the paradox

Posted in acting on June 24th, 2010 by Andrew

It’s hard not to get a kick out yourself as you imitate, transform, or entertain others, or make them laugh! How great it is to be able to do these things.

But it’s the watching-yourself-do-these-things-while-you-do-them that is, unfortunately, the essence of self-consciousness. It’s this awareness that has to be marginalized if not banished altogether from your mind to achieve maximal absorption in what you are doing.

Unfortunately, it’s this desire to see one’s self doing these things, to watch one’s self in the act of imitating, transforming,entertaining or inducing laughter that brings most of us to want to act in the first place.

If you want to be great, you don’t get to watch yourself be entertaining. That you have to give up. You can be appreciated by others all you want afterwards. But while you are acting? Don’t look into the light!

Or, as the famous nineteenth century Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard said: when Abraham consents to make the sacrifice of his son Isaac, he regains the world!

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because you never know who’s watching

Posted in HBO, acting, casting director on June 19th, 2010 by Andrew

Ahem.

We had the Friends and Family Nights at the end of the cycles in Los Angeles and San Francisco two weeks ago. These events are intended as celebrations: I do not invite prospective students, to try to sell them on the class, because on those nights I don’t want to be distracted by having to play host to these prospectives. The way that I run the class, there is usually a familial feeling (in a good way!) among the graduating students. I like to savor that feeling, and not have to worry about making sure that the prospectives feel at home. I also don’t want to feel pressure for the students who are showing their scenes to “deliver for me” and sell the class. I want to celebrate the work at whatever level it is at as the course comes to a close. When industry people have inquired about coming to the Night, I have allowed it, but have asked them not to speak to students in a professional capacity that night, but rather to contact them through me later, because I wouldn’t want the word to get out that night and for other students to feel that they had not measured up in failing to attract the attention of whoever these industry people were. I want my students to celebrate their achievement and enjoy the their last night together as a class.

But I have no control over who students choose to invite. It so happened (I later learned) that at one of these events, a student had a guest who was a casting director for HBO. Now many of the students had worked hard throughout the cycle, and were Ready. And casting my mind back over the evening in question, the man who I take to be the HBO director (based on whose guest he was) complimented me on the way out, in a “No, really, I mean it” kind of way. So I think he felt those students were Ready too. But I know for a fact that some students had not worked as hard and as consistently as the ones who were Ready, and as a consequence, were not as Ready.

Oops.

The moral? Always be Ready. Because you never know who’s watching.

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David Foster Wallace on "puff words"

Posted in David Foster Wallace on June 9th, 2010 by Andrew

In class, we spend a lot of time learning to talk about who we are as the role, what we are pursuing, etc. And I strive to instill in my students an understanding of how important it is to speak about the scene in an immediate, direct, visceral way. That’s why I like this so much:

(If you just see a bunch of HTML below, then click the headline above to go to my blog and watch the video)

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William Burroughs shooting Shakespeare (with a gun, not a camera)

Posted in Buddha, William Burroughs, William Shakespeare on June 9th, 2010 by Andrew

The Buddhists say that if you meet the Buddha on the road, you should kill him. I guess that’s the idea here.

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what Sheila quoted Minnie as saying about performing

Posted in acting, technique, virtuousity on June 6th, 2010 by Andrew

Via The Sheila Variations

“Genius is the great unknown quantity. Technique supplies a constant for the problem. Fluency, flexibility, technique, precision, virtuosity, science – call it what you will. Why call it anything? Watch Pavlova dance, and there you have it. She knows her business. She has carried this mastery to such perfection that there is really no need of watching her at all. You know it will be all right. One glance at her and you are sure. On most of our players one keeps an apprehensive eye, filled with dark suspicions and forebodings – forebodings based on sad experience. But I told Gabrielle Rejane once that a performance of hers would no sooner begin than I would feel perfectly free to go out of the theatre and take a walk. I knew she could be trusted. It would be all right. There was no need to stay and watch.”

– Minnie Maddern Fiske, famous American actress of the late 19th and early 20th centuries

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