Mother of Invention Acting School — Los Angeles — Blog

From the Gronbeck-Tedesco book:

In The Reenchantment of the World, Morris Berman offers a particularly useful word for talking about the ideal working relationship between actor and setting: participation. Berman explains it in ecological terms: (1) Participation is the kind of relationship that breaks down the customary separation between us and environment. We and the nonhuman components of the space become connected and interdependent. (2) The environment is transformed from a group of objects to be acted upon into something with the capacity to act upon us in return. (3) In a participatory relationship, we enter into a give-and-take with the environment that increases the variety, depth and intensity of our reactions to it

As a general rule, your aim onstage is to achieve and maintain as much participation with the setting as possible. This means you must allow the space to act upon you– that is, to shape your internal life as well as your physical movement. Instead of merely standing in, on, or in front of a setting, you must connect with it almost as though it were another actor always offering you something to respond to.

This is a tremendous characterization of the challenge facing an actor embarking on a rehearsal process: somehow the space of the rehearsal room, consisting of other people, places and things, have to become the imaginary world of the script. Gronbeck-Tedesco offers an excellent series of exercises to enable this process. At Mother of Invention, we think of this process as having two major parts:

PARTICULARIZATION: Particularization is the process of becoming clear about who and what, exactly, make up the world of the scene. This means developing a heightened awareness of the senorial features of the people, places and things that make up the world of the scene. There is a way in which this heightened awareness provides for a certain kind of relaxation in the actor: our guard can come down once we have “taken in” an element of our envirnment sensorially. Think of the way that a dog, upon meeting a stranger, needs to acquaint himself with the stranger by sniffing him. Once the dog has sniffed the stranger, the threatening character of the unfamiliar person may have dissipated, and the dog is free to pay attention to something else. The people, places and things that comprise our scene environment work on us in a similar way: when we have not “sniffed out” the entity in question, that entity is mysterious foreign object to our neuromuscular system: it is something that may trip us up or otherwise endanger us. By particularizing the person, place, or thing in question, we disarm it, we “tame” it, to use the phrase of Antoine de St.-Exupery’s The Little Prince. At that point, we are free to “play” with it, or to enter into what Gronbeck-Tedesco calls a “participatory” relationship with it. And indeed, the first set of exercises for promoting a participatory relationship according to Gronbeck-Tedesco is “Specific, Detailed Perception”

INVESTMENT: Once we have a sense of exactly what the elements of the imaginary world are that we are attempting to engage, we need to have these people, places and things take on an importance for us appropriate for the Who-am-I or character we are playing. They need to matter to us in the way that they would for the character. Our major tool for that we use for that is what Uta Hagen calls “Transference” in her book A Challenge for the Actor. With transference, we try to find a person, place or thing from our own experience to try to use as a way of articulating the character’s relationship to some element of their world. It’s one thing to identify another character as your confidant, another thing to identify a confidant from your own life and use that relationship as a way of understanding the importance of that other person for the characters.

The work of particularization and investment, which together we refer to as personalization, is the work of making the imaginary context for the character known and familiar, so that it can be trusted, so that our creativity can be fed by that world and that that world can begin to elicit surprising, organic responses from us, responses that issue from the instinctual, as opposed to from the cerebral, realm.

PHILIP GLASS: POWAQQATSI

In the early days of the Mother of Invention Acting School, lo these many years ago, when this was all just a twinkle in my eye, I was (unconsciously) engaging in what is formally known as branding: wrestling with questions of who I was and how I wanted to represent that to the world. The Mother of Invention part I have discussed elsewhere, but even before I had that, I knew that I wanted to start an acting school. Not an acting studio, but an acting school. To me, at the time, the difference seemed important. And it still does.

Let me dispense with “studio” and why I didn’t want my enterprise to bear that moniker first. To me, “studio” flatters peoples’ pretensions. Film studios make movies, and by calling the operation a “studio” it seemed to suggest or promise some kind of proximity to the places where movies get made, not geographic proximity but proximity of endeavor, that somehow what I am doing has something in common with what Universal Studios does. People who learn to act with me could very well one day be involved in a project at Universal Studios, but I didn’t want to insinuate that I offered any sort of pipeline into that scene. I was here to teach people to act. Finding their way in the profession was, largely, another matter.

