advice about what disciplines to study besides acting itself that will support them in their efforts. It takes a bit more initiative and resourcefulness, but offers a great deal more autonomy as well. In a conservatory situation, there are authority figures that you will be beholden to for the entire time you are there. Missteps in that kind of a setting can have long term ramifications.

If you can get into a truly first-rate program, you should probably go. Otherwise, I would try to educate yourself as much as possible about the programs you are considering, including visiting and watching classes, if possible. Go into it with your eyes open, and try to be sure that you are entering into something you truly want, rather than fleeing the responsibility to take your destiny into your own hands.

Either path, conservatory or a la carte, can work, and it's going to be a personal decision for everyone. It's just good to bring as much care and clarity to making that decision as you can.

Comedy is very serious business

2009-10-19T13:43:00.000-07:00

This was a dictum I heard from one of my heroes, Richard Gilman, who headed the playwriting and dramaturgy program at the Drama School for many years. He is the author of The Making of Modern Drama, a fantastic study of the the way thea great playwrights of the modern era became who they are.

It came to mind because I finally saw Inglorious Basterds yesterday. I had heard a great deal of good buzz about it, but the reviewers have been less kind. Here is what Kenneth Turan of the LA Times had to say:

The chapters of "Inglourious Basterds" at first focus on these plot strands one by one, but by the time they all come together in a finale that rewrites history with a particularly Tarantino flourish, it is hard to care what happens to anyone in them.

And for my money, Turan nailed it (Manohla Dargis of the New York Times came to a similar conclusion by a different route). Tarantine had all of the stylishness and outrageousness that we have come to expect from him, but he does not understand that if we are to care much, even in a stylish romp, the actors need to care deeply about what they are after. The proof positive that they don't is that as the various characters meet their final destinies in the end, it just doesn't matter to us (SPOILER ALERT). When the Ufa starlet turned spy for the British is strangled in a penultimate sequence, we view it with apathy. When the cinema owner is killed by her noisome suitor moments before destroying the entire Nazi junta, we can only shrug. The immilation of the Nazis in the cinema itself feels like an afterthought. And the carving of the Swastika into the forehead of the oily Landa seems to be without consequence.

I admired the performance of Sacha Waltz, who played Landa. His poisonous charm and graciousness were quite pleasurable to watch. Who doesn't like to be seduced? But because his performance was all about the blood lust of the hunter, and there was nothing of the desperation that he would have felt as an officer of a collapsing Reich and perpetrator of abominations, his switching sides at the end simply doesn't rate. It msy have been a writing problem as well; if Mr. Tarantino had asked for this value from this skilled actor, and built in an opportunity for him to display it, he no doubt would have. But for us to feel real vindication at him being branded a Nazi at the end, we needed to feel his wish to escape his destiny much more keenly.

And the same is true of the other characters. The Jewish cinema owner seems to regard the Nazis with annoyance and disdain, but there is none of the visceral hatred of someone who has witnessed the slaughter of her whole family. So the payoffs aren't there.

It is these kinds of failings that makes the movie a fun but forgettable romp. We can only hope that Mr. Tarantino stumbles into some gravitas on the way to his next movie.

In the class, we strive to get in touch with the visceral need that drives any character that we play to fight their fights. Fighting well is certainly important, but knowing what you are fighting for moreso.

"But you don't rehearse when you get on TeeVee..."

2009-10-03T23:18:00.000-07:00

So the refrain goes. Television production happens on a frantic timetable, and TV casting people need you to be able to deliver immediately. Just show up with your lines learned, looking your best, hit your marks, look your partner in the eye, and tell the truth. Therefore, goes the thinking, much of what goes on in scene study classes, that is, the preparation, the thinking, the WORK, is just not relevant. It's a quaint anachronism that the actor who understands the realities of today's showbiz world can afford to simply disregard.

Think again.

The idea that the way that television is produced makes intensive scene study obsolete is a fatuous one. The fact is, when you show up for your TV show shoot, you bring whatever readiness to go the distance that you have in with you, and nothing more. There is a persistent fantasy that when opportunity knocks, the actor, through a combination of talent and determination, will rise to the challenge and somehow deliver something extraordinary, something memorable, because, after all, they picked him, the TV people did, and they must know, so that must mean he's "got it", whatever "it" is.

Sadly, no.

The ability to move quickly to the essence of what is transpiring in a scene, an essence which is never explicit in the text the actor is given to speak, and to work from that essence, is something that is acquired through lengthy study, hard work, and bumping one's head against one's own misconceptions. It is the result of a change in how people and situations are viewed, and an understanding of the way incidents matter to the characters involved. The scales have fallen from the eyes of such an actor, but this is not easily purchased. Anyone who promises a quick and easy way to achieve great acting is probably going to offer you a set of Ginsu knives if you act now.

Consider the fact that actors such as Paul Newman, Meryl Streep, Sigourney Weaver, Paul Giamatti, Frances McDormand and Patricia Clarkson all attended the Yale School of Drama, a three year conversatory program that trained them to act in plays. All went on to have stellar careers in Hollywood, some of which are still in progress. They are all enormously gifted actors, and probably would have found a way to flourish no matter what path they took, but I am sure that many of them would say that their training at the Drama School was excellent preparation for what came after. It is the experience of having taken acting classes with master teachers, and of working on countless productions, examining roles in depth and taking time to develop them across substantial rehearsal processes, that prepared them to work quickly, intuitive, incisively when the situation called for it.

Can you imagine someone saying that since they were only going to play jazz improvisation on the piano, they were not going to learn to read music or to learn to play any previously composed music? The ability to improvise and work spontaneously comes from an intimate familarity with the medium in question, that comes in turn from lengthy exposure to the patterns that recur in various forms again and again. The only way out is through, a wise person once said. Wanting to be able meet the challenge of working spontaneously on a quick timetable without putting in the time to learn to work well under less strained circumstances is wanting a way out without going through. And except for those very few, freakishly talented exceptions, that isn't going to happen. All the other people showing up for the call you are going to have been to the same Acting for the Camera classes you have. The question is, what else have you got?

what a happy actor sounds like

2009-06-29T11:24:00.000-07:00

"Everyone works every class": and what's wrong with that

2009-06-07T21:26:00.001-07:00

This is a promise which many acting teachers make. But let's consider the implications of it for a moment.

