Mother of Invention Acting School — Los Angeles — Blog

“May you live in interesting times.”

Apparently, this alleged Chinese imprecation is not so Chinese. Wikipedia:

No known user of the English phrase has supplied the purported Chinese language original, and the Chinese language origin of the phrase, if it exists, has not been found, making its authenticity doubtful. One theory is that it may be related to the Chinese proverb, “It’s better to be a dog in a peaceful time than be a man in a chaotic period” (???????????; pinyin: níng wéi tàipíng qu?n, bù zuò luànshì rén).[citation needed]

Still, it seems that interesting times have been wished on all of us, what with the bailout fever and governors being arrested and Greece on fire. I have noticed that since these interesting times began, right around, oh, say, the selection of Sarah Palin as John McCain’s running mate, aspects of the plays that we work on in class that come up in scenes that have relevance to our current national and international crises (!), they crackle more loudly than they perhaps otherwise would. Last cycle in SF, we worked on a play by Neal Bell called Ready for the River from the early nineties, which involves the bloody aftermath of a bank foreclosing on a family farm. I had selected to the play because it’s great writing and I like the way playwright Neal Bell loves to bring dead people back from the dead to talk to the living in what are either expressionistic interludes or hallucinatory sequences. But my selection of the play had nothing to do, if I recall correctly, with its social relevance. The first time I heard the foreclosure that transpires in the play referenced by a pair of actors doing a scene from the play in class, I was BOWLED OVER. I mentioned this to students who had been watching the scene work in class during a break, and they had a similar reaction. Tom Brokaw said on Meet the Press the other day that for the first time in years, “everyone is paying attention.” We are all experiencing and participating in the public life of this country in a way that is new and exciting.

These observations throw into relief the importance of actors in these times: they are people who are able to embody and give voice to the yearnings of people in our society, both the private and subjective yearnings and the public and political ones. In performing pieces of writing, actors participate in bringing these yearnings into confrontation and dialogue with others, so that solutions can be hammered out, tires can be kicked, and glad tidings and great rejoicing can ultimately come to pass.

To arms!

(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.)

Ever wonder what it felt like?

Well, click here to find out. And don’t forget to click your mouse to change colors.

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(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.)

(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.)

Driving into town from Burbank this morning, I caught the tail-end of an interview on NPR. Turns out is was with a guy named Michael Soussan, who has just published a memoir of his time at the United Nations, and his frustrated attempts to expose Saddam Hussein’s subversion of the oil-for-food program. It caught my ear because his frustrations with the bureaucracy of that august insitution reminded me of all the experiences I have had with bureaucracy: corporate, non-profit, academic, you name it. It all devolves very quickly to turf wars which are as nasty as they are inconsequential. Bureaucracy is a necessary evil that isn’t going anywhere. but my allergic reaction to it has been a big part of my decision to go it alone as an acting teacher. Soussan talked about how exceedingly frustrated people who were high-minded or idealistic became in that environment (he himself resigned over his superiors’ refusal to expose the aforementioned Hussein fraud). It can be isolating, but not having to play along with all of that nonsense makes the adversity worthwhile.

I still harbor a vision of a small, lean group of collaborators that would begin to work together to create theater with the absolute minimum of organizational support. Additional organizational support could be added to support growth, but always with a less-is-better principle. Staying lean is where it’s at.
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Devilstower, one of the editorial bloggers on the Daily Kos, the notorious epicenter of the liberal blogsophere, wrote a eulogy for Tom Gish, the tough-minded editor of a newspaper in Kentucky called the Mountain Eagle. Upon acquiring the paper, Gish gave it the motto “It Screams!”. And, according to devilstower, it did:

The Mountain Eagle screamed out against corruption in Kentucky politics, against the excesses of coal mine operators, against police who abused their power, against mistreatment of workers, and against destruction of the land. Gish used his paper like a hammer, and he didn’t care whose political fingers he smashed as he pounded out the truth. It didn’t matter if you were a local school board member, or the president of a giant corporation. The Gish’s would not back down.

I’d like to say that it is in this spirit that I started the Mother of Invention Acting School. When I started teaching, I used to say that I was happy to be San Francisco, at some remove from “the industry.” There is an idealism in the way I run my classes, and there is an idealism to San Francisco, so there was a good match. My recent Los Angeles expansion was prompted in part by my recognition that in spite of the presence of “the business” in SoCal, and all that goes along with it, there is a vast number of highly creative, energetic people in Los Angeles who would enjoy my classes. When I visited friends in the Southlands, this became obvious to me.

