My Front Porch
Long and short rants, opinions, dialectics, etc. concerning whatever I have on my mind that day.
<posts archived in chronological order>
<posts archived in chronological order>
OK...
...here goes. I have finally found the relevant metaphor. Starting one’s first blog is like the first time you try to jump double Dutch. You’ve seen other people do it. Some of them do it well, some badly. But people you know have done it. How hard can it be? But you’ve also seen people unexpectedly fail, winding up looking stupid and in a few cases, flat on their asses. My daughter, Jessie, set up the blog for me a while ago and I’ve been standing there in front of a blank screen, leaning forward, leaning back, leaning forward, leaning back in the same kind of rhythm I stood in front of the two girls swinging heavy ropes double Dutch and grinning, waiting for my hoped for failure. (Only girls who jumped double Dutch could swing double Dutch. Everyone gathered around could laugh at failure, however. And I was surrounded by people hoping for my failure, given how often I had ruined the curve for 43 third graders.
Interestingly, I have no idea whether or not I succeeded that first time. I only know that eventually I was an amazing double Dutcher and won the right to swing the rope too. I have no idea how long it’s going to take for me to find out whether or not blogging is a useful part of my future. However, today I’m jumping in. Why today? Because this is in two ways a significant day. This is the 42nd anniversary of my marriage. It is also the day that Mary Catherine Hayes went to paradise. I don’t always believe in an afterlife but when I do I am reminded of a hymn I used to play often when I was a church organist playing the organ for most of the funerals and requiem Masses in our parish. That hymn is the only reason that I am sorry I can’t be buried in a Requiem High Mass celebrated in Latin. The hymn is called In Paradisum. After all of the sad parts of the Mass that preceded it, this hymn, played and sung properly, means that the soul today lives today in Paradise. This morning Mary Catherine’s family announced her passing to her SU friends with an email whose subject line was In Paradisum.
If there is another edition, I will explain why the name of the blog is “The Truth Is . . .” besides the fact that everyone who knows me know I say that a lot. Really a lot.
Interestingly, I have no idea whether or not I succeeded that first time. I only know that eventually I was an amazing double Dutcher and won the right to swing the rope too. I have no idea how long it’s going to take for me to find out whether or not blogging is a useful part of my future. However, today I’m jumping in. Why today? Because this is in two ways a significant day. This is the 42nd anniversary of my marriage. It is also the day that Mary Catherine Hayes went to paradise. I don’t always believe in an afterlife but when I do I am reminded of a hymn I used to play often when I was a church organist playing the organ for most of the funerals and requiem Masses in our parish. That hymn is the only reason that I am sorry I can’t be buried in a Requiem High Mass celebrated in Latin. The hymn is called In Paradisum. After all of the sad parts of the Mass that preceded it, this hymn, played and sung properly, means that the soul today lives today in Paradise. This morning Mary Catherine’s family announced her passing to her SU friends with an email whose subject line was In Paradisum.
I have lost many people including, most sadly, five students in Pan Am 103. I have lost my father, my mother, and eighteen uncles and aunts, five close friends and many acquaintances. All of these have deeply affected me. However, while I was pretty sure that my father was on the fast train to heaven, Mary Catherine is only person I’ve ever lost of whom I am preternaturally certain that at this moment she is in heaven, leading the angels in a dance. She was a dancer, a smiler, a lover, the bravest person I’ve ever known. I hope she looks after all of us. We need it if we are going to become a lot more like her. OK, I’ve jumped in. I don’t know if I’m going to do this every day, once a week, once a month, or never again. But I’m glad I have a blog today if for no other reason than this.
If there is another edition, I will explain why the name of the blog is “The Truth Is . . .” besides the fact that everyone who knows me know I say that a lot. Really a lot.
The Truth is....
...Until my daughter, Kate, suggested this as the name of my intended blog and everyone chimed in with recognition, I honestly didn’t realize this was a Geriism right up there with the frequently uttered “Yah?” Since that came to my attention I have been pondering my meaning and my intention in using this expression. I know that I also say “The point is . . .” and “The fact is . . .” almost as frequently but those expressions I don’t find equally troubling. “The Truth Is . . .” suggests I think I know what that holy grail of all philosophy, the truth, is. And my strongest belief is one I borrowed long ago from Socrates: “The only thing I am certain of is that I am certain of nothing at all."