This from a prominent LA acting teacher's site:

Because class size is restricted to 12-14 actors, each actor works in every class.

Let's say that the classes being described meet for three hours a week. Assuming two person scenes, that is 6-7 scenes that have to be presented in class every week. Let's suppose 6. Let's also assume that there is no time in class spent on any other issues, and that each pair uses no time to get their scene set up or change into their rehearsal clothes, and that there is no break for the whole three hours. That these assumptions would all hold seems a bit improbable, but let's assume them to be the case for now. Then each pair gets 30 minutes. Assuming it takes at least five minutes to set up and present (again, probably optimistic), then that leaves twenty-give minutes of work from the teacher for each scene. Given that we are talking about a two person scene, that means each actor gets about twelve and a half minutes worth of attention from the teacher when they get up.

This, to my mind, is woefully inadequate. And anyone who thinks that it is adequate is seriously kidding themselves about what it takes to change habits. Because that is what we are talking about when we are getting people to develop as actors. And not just habits, but habits which are often unconsciously held: we don't even know that we have the habit in question. The habit can be a way of looking at the scene, or a character, or acting itself, or a way of moving, speaking, or breathing, or of dealing with the physical life of a scene. Habits are notoriously difficult to change. Just ask anyone you know who has tried to quit smoking. Then think of changing a habit that you haven't even noticed that you have. It probably takes some work to even get the actor to recognize something she is doing reflexively is, in fact, a habit.

In acting class at the Drama School at Yale, we saw maybe two scenes in a three hour class. That's because these teachers were not only concerned with our work in the scene, but also with our process in arriving at that work, and our way of thinking about the work. All of this takes time to tease out. There is just no way that you are going to bring anyone to a fundamentally new understanding of anything in twelve and a half minutes.

And it didn't bother me that we didn't get up more, because it was eye=opening to watch the teachers work the the other students. Now, I can understand that in a class in which the teacher is offering nothing particularly revelatory, it would be a drag to have to watch that teacher coach a lot of other people, and only occasionally get up to work. But that was not the case in my classes at the Drama School: Earl Gister and Evan Yionoulis are profoundly gifted teachers who regularly provided insights which were nothing short of electrifying. Their passion for the plays we worked on and for the art of acting itself was a constant source of inspiration. And in watching them work with other students, we gained perspective about the technique we were learning which we could not have gotten when we were up doing a scene, as invaluable as that was.

The time to delve deeply into a scene and into an actor's way of approaching the scene is, to my mind, indispensable. This is the only way that the clenched fingers of habit can be peeled back, and real growth can occur. Twelve and a half minutes is barely enough time for a teacher to initiate a dialogue with the student about the scene and the character. Getting to the root of anything takes a lot more than that.

So why do teachers make this everyone-works-every-class promise? Because they perceive that that is what the students want, that is what gets the proverbial asses in the seats. And maybe many students want that, or think they do. And why do they want it? Well, if I had to guess, I would say that it has to do with impatience and the culture of instant gratification. Rather than wait for a longer, more satisfying session with the instructor, the student wants to get up and get a little feedback each week, not too much, just a little bit, nothing that would be too challenging to address. The truth is that the students, in my classes, as in many others, are expected to meet outside class to rehearse their scene. So it's not that they are not getting to WORK if they don't get up in class each week. It's that they are not getting the opportunity to be in front of the rest of the class and the instructor, in the spotlight, as it were. It may be harsh to say this, but I think it's the truth. It is the students who recognize the value of sustained investment in their own rehearsal process over time, with periodic and thorough review from the instructor, that really grow. Anyone looking for a twelve-and-a-half-minute-a-week fix is basically looking for a fairy godmother to wave her magic wand. And fairy godmothers are not as frequently sighted in this day and age as they once were.

Pandora: the acting exercise

2009-05-23T14:15:00.000-07:00

The website pandora.com has been around for a while, so a lot of people are already familiar with it. For those that aren't, a quick primer: Pandora lets you create "radio stations" by using artists or songs you like as "seeds". Based on your "seed" choices, Pandora makes use of something called the Music Genome Project, a giant music classification archive, to select other songs it believes will appeal to you. It plays the songs it selects, and for each song, you have the opportunity to give it a thumbs up or a thumbs down. Pandora then uses your input to refine its sense of what you like and don't like, and to serve up music it thinks you will like. I have discovered some great music through listening to it, and look forward to finding even more.

A novel concept, but it definitely has some flaws. One is that when you identify a song that you like, Pandora will put it on "heavy rotation", playing it quite often, to the point where you may quickly get sick of the song in question. Pandora does give you the option to tell it not to play a song for a month. However, I found I had to use this option really often, more often than I would have liked. Repetitiveness is definitely the biggest setback to Pandora.

But like most things in life, Pandora is what you make it. If you are vigilant about giving it feedback about what you like and don't like, and consign songs you like but hear too much to the Don't Play for a Month Shelf, Pandora will probably work out pretty well. It doesn't work so well for you if you go on auto-pilot. If you just leave it to its own devices, and don't give it continuous feedback, you will find yourself annoyed by its tendency to replay songs it thinks you MIGHT like endlessly, and will probably end up shutting it off in frustration.

But why would anyone go on auto-pilot, when they have the option to determine the nature of what gets played? If you have used Pandora, you probably can answer this question, but if you haven't, you might not be able to right off. Then answer is that having to constantly take actions based on our responses to what we are receiving from our environment can be very, very taxing. And there are consequences to our choices: Pandora might misunderstand WHY I dislike a given song, and this might skew the whole aesthetic. And if I say no to a given song, then I am banishing it FOREVER. But what if I'm wrong, what if it really is a good song and I just not hearing it yet? DECISIONS! ONOOOOOOOZZZZZZZ! Heavy is the head that wears the crown, and all that.