I look forward to growing my classes in Los Angeles. I fully intend, though, to continue to uphold the things about the class that may mean that it grows more slowly than it otherwise might. I don’t offer “weekend workshops”: what I teach can’t be learned in a weekend. Only one absence is allowed per ten week cycle, and the class is set up on a pay-as-you-go basis. So if a student misses for the second time at session 5, I lose revenue that I would get if I let them continue to show up, and I create a headache for myself, in having to find them a new scene partner. But I am committed to creating an environment in which everyone is similarly invested in what we are doing, everyone is accountable in the same way, everyone is vulnerable in the same way. I do not invite prospective students to audit, although I know that that costs me some enrollments. But with the trouble I take to create and maintain an atmosphere of safety and seriousness, I don’t want to allow that atmosphere to be undermined by having strangers sit in. I don’t teach “cold reading technique”, as I believe the best possible preparation for cold reading is proficiency as an actor and the confidence that follows from that. Everyone works on two person scenes, not monologues, in spite of the logistical challenges that this poses for me and the students. If industry people want to attend a “Friends and Family Night” at the end of the cycle, they are welcome, but I ask them to be discreet, and not approach students directly that night, but rather through me at a later time. The emphasis at Friends and Family Night is on celebrating what we have achieved together.

I haven’t looked for a job teaching acting at a local college or university, because I don’t want to have to compromise in all of the ways that a university bureaucracy would aak me to. I may still do this at some point, but it is not the preferred path for me.

Doing it your way, the way you hold to be the right way, comes with a cost, as Tom Gish of the Mountain Eagle knew. Devilstower again:

The paper’s reputation grew until politicians throughout the region refused to allow the Eagle’s reporters into press conferences. Then it grew until they had to let them back in. When the office was firebombed and their press burned, they didn’t miss a week. Even when advertisers were so frightened to be associated with the paper that The Mountain Eagle shrank to only four pages, Gish held his ground.

I do it my way, not out of a sense of high-mindedness, but because it’s the way I want to do it. It’s the best way I have been able to find, so far, to help people live as expansively as possible in the fictional worlds of stage and screen. This way is not for everyone, and not everyone wants to hear my message about how much is asked of the actor or to be held accountable in the way that I hold my students accountable. But, like Tom Gish’s Mountain Eagle and like Howard Dean, in my teaching, I scream, (not literally!), in the hope of summoning people into a greater vitality. A finer vocation, for me, I can’t imagine.

(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 San Francisco for serious, motivated students.)

I am reading a book with the above title for my dissertation work in German Literature at Stanford. The book is by Richard Kraut, an analytic philosopher. Unless you have a taste for meticulous, painstaking philosophical argumentation, I can’t recommend it, but I have found that Kraut has ideas that resonate strongly with the way that we think about how people make life decisions in scene work.

Kraut maintains that older ways of thinking about what is good (what gives pleasure, achieving what one wants or plans) and the problems that are bound up with them can be jettisoned in favor of a notion that what is good for humans is what brings about their flourishing. By flourishing, he means a sustained condition in which humans can exercise their powers (physical, cognitive, and emotional) as expansively as possible.

Most scenes in class involve a relationship in some type of crisis or culmination. The two people involved are attempting, in one way or another, to save or at least strengthen the relationship, based on their understanding of the relationship and what is valuable about it. This, in turn, always comes down to a belief about the way in which two people fit together: what about them makes them a good match.

Close friendships and relationships of all kinds are important because they provide us an opportunity to exercise aspects of ourselves that we value. With one friend, perhaps we can banter in a satisfying way, with another, perhaps we can play a great game of squash, with another, exchange stories of our lives. In other words, they give us contexts in which flourishing is possible. If there is no one to appreciate our wit, and no one to provide wit which, in appreciating, we have an experience of our own wit, then things are not as good for us as they could be.

Of course, we also talk a lot about what we want at particular moments in scenes, but generally, we can say that in scenes, in our roles, our beliefs (as the character) about what wants will bring us closer to flourishing are tested, and we must make decisions about whether to hold fast to one vision of coming closer to flourishing, or to embrace another. Uta Hagen calls this “weighing courses of action” in her discussion of this in her book A Challenge for the Actor.—