So, what to make of the contradiction between the belief in the expression of uncertainty and that of certainty. As a great many of you may know I have been studying the brain and it’s methods for many years, first because I find my own mind perplexing and fascinating but also because I believe the road to the final expression of truthfulness in acting is in the process of creating the mind of the character out of the raw material of the actor’s mind. A book I am reading slowly and thoughtfully is called The Master and His Emissary by Iain McGilchrist. It goes a long way to describing the relationship between the right brain and the left brain and the particular difficulties that relationship in our daily life. For that reason it makes almost confoundingly difficult the problem of creating a believable mind for a character.
In the rawest possible terms, the left brain is what I refer to as “high school head.” It’s the brain whose function is increasingly rewarded in elementary and high schools as “teaching to the test” becomes more the order of the day. The left brain believes in right answers and, indeed there are some right answers in math and the hard sciences that are provable and demonstrable. Everywhere else, in religion, politics, all of the arts, philosophy, etc. answers are only relative. The left brain controls language and has the capacity to shut down the right brain that cannot speak directly but only in something Steven Pinker calls “mentalese.” The left brain always wants there to be one answer and that answer the right answer. Its answers are usually normative and conventional and in many situations good enough for government work. However, real advances in both art and science require that much praised capacity, critical thinking.
For me the idea of critical thinking can be characterized by embrace of one simple idea: “What if the opposite were true.” The left brain can just about wrap itself around a proposition and its opposite, but that is not the end of critical thinking. It means going to that theoretical position of considering the contrary of both the original proposition and its opposite. At his possibility the left brain throws up its hands and yells to the right brain, “You take over. I’m outta here,” as it runs from the room.
The right brain has eight ideas for every one the left brain has and it is interested in all of them. Think of all of the different “right” ways of saying just about anything. Eventually however, the play must be played and
decisions made over and over and over again about how, at least tonight, the line must be said. When one delivers the line that way one is saying “At this moment I believe the truth is . . .” And that’s what I mean when I say something in class or in rehearsal or just in an everyday conversation. I never mean it’s THE truth. It’s only the truth as I profess it at this very moment.
Tomorrow I will be a slightly different person who may think the truth is other. But at this moment this is what I profess. I would be delighted if you could convince me that I’m mistaken. So, you see while you have thought I thought of myself as the all-knowing fount of wisdom I have really thought that I am on a lifelong journey in a search for a truth that will never be anything but temporary.
There are a few things from my childhood I continue to profess but I have no certainty that in my last hours (or tomorrow) I won’t slap myself on the forehead and exclaim, “How could I be such an idiot!” And when and if I do I won’t be embarrassed or humiliated but only delighted that I have, temporarily, found my way to a better truth.
Next time (if there is a next time) I will talk a little bit about “point of view” and how it relates to life and theatre. Anyone who has a disagreement with anything I write or an idea of something you would like to hear me expatiate on, just email me or reach me on Facebook. If this blog has a comment function, feel free to do that too. My daughter, Jessie, is managing my blog at the moment so if it’s there she’ll let me know.
So till next time, if the good Lord’s willin’ and the crick don’t rise. . . I’ll be back.
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As technology (photography, recording, film, television, computers, cgi, etc. made it possible to be present at dramatic events of the real world only two things were left. We still needed comprehensible narratives to make sense of a world of bewildering phenomena and behavior of actors so accurate that the entire audience would be able to “read” that behavior with the same eyes and ears by which we stay safe in the world. But, as I wrote in an earlier post, we have become so expert in witnessing the vocabulary or real-life behavior that what we require of actors in the present time is behavior based accurately on reality but not having the “noise” of behavior in real life. In the same way that increasingly we expect every single speech, word, and sentence, and speech of a play to illuminate the ideas of the text, we now expect every gesture, every element of the ten elements of behavior with which we write our lives in the air at every moment.
Next time I will try and unpack (with some brevity) the ten elements of behavior.