What does this have to do with acting? To act well, you have to be in touch with your vulnerability to the fictional people you are involved with, i.e. your scene partners. You must discover and embody a need that you can pursue from these partners AT EACH MOMENT of your life in the scene. There is no local color, no exposition, no irrelevant chatter. If you are in a situation where you have an URGENT NEED (and you should conceive of EVERY scene you do in this way, no matter how quotidian or everyday it may seem on the surface" Anton Chekohv wrote in his journal that "Men dine, just dine, and in that moment their destinies are decided and their lives destroyed."), then EVERYTHING that happens, at each moment, is either giving you a piece of what you need or depriving you of what you need. There is no grey area, no dead air. However, it is very often not obvious to us when we act, since we are entering into someone else's world, whether what we are receiving is giving us what we need or not. Many of us, when we aren't sure, choose to merely coast until we come to a part of the scene where we are sure, and then we start to pursue what we need in earnest. This will mean we only fulfill the role in a piecemeal way, and our own experience in the scene or the role will be much less than it could be.

Which brings me back to Pandora. To do the Pandora acting exercise, set aside ten minutes a day to listen to Pandora. As you listen, make a decision about EACH SONG you hear: do you give it a thumbs up or a thumbs down or a Don't Play This Song For a Month? Think Simon Cowell: the song either makes the cut or it doesn't. No half-measures. If you have never used Pandora before, you may have a very strong reaction to the initial songs you hear, but eventually you will start to hear songs that you have less of a strong feeling about, songs that will require you to listen more closely to your own internal aesthetic compass. And you will have to commit. You will have to come down on one side or the other. You will have to be attentive and fully alive: alive to the music, to what is coming at your from your world, and alive to your own reaction to it. It's what a Zen teacher once called "brutally simple." Ready to listen?

(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 Hollywood/Los Angeles and San Francisco for serious, motivated students.)

Prison Guards Union Squashes Inmates' Musical

2009-05-17T15:28:00.000-07:00

(This post is from the blog of the Mother of Invention Acting School in Hollywood/Los Angeles and San Francisco (www.utteracting.com): an acting class in Hollywood/Los Angeles and San Francisco for serious, motivated students.)

This is a cryin' shame:

A troupe of 18 convicted murderers, robbers and other felons at Woodbourne Correctional Facility had been scheduled to perform an original play Wednesday at Eastern Correctional Facility in Ellenville.

But the state Department of Correctional Services has canceled the show because union workers threatened to picket.

This was a project that a very noble group had launched:

In January 2008, inmates began writing and rehearsing their own Broadway-style show about the difficulty of living behind bars and keeping a family. The play, "Starting Over," was funded and supervised by Rehabilitation Through the Arts, a nonprofit group that seeks to reduce recidivism through arts enrichment programs. The group declined comment on the cancellation, but it forged ahead with a production of Shakespeare's "Macbeth" last week at Sing Sing.

And why? The Prison Guards Union just didn't see the point:

Kevin Walker, regional vice president for the New York State Correctional Officers & Police Benevolent Association, said prison farms, annexes and print shops have been useful because they teach skills that can be applied toward a job on the outside. The union saw no value in theater work.

"How many of these medium-security convicts do you think will go to Broadway and get a job?" Walker said. "We believe it's a blatant waste of manpower and funding."

Un-effin-believable. This is a profoundly sad commentary on the pervasive, radical ignorance in this country about the way in which artistic practice enriches the lives of those who participate in it. These are men who have lost everything, and most carry horrendous burdens of guilt and shame with them, attempting to collaborate constructively to EXPRESS THEMSELVES!!! Oh THE HORROR!!! My take: the Prison Guards were jealous that prsioners were taking such initiative to transform their lot and enrich their lives. Cut a little too close to home for these philistines.

Please, pass this on!!!

And here are some people you can contact to complain about it:

Kevin Walker (mentioned above) kwalker@nyscopba.org

New York State Department of Correctional Servies http://www.docs.state.ny.us/DOCSwebcontactform.asp

Governor PatersonL

http://161.11.121.121/govemail

Thanks for reading!

some questions

2009-05-12T00:40:00.000-07:00

I was on a website called answerbag.com today and I came across some thought-provoking questions I wanted to share with all of my friends on teh Internets. If you want to know the answer, you can visit answerbag.com yourself, and search for the answer. You will be enlightened!

Did a security guard ever annoy you?
What is that song that come out in French movie girl riding on bicycle and story is she falls in love with book writer... love triangle..... I have been trying to figure this out for so many days...
I have started a casual thing with this guy,he has invited me to his house later and asked me to bring a porn movie with me,what should i read into this?is he getting more comfortable with me?
Which animal is the meanest on earth?
Your 1.6 ghz computer acts like a 386... what do you do?
What is the recipe for the butter fried lobster sold in Puerto Neuvo, Baja California, Mexico?
What would you do if your older daughter was negative in all she talked about or did and every time she came to visit she would curse her son out in front of you being the grandmother of the child and then she talked bad about you and the other siblings?
Do you like to ride in a convertable?
How did human evolutions came from apes if most apes live no more than 75 years? don't a ape would have to live thousands or ten thousands of years for this to happen?
Have you ever seen a blue rabbit?
Does anybody find the burger king guy creepy and what would you do if you saw him peeking in your window
What is that rap song that came out in the 90's, it has a guy and a girl singing thats like, na na na na na na na na na something something "well always be together" na na nana na na na na na...Ive been trying to figure this out for days!
What is good way to get knowledge?
Would you rather receive an official letter or an official e-mail?
Are the new Giant Cheetos commercials meant to be creepy as hell?
Will i lose weight if i jump everyday. Will my breast become bigger or not?
When i was baptized in 2004 it was like having new life after a rain.Written by myself.Decribe to me what the rain means logicaly or spirituly
I'm in the malI, I can't make to the bathroom. What do I do? (13
Hi, my wife tried to use a credit card online by inserting it into the floppy port of our pc. I have tried to fish it out but looks like it will have to come apart to retrieve the card. Is that a easy task to do? Thanks.
My boyfriend is 29, and he revealed to me when he was 20 a man sucked his penis..... do you think he may still have those tendecies
Were you disappointed when your doggie didn't want to eat or didn't enjoy the box of Scooby Doo snacks; you purchased for them?
Does a cold beverage taste better to you in a glass or in a plastic cup or does it really matter?
What do you do when your friend ditches you? Her excuse being 'your trying to steal my boyfriend', which is completely untrue and stupid as im not like that at all.
If the Civil War were to happen today, would you fight for the west?
How much would you guess you pan of Lasagna weighs when you are all done with preparing it? (I swear mine has got to be 5 lbs. or better)
How many times have you actually followed your gut instinct and what you felt was going to happen didn't because you felt it and did something different?