I also felt that “studio” flattered people’s pretensions in another way: it was easier for someone who felt that they had already learned how to act but needed to “work out” or “tune up” to go to study at a studio than at something which called itself a school. And I knew that what I was offering was something that was foundational, radical, even revolutionary, as one of my students has characterized it. I was not going to be in the business of finessing the acting of people who had picked up a random assortment of concepts and practices that they deployed as the spirit moved them. I had been lucky enough to be initiated into a system that was practical, elegant, comprehensive and conceptually coherent. I wasn’t offering a grab bag of tools, or supplementing the grab bag that someone else came in the door with. I was (am) presenting a whole point of view about what acting is and how to do it well, one that was marked by a visible integrity, and if it was to be grasped at all, it needed to be grasped as a whole. So this meant that the student walking in the door needed to have a readiness to learn from the ground up, to truly reconsider their view of acting, if they were coming to the class with prior training and experience. In that sense, saying that I was running a “school” was a bit of a provocation: are you ready to go to school, even to be schooled, was my implication. Bring your zen mind, beginner’s mind.

I think I also was thinking a little about reform school/school of hard knocks/ boot camp, not that my school would be brutal, but it would be…austere, focused on essentials, no frills, rigorous. I would be unflinching in laying out exactly how challenging acting was, how much accountability it required, how much falling short or not getting it right or nailing it it entailed, it would not a steady stream of brilliant, creative eruptions, but rather a lot of carrying water and chopping wood. Stripping away the illusions of effortless and “talent”, and confronting the reality of the nose at the grindstone. I think if you look at the utteracting home page, you can see that I communicated this to the designer: the green and black palette, the font, the newspaper columns all bespeak, I think, austerity and sobriety, without being dreary.

But over the years of teaching, I have come to see another sense in which I see what I do as a school. While working on my dissertation in literature at Stanford, I thought a lot about Plato and Aristotle, who themselves thought a lot about literature, art, acting, and what it is to be a human being. I was humbled by the complexity and brilliance of their perspectives. It’s so easy to patronize the ancients, to look back on their lack of technology or modern scientific understanding with smugness. But what I got from this encounter with Plato and Aristotle, and with Socrates as well, through Plato, was their readiness to struggle. These were men who wrestled, yes, wrestled with intractable, difficult problems and tamed their fair share of them. They resolved age old conundrums by reframing the debate altogether. They shifted paradigms. But what I was extremely challenged by was the spirit, enshrined in their work, that thought, and by extension creative work, is and must be difficult. It’ has to be a struggle. And we have to accept that that is what it always, always is. We all are tempted to cling to a childish desire for things to be easy. You want easy, play bingo. Find a cakewalk. Go to the mall. Acting, the art of the protean, of transformation, the art of being what you aren’t — is always, always a struggle. It’s the kind of thing Albert Camus had in mind when he said that one had to imagine Sisyphus happy, that the struggle to the heights was enough to fill a man’s heart, never mind whether the rock rolled back down the hill every time he pushed it up there. This, I learned, was the spirit in which Plato and Aristotle waged school. And that is the ethos that I endeavor to evoke and embody in my school: we have to be ready to work.

I continue to marvel at the amount of wisdom that is packed into John Gronbeck-Tedesco’s book Acting Through Exercises.

Today:

Openness is not automatic–based only on deciding, “Now I will be open for two hours.” Openness– the ability to take in and use the energy in our environment– is an acquired skill. [emphasis added]

I grew up on the east coast, which means we weren’t constantly throwing the word “energy” around like a volley ball in Malibu. Still, I have no doubt that it is appropriate and meaningful for acting far beyond the “New Age” idiom it evokes for many.

Tonight I opened the Gronbeck-Tedesco book, just to kind of jumpstart my thinking, and I came across this nugget of wisdom:

A growing sense of personal security is essential in all the work an actor does both in performance and day-to-day training. By security, I mean a sense of self-trust and personal well-being that permits an actor to encounter with confidence and relish whatever is happening onstage or in the studio.

Sound familiar? From, like, yesterday on this blog?

We are all actors because of some deep-seated need to be seen, and yet, when we go to act, ambivalence about this desire to be seen can arise. Do we really want to be seen? Is this the way we want to be seen? What will people think? And these worries can entice us into playing it safe, trying to blend in, trying NOT to stand out

Is it just me, or is there an echo in here?