Saving Uta Hagen

2009-05-10T00:26:00.000-07:00

I have been snooping around on the BackStage.com Acting Methods and Approaches Message Board and a couple of times I have seen posters speak of Uta Hagen and Lee Strasberg as essentially equivalent in terms of the approach to acting that they espouse. This is a misperception, and it seems to spring from two sources: first, a belief that what Hagen calls "transference" (earlier, "substitution") is somehow roughly equivalent to "affective memory", the technique that defined Lee Strasberg, and second, the fact that Uta Hagen does discuss and even recommend affective memory in her books, which does seem to align her with Strasberg. In that sense, the confusion is not entirely without warrant. I propose to shed some light on both of these, and demonstrate that although Uta Hagen has a pragmatic openness to the possible uses of affective memory, she does not regard it as the alpha and the omega of compelling acting, as Strasberg does.

Before we proceed, let's define some terms. Here is what the Cambridge History of the American Theater has to say about Strasberg and the use of affective memory:

And in a technique called affective memory, … Strasberg believed he had found a reliable aid for achieving [true emotion]. … What Strasberg prized about the technique was that the actor would be using true emotion – his own reawakened real-life feelings – to color and deepen his performance. . . Maintaining that the technique was the surest way of achieving the style of psychological realism the Group was searching for, Strasberg placed it as the foundation of his work

The idea is that the actor, while rehearsing and performing (this is key, as we'll see later), is making use of emotionally charged episodes from her own life in order to summon the feeling appropriate to the scene. Over the years, this has been controversial, to put it mildly. Most famously, Stella Adler argued that Strasberg had been mistaken in giving primacy to this practice. From the Wikipedia entry on Stella Adler:

Adler's biggest issue with Strasberg concerned whether an actor should use the technique of "affective memory" (recalling a personal event or sensory experience for more expressive and truthful behavior), or living in the moment, using your partner to create a believable result. It's been said that after Strasberg died, Adler asked for a moment of silence in her class for the famous actor. Afterwards, she allegedly claimed that it will take a hundred years to repair what Strasberg did to acting.

To some extent, the use of affective (or emotional) memory has become a kind of line in the sand in the teaching of acting in this country: you either believe in it or you don't, and most of the time, never the twain shall meet. For a good example of this, check out the writings of David Mamet and the practical aesthetics crowd: they take the reviling of affective memory to heretofore unknown heights.

Interestingly, Uta Hagen is someone who appears to walk the line between the two camps, although, I will ultimately maintain, her heart belongs clearly in one of them. In both her books, Respect for Acting and A Challenge for the Actor, she describes the practice of affective memory. She is very careful, though, to qualify and limit its use, characterizing it as a means for meeting certain kinds of challenges posed by a role, but not as an end in itself. Here she is, close to the end of her discussion of emotional memory in A Challenge for the Actor:

You will need to supply personal psychological realities only when direct contact with the events, the objects, and your partner fails to stimulate you, when the imagination alone fails to support your specific actions during the moment-to-moment give and take that will prove you are alive on stage.

For Hagen, affective memory is a kind of stopgap when the things which are supposed to galvanize an actor in a scene (circumstance, relationship, need, pushback from scene partners) are, for whatever reason, not doing the trick. Then, the actor might use a dash of affective memory in order to stir the pot, but:

The sole purpose of developing a limber psychological instrument, and the correct technique of spontaneous emotional recall, is to discover and execute the consequent actions (what we do about what we feel) and to give substance to the actions which are the true communicators of our character.

So Uta sees some possible place for the use of affective memory, but her priority is doing, which places her comfortably in the camp of Adler, Meisner, and those who emphasize being in the moment over reliving the past.

So much for affective memory. However, I believe that the source of the confusion about where to place Uta Hagen relative to Strasberg comes not from her flirtation with emotional memory, but from her concept of transference, which she previously called substitution. In a nutshell, transference is a way to create investment in the persons, places, and things from the fictional world of the text by making reference to people, places and things from our own experience. If I were playing Blanche DuBois, then I might use my own sister Elizabeth as a transference for Stella. My relationship with Elizabeth becomes an experiential frame of reference for my relationship with Stella (Hagen speaks of the transference as evoking the "essence" of the relationship). Ideally, I would come to value "Stella" in a way approximated by the way I value my sister Elizabeth. So transference is a way of creating correlations between people, places and things in the world of the play and similar persons, places and things from my own experience. The goal of transference is not to put me in an emotional state, but to help me orient myself towards whoever or whatever I am interacting with appropriately and compellingly.
Uta Hagen is very clear that transferences are something that is used to prepare to do a scene:

[A transference] should not lead you to private feelings and reveries when you are on stage. A transference is incomplete until the original source has become synonymous with the material in the play...[When practicing transference] I have not hung onto an image of [the person from my own experience] or dangles their images before my eyes. That would cloud my awareness of the partner and my influence on him.

While in the scene, Uta Hagen wants the actor present to his partner, not recycling feelings from your personal history. This much is clear.

The confusion about an identity or strong affinity between Hagen's views and Strasberg's arises, I think, because Hagen does ask the actor to make use of his personal experience through transference, but she asks him to do so, by and large, as a way of preparing to act, not as a technique for acting itself. But because she does point to the sensible use of the personal experience of the actor (and why not?), she is often misunderstood as an advocate of emotional memory as THE way to act as a scene. And that, she most emphatically is not.

In my own classes, I assign readings from Hagen on transference, inner monologue, sense memory (frequently confused with affective memory but quite distinct from it), and physical life. She writes on these things inspiringly and clearly, and has great things to say on these subjects. I don't make use of emotional memory, as I don't see it as a primary means of getting the job done. I don't dispute that it can have a limited kind of usefulness in preparing a performance, for example, for a scene that has to start at a particularly strong emotional pitch. But a scene is like a roller coaster ride, and emotional memory is useful only for getting to a particular altitude. In the scene, you have to get to that altitude with the right momentum and speed, and headed in the right direction. If you need to start from a great height, emotional memory might help you reach that starting point, but the real work is learning to take the ride, and enjoy it.

I do recognize, though, that Lee Strasberg trained a number of great actors. There is a phrase that Hagen uses that gestures at another potential use of emotional memory: she speaks of becoming "psychologically limber." It reminds me of a remark of Kafka's: "A book should be an axe to break up the frozen sea within." Emotional memory can be a technique to break up the emotional sod, so to speak, to tune one's emotional instrumeent, to use a pretentious turn of phrase. People do have blockages and inhibitions, and emotional memory can be a way of overcoming emotional constipation, quite apart from the use it might have in a scene. To use it successfully in this way, as emotional uncoiling, it would take a teacher of extraordinary sensitivity and integrity, as this type of work would likely take people to some very fragile places. I have heard tell of teachers who teach this technique and are simultaneously abusive, and I hope one day their bad karma catches up with them. And pedagogically, I believe there is as much to master in the much more immediately useful skills of coming to grips with a character's circumstances and entering into them, playing off the partner and embodying a need in a scene. Further, there is nothing to say that engaging in this much more grounded type of work, with much clearer lines between the art and the personal life, cannot stretch the actor in ways that will help her to achieve the psychological limberness Uta Hagen recommends. I have seen it happen, and it has been, and continues to be, supremely satisfying.

It might have seemed like Uta Hagen needed to come back to the five and dime, but in the truth, she never left.

(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 Hollywood/Los Angeles and San Francisco for serious, motivated students.)

shameless self promotion

2009-05-06T02:26:00.000-07:00

Hi y'all,

THis is a press release I just put out and I wanted to share.

Acting Teacher's Students Blazing Creative Trails
Andrew Utter, founder of the Mother of Invention Acting School in Los Angeles and San Francisco, finds that his students are seeking out and finding fresh and exciting opportunities to practice their art.

Mother of Invention Acting School
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

PRLog (Press Release) – May 06, 2009 – Andrew Utter, founder of the Mother of Invention Acting School in Los Angeles and San Francisco, started his acting school five years ago, and is constantly amazed at the variety and richness of the work that his students are doing. From booking a small speaking part in Gus van Sant's 'Milk' to creating a touring one-woman show by a Palestinian-American entitled 'I Heart Hamas and Other Things I Am Afraid to Tell You', Utter' finds that his students carry on the idealism, the passion and the love of the art of acting that he espouses in his classes.

"One of the best things about this gig, aside from the classroom experience, and seeing people make strides in their skill as an actor, is hearing back from students about the things they are up to. I'll get a Facebook message that someone just got a role in an independent film, or I'll hear that someone got into a graduate program they applied for, and I will feel like a proud papa for a whole week!" Utter muses.

Utter's student Dawn Scott was admitted to the National Theater Conservatory in Colorado, which included a full scholarship and a stipend for three years and the opportunity to study trapeze as part of the training! Another student, Tim Rossi, just got a role in an independent film shooting this June in San Francisco called 'Sedona's Rule', about a man who agrees to let his girlfirend cheat on him, and is subsequently drawn into dangerous sexual intrigue. Miklos Philips, a filmmaker who studied with Utter, has made films which have been shown in several festivals and on NBC's Universal's Digital Television Channel 4.4 Independent Producer Showcase. Holly Shaw, an actor and choreographer, recently produced an evening of wolrd dance at Fort Mason's Cowell Theater, entitled 'Eyes of Eve', which included pieces that Shaw choreographed and appeared in, but also included many other pieces that allowed Bay Area dancers and choreographers to show their work.. Jeremy Mascia has becone a regular with the offbeat and surprising PianoFIght Productions, a theater/improv/comedy troupe operating in San Francisco and Los Angeles.

"I am very lucky to attract students who want to learn to do great work as actors and have a creative vision all their own. A lot of actors don't feel a lot of ownership of their own creative destinies, but you can't say that about my students. They have the pluck and determination to search out or create the contexts that will allow them to be the creative artists that they want to be" says Utter.

Utter started teaching in San Francisco five years ago, and began offering classes in Los Angeles in October. He founded the School to create a forum to pass on the tremendous acting training he received at the Yale Schoold Drama from master teachers like Earle Gister and Evan Yionoulis. He lives in San Francisco but travels weekly to Los Angeles to teach there. "I love teaching in both cities. They have very different things going for them, but there are passionate, creative people in both. I plan to keep a foot in both cities in the future."

The courses Utter teaches at Mother of Invention run in ten week cycles. The next cycles begin the week of June 30. More information is available at the School's website, http://www.utteracting.com/
# # #

About Mother of Invention Acting School. The Mother of Invention Acting School was founded in 2004 by director Andrew Utter, MFA, Yale School of Drama. Utter founded the School to create a forum to transmit the approach to acting that he encountered from master teachers like Evan Yionoulis and Earle Gister at Yale to serious, motivated students.

the ego of the acting teacher

2009-05-04T00:26:00.000-07:00

The tough acting teacher is such a familiar type as to be a cliche. It's a ruthless business, so the reasoning goes, so teachers need to be ruthless with their students to prepare them for the brutal, cutthroat world that they will face in showbiz. Students often embrace this ethos. How many times have I had students say "I want you to be harsh with me", believing that this harshness will make it more likely that they will succeed the next time. Suffering through the harshness becomes a badge of pride: "my training must have been good, it was harsh."

I encounter this attitude in many students. There is no question that acting is challenging, and that teachers need to be challenging. Certainly no one who comes to my class walks away feeling unchallenged. Compelling acting is difficult to do, no matter how you slice it. I make no bones about this to my students, and I am always ready to invite them to fulfill the aspect of the scene or role that they may not yet have attended to. But it is also true that acting is a confidence game: being able to do it entails believing that you can do it, and harshness or abuse from a revered teacher is a great way to destroy that confidence forever.

I have heard stories of acting teachers saying things to students, in front of a whole acting class, such as "You know, you wouldn't be having this problem if you weren't sleeping with a truck driver." There is so much wrong with this, I don't know where to begin: betraying a confidence, inappropriate use of knowledge about someone's personal life in a public setting, shaming about sexuality and pleasure, and humiliation, all rolled up into one ugly bundle. I shudder to think about what that student suffered. There is no excuse for behavior like this from teachers who have been entrusted with the creative aspirations and dreams of others. To my mind, it has more than a little in common with child abuse.

The truth is people like to be challenged, and they like the challenge of pleasing a demanding teacher. There is simply no need for this type of abusive treatment. That is not to say that people never need to be confronted about their foibles and evasions, but context and tone mean everything in that type of intervention.

And then there are the acting teachers who publicly harangue their students for a one-time lateness. It's true that an acting class needs structure, and that that structure is part of what creates the feeling of safety for the participants. But there is simply no way that this kind of no-wiggle-room approach can truly foster an environment conducive to creativity. I have evolved my own set of rules for dealing with attendance and promptness, and I find that they are very adequate. There is no need to shame or humiliate anyone. in fact, the most important thing I can do to promote observance of the class structure is to start on time and have something really interesting to say, so that students will be motivated to be present for as much of class as possible.

There are a lot of people who gravitate to acting because they think it looks easy, and it can be a rude awakening for them when they come to learn how much work and dedication is involved. Sometimes I have to be the agent of that awakening for someone, but even then, I endeavor to keep it respectful: for all I know, they will be ready to dedicate in the fullness of time, but they simply aren't right now. And that's ok. Better that we both recognize where they are right now and move on.

Theater and film are collaborative art forms. As teachers, we have an obligation to prepare our students to work collaboratively by modelling the practice of standing for high quality in the work of the actors that we work with while adhering to a basic principle of respect for all people. There is simply no acceptable alternative.

Big Art flop

2009-05-02T21:49:00.000-07:00

Last weekend I went to see the Big Art Group's show at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. I have good associations with Yerba Buena: it was there that Cassie Powell introduced me to Miranda July. She took me to see her live show there, and it had a big impact on me, influencing the way that I conducted the Friends and Family Night presentations at the end of the ten week cycles of my classes.

Big Art Group, though, was another story. I had heard some good things, and the pictures looked intriguing. When I sat down in the theater, though, I began to feel uneasy. My frame of reference for multimedia work is the incomparable Wooster Group, and one of the many things that was so dazzling about them was the way in which the multimedia equipment that decked the stage was always arranged and rearranged with an eye toward the overall visual composition of the landscape: human figures, scenic elements, video monitors, and mic stands conspired to form an eternally arresting composition, and this was even true upon entering the theater, in the time before the performance started.

The stage for Big Art Group was crowded with multimedia equipment that seemed to be arranged in no particular way relative to the rest of the space. There was nothing alluring or artful about the array of screens and mics and other stuff that lay in waiting for the performance to begin.

It turned out that this was shades of things to come. The performance was big and loud. The acting was not good. The subject matter, insofar as I could even grasp it at all, was glib and devoid of interest. The director seemed conflicted about whether we should watch the actors in the center of the stage or their projected faces on the giant screens above, and this conflict was not even remotely aesthetically interesting, just confused. I lasted about twenty-five minutes.

As much as I love California, I often wonder what new talents are exploding onto the scene back in NYC. This is one I won't need to wonder about anymore.

(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.)

Tim Rossi lands role in indie film Sedona's Rule

2009-04-30T20:08:00.000-07:00

I just heard from Mother of Invention alum Tim Rossi that he will be appearing in the indie film Sedon'a Rule, shooting this June in San Francisco. The film is a thriller with sexual intrigue. More information here at

http://www.sedonasrule.com/

Congratulations Tim! Looking forward to seeing it!

A

(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.)

the Beatles' apprenticeship

2009-04-26T22:23:00.000-07:00

Fareed Zakaria (CNN) had Malcolm Gladwell on today. Gladwell, in case you don't know, is the author of Blink, Outliers, and The Tipping Point. He was on to talk about his newest book, Outliers. This is a study of what makes for success in a variety of disciplines. He tells an interesting anecdote about the Beatles: in 1959, they went to Hamburg, Germany for two years to play in a strip club for eight hours a day, seven days a week. Gladwell maintains that this period of intensive practice was, in fact, an apprenticeship that allowed them to develop virtuousic skill, mastery of different genres and boundless experience collaborating with each other. He says that this is what gave them their edge.

He goes on to argue that talent is not some inborn, native ability, but simply the desire to practice, to make enormous sacrifices and compromises to be able to do what one loves. He says that it was the Beatles' genius to see the Hamburg gig as an opportunity, and not as an invitation to indentured servitude.

Few people recognize this as the truth about acting. What we associate with actors is the glamour and the slick presentation of the movies, but most actors never see even a moment of fame, and the ones that do find that it isn't what it's cracked up to be. What doesn't get seen is the endless hours of blood, sweat and tears that go into doing anything well. My class gives people a taste of that: an enormous amount is asked of the students in the way of time and preparation. I do my best to communicate the happiness of this challenge, this burden. "We must do what is difficult because it is difficult", wrote Rainer Maria Rilke. It is a message that not everyone is ready to hear, much less to embrace. But it's the ones that can lap up that vinegar like it's honey and ask for more that will come to know the true rewards of a creative life.

The Gladwell piece:

http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/us/2009/04/26/gps.fareed.intv.malcolm.gladwell.cnn

we don't know what we know

2009-04-16T12:53:00.000-07:00

I had resolved to make it to the gym on Tuesday, as part of my current campaign to not have to buy larger jeans. Then, a coaching session materialized. For the coaching session, I was going to the actor's residence, which was in the part of the Mission closer to Potrero Hill. Now, I usually go to the gym at the 24 Hour Fitness near Church and Market. It occured to me that I could instead go to the 24 Hour Fitness at Potrero Center, which would be on the way home from the coaching session, whereas getting to Church and Market from the studen't place would be a bit of a production. But i found myself unsatisfied with that solution: I didn't want to go to the Potrero Center 24 Hour Fitness, although it wasn't immediately obvious to me why. At first, it seemed like perhaps I just want to go to my usual place, for the familiarity of it. Also there is a pool at the 24 at Potrero, which means the locker room smells like chlorine, and in general the facility is not as nice. But were these reasons for an out of the way effort to get to Church and Market?
.
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.)

you never know

2009-04-12T23:48:00.000-07:00

According to this article, 10 women across America were asked about how they met their current boyfriends.

Here's what one of them said:

“He sat next to me in my acting class. Our instructor paired us up for a scene, so we exchanged numbers to rehearse. He kept sending me flirty texts and asked me out that weekend. Our first date was a picnic dinner in Griffith Park and a visit to the Griffith Observatory. We had an amazing view of downtown LA and the Hollywood sign. We kissed under the stars and were surrounded by city lights. It was so romantic and felt like it was straight out of a movie.” --Adrienne Tilden

And as a dating pool, you can't do better than my students. If I do say so myself.

(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.)

the viewpoints mystique

2009-03-29T13:19:00.001-07:00

I am the veteran of a thousand viewpoints wars. I first encountered Anne Bogart's six or seven or eight or nine viewpoints (they kept changing the number) of "postmodernism", as they were originally called, in the summer of 1990. I was employed as a Faculty Associate (or "FacAss", as we were known, basically teaching assistants plus) at Northwestern University's National High School Institute, aka the "Cherub" program. Two of the people I was assisting, one for a voice and movement class, and one on a production of Euripides' The Bacchae, were MFA students at the Trinity Rep conservatory, where Anne Bogart, the premier evangelist of the viewpoints was at the helm. My initial encounter with viewpoints was thrilling: using viewpoints, the instructors seemed to be able to effortlessly concoct a quirky, surprising theatrical landscape with moving parts that seemed connected to each other in some mysterious way. It was a little like watching a Rube Goldberg machine being simultaneously designed and tested, with human bodies and voices triggering each other in an endless series of jerks, plops, ritardandoes, bounces, beelines and stop-drop-and-rolls. To use a slightly more contemporary analogy, it was like a large-scale, human-body version of the culmination of the boardgame from the 1970's, Mousetrap.

As the summer wore on, though, something became clear: one "viewpoints" exploration looked a lot like the next one , and the previous one as well. The person moderating the exercise could introduce various stipulations, but sooner or later, a monotony crept in. The reason for this, I would maintain, was the underlying arbitrariness of the unfoldings. A relentless series of surprises of more or less the same kind, is still a relentless series. And a relentless series of anything grows wearing at some point. A college friend of mine who entered the Columbia Graduate acting program under Bogart, but later dropped out in disgust, dubbed the viewpoints "aerobics for dramaturgs." And I think that about hits the nail on the head.

A year later, I was interning in New York at Mabou Mines, a downtown theater collective that dates back to the 1960's. The original members included Lee Breuer, Phillip Glass, JoAnne Akalaitis, Ruth Maleczech and David Warrilow, all of them titans in the history of downtown New York theater. It was the early nineties at this point, and many of the original members were gone, and the collective was scrambling for a new vision or a way forward. In collaboration with the Public Theater, which at that time JoAnnne Akalaitis was running, Mabou Mines produced Bertolt Brecht's enigmatic, early play In the Jungle of Cities, and hired Anne Bogart to direct it. Anne was a very hot item right about then, her recent departure from Trinity Rep notwithstanding, and there was a good deal of excitement about the potential synergy of Anne Bogart, Mabou Mines and Brecht. The excitement, sadly, did not bear fruit.

The production was widely panned, although it did have its defenders, and it had some fine performances as well. It had Ruth Maleczech, a titanic force of nature and a phenomenal actor, but she was in a relatively small role. It had Fred Neumann, a man whom none other than Samuel Beckett had entrusted some of his prose pieces for adaptation to the stage, also a tremendous actor. And it had a wonderful, recent graduate of the NYU conservatory named Fanny Green, who acquitted herself splendidly. But on the whole, the productions failed, and there was a simple reason for that sad fact.

Frank Rich nailed the reason for this in his New York Times review of the production;

Since most of the large supporting cast is as smart-alecky in voice and gesture as Mr. Arrambide [the lead actor], the jungle of Ms. Bogart's Chicago is less a savage industrial wasteland out of Upton Sinclair than a benign absurdist cartoon, a rather sexless retread of R. Crumb.

Ms. Bogart does not dream big. She is so cautious that she minimizes the seedy Chinatown fantasized by Brecht, perhaps out of fear that a contemporary audience might be offended by the author's tongue-in-cheek use of old Charlie Chan ethnic stereotypes. (Even Shlink's Malayan identity is all but obliterated.) As bold esthetic sensuousness is missing from this "Jungle," so is most of Brecht's raw pain at discovering man's "infinite isolation." Far more care is devoted to the busy deployment of two moving men whose endless shifting of a few sticks of furniture typifies the evening's pedantic illustration of Brechtian stagecraft.

I was in a lot of those rehearsals, I was friends with the backstage interns who handed off and received that furniture from the actors on stage, and I can say that Frank Rich is absolutely right. Bogart did spend hours in those rehearsals painstakingly choreographing the movement of the furniture movers. But it gets worse. She had an assistant director for the production who was the development director (grantwriter) for Mabou Mines, an aspiring director himself, with whom, to my knowledge, she had not worked previously. When one of the actors would have a question about the scene involving, you know, their relationship to other characters in the scene, their needs or desires, or the outcomes they were seeking, she would motion the assistant director to run down and chat with them.

Now, getting to the essence of any scene is a challenge. Brecht's play is especially enigmatic, and it really takes someone with an overarching vision to help actors connect the dots. Someone like a director. Regardless of how helpful this assistant director's insights were, it's a terrible signal to send to the actors that their concerns, their legitimate concerns about how to act their roles well, are to be relegated to an assistant. They must NOT, under any circumstances, be allowed to interfere with the machinations of the director as the string-puller of the uber-marionettes.

Bogart reaped what she sowed. The production flopped. But worse than that, she left the lead members of Mabou Mines with a profound sense of betrayal. "We got taken" Ruth Maleczech said in the office on Ninth St, months later. She then proceeded to perform a spontaneous, derisive parody of "kinesthetic response", one of Bogart's most hallowed viewpoints.

This anecdote perfectly illustrates both the appeal and the danger of viewpoints. People who are studying acting want desperately to be initiated, to be shown the true secrets of doing compelling, memorable work. However, finding someone who can really help them with that is never easy. They may encounter a gifted teacher at school, college, or grad school, but eventually, they leave that institution, and are faced with finding someone who can help them continue to develop. The teaching of acting can be maddeningly insubstantial, ethereal even, and so often aspiring actors despair of finding someone who can help them make sense of it all: what to do with their minds, their bodies, their feelings, the text. It can seem to be impossible to find an approach that works with all of these elements together.

Viewpoints makes a false promise: put your money on the "physical". Anything that deals with the inner life or intention or yearning or longing smacks of dated, naive aberrations from Lee Strasberg's 1950's New York. Use viewpoints and focus on the physical, the acolytes are told, and let the rest take care of itself. And so the actor is introduced to this series of relatively simple "viewpoints" that are concerned with an actor's physical relationships with others in a space: how far away or close they are to each other, the shapes of their bodies, the mimicing of what others in the space are doing, the contours of the space itself, and potential responses to the gestural exhibitions of others. Follow these simple steps, and you, too, can be a "physical" actor.

The appeal is in the concreteness of what viewpoints is pushing, and in its relative simplicity. Through my years of training at the Yale School of Drama and at Duke before that, I watched it happen again and again: actors would be presented with a concrete skill to master, whether it was the "ask" list of words, in which the pronounciation of the short "a" sound varies across British and American dialects, or fencing, or scansion, or stage combat, or, yes, viewpoints, and they leaped at the promise that mastering this very concrete set of more or less mechanical rules, a set of rules that was divorced from things like judgment, intuition, and imagination, would somehow accredit them as actors. I can empathize with the impulse: learning to act well is not easy, even with the help of a caring and insightful teacher. But the promise, my friends, is a false one.

Any good acting teacher, like any good yoga teacher, or any good Alexander teacher, or any good Zen teacher, wil tell you, in one way or another, that it is all about body-mind integration. Viewpoints promises to make accessible something that DEPENDS on this integration of body and mind, i.e. acting, by focusing on the merely physical, and in a totally superficial way. I had a great piano teacher growing up, Linda Calligaro, and she insisted that you do NOT develop independence of the right hand and the left hand by practicing one hand at a time. Learning the part of a piece of music one hand at a time could be useful as a preliminary, but no gains would be made in achieving the INDEPENDENCE of the two hands by practicing one hand at a time. For that, you had to try to do the much more difficult challenge of playing with both hands at once. It's all about coordination. As so is acting. It's about learning to simultaneously direct your attention to people or things, sometimes ones that are present, sometimes not, use your voice, use your body, remember your lines, and an whole lot more. It's what Barack Obama has referred to as walking and chewing gum at the same time. It's rubbing your tummy and patting your head, jumping on one foot, naked, while speaking a bit of text that means everything to you in a way that honors both the punctuation and the need to preserve the integrity of the whole thought. Viewpoints, sadly, makes things just way too easy, and tries to make a virtue of that.

Viewpointa can have a value as part of an actor's training. It is definitely valuable for an actor to have a dynamic understanding of space and his or her relationships to others in that space, and the way she can use his body in relationship with the space and the others with whom she shares it. Too much of this awaremess, though, is NOT a good thing. These concerns are essentially the purvey of the director (viewpoints evolved out of dance composition principles), as they involve the "big picture". And being too aware of the "big picture" can be a major stumbling block for the actor: when he is thinking about that, he is thinking about what he, and everyone else, looks like, and is therefore the very definition of self-conscious. Viewpoints also tacitly encourages cleverness (or "smart-aleckeyness" as Frank Rich put it), and seeming clever has nothing to do with being vulnerable. So a LITTLE bit of viewpoints goes a long way. Some viewpoints proponents will no doubt say that their technique is not intended to replace "inner" work, but my experience with Anne Bogart, and Frank Rich's etimation of her work, shows that that is not the case.

The only way I can imagine viewpoints being valuable is as a kind of basic awareness of space and its possibilites. Though I have heard tell of scene study classes that attempt to incorporate viewpoints as part of the working process, I am very, very skeptical. Getting the attention of the actor on to the right things is difficult enough, and viewpoints is an invitation to focus on many of the wrong ones.

But whatever merits viewpoints may have, it is NOT a substitute for a real approach to the difficult terrain that belongs to the actor: the domain of dreams, fears, needs, outcomes, interventions, confrontations, and intuition, as well as the body and the voice. And like Mrs. Calliagaro said, the real work begins when you are practicing using all of these things at one time. Is it difficult to work with these thing all together? Yes. Is there only one way of doing it? No. Is finding an approach to dealing with these things necessary for any actor who wants to sustain a creative life in acting in film or theater? Absolutely. The only way out, a wise man once said, is through. That's a viewpoint you can believe in.

(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.)