So, what to make of the contradiction between the belief in the expression of uncertainty and that of certainty. As a great many of you may know I have been studying the brain and it’s methods for many years, first because I find my own mind perplexing and fascinating but also because I believe the road to the final expression of truthfulness in acting is in the process of creating the mind of the character out of the raw material of the actor’s mind. A book I am reading slowly and thoughtfully is called The Master and His Emissary by Iain McGilchrist. It goes a long way to describing the relationship between the right brain and the left brain and the particular difficulties that relationship in our daily life. For that reason it makes almost confoundingly difficult the problem of creating a believable mind for a character.
In the rawest possible terms, the left brain is what I refer to as “high school head.” It’s the brain whose function is increasingly rewarded in elementary and high schools as “teaching to the test” becomes more the order of the day. The left brain believes in right answers and, indeed there are some right answers in math and the hard sciences that are provable and demonstrable. Everywhere else, in religion, politics, all of the arts, philosophy, etc. answers are only relative. The left brain controls language and has the capacity to shut down the right brain that cannot speak directly but only in something Steven Pinker calls “mentalese.” The left brain always wants there to be one answer and that answer the right answer. Its answers are usually normative and conventional and in many situations good enough for government work. However, real advances in both art and science require that much praised capacity, critical thinking.
For me the idea of critical thinking can be characterized by embrace of one simple idea: “What if the opposite were true.” The left brain can just about wrap itself around a proposition and its opposite, but that is not the end of critical thinking. It means going to that theoretical position of considering the contrary of both the original proposition and its opposite. At his possibility the left brain throws up its hands and yells to the right brain, “You take over. I’m outta here,” as it runs from the room.
The right brain has eight ideas for every one the left brain has and it is interested in all of them. Think of all of the different “right” ways of saying just about anything. Eventually however, the play must be played and
decisions made over and over and over again about how, at least tonight, the line must be said. When one delivers the line that way one is saying “At this moment I believe the truth is . . .” And that’s what I mean when I say something in class or in rehearsal or just in an everyday conversation. I never mean it’s THE truth. It’s only the truth as I profess it at this very moment.
Tomorrow I will be a slightly different person who may think the truth is other. But at this moment this is what I profess. I would be delighted if you could convince me that I’m mistaken. So, you see while you have thought I thought of myself as the all-knowing fount of wisdom I have really thought that I am on a lifelong journey in a search for a truth that will never be anything but temporary.
There are a few things from my childhood I continue to profess but I have no certainty that in my last hours (or tomorrow) I won’t slap myself on the forehead and exclaim, “How could I be such an idiot!” And when and if I do I won’t be embarrassed or humiliated but only delighted that I have, temporarily, found my way to a better truth.
Next time (if there is a next time) I will talk a little bit about “point of view” and how it relates to life and theatre. Anyone who has a disagreement with anything I write or an idea of something you would like to hear me expatiate on, just email me or reach me on Facebook. If this blog has a comment function, feel free to do that too. My daughter, Jessie, is managing my blog at the moment so if it’s there she’ll let me know.
So till next time, if the good Lord’s willin’ and the crick don’t rise. . . I’ll be back.
My Front Porch
OK, here I am, rocking back and forth in my virtual rocking chair, pondering what to share with you today, and as one by one, my students, past and future mentally step up to the porch I think, “Well, it’s been a while. What would you like to hear from me today?” And I imagine you saying, “Geri, you’re older than dirt. You were born in the first half of the 19th century. You’ve seen a lot. How do you think acting has changed since back in the day?” And I answer in my typical long-winded fashion:
My teacher, Oscar Brockett, arguably the best theatre historian of the 20th and the 21st century, was fond of saying that every generation makes steady progress toward a greater naturalism. While he lived into the age of the milennials, I doubt he ever imagined how great the progress would be in the last twenty-five years. Back in my day, emotional truth was the direction of great progress. I was a student of one of the first graduates of the Actors Studio where Lee Strasberg had made emotional truth the order of the day. However, fellow founders Bobby Lewis and Elia Kazan were equally interested in all of Stanislavski’s contribution to the development of realistic theatre so one small woman, Robin Humphrey was able to raise a ragtag bunch of very diverse students into inheritors to that which was most cutting edge in theatrical realism even in the bowels of darkest Missouri.
The 20th century made the greatest progress toward realism made in history of theatre because of a number of technological advances that made the very concept of theatrical realism possible. The development of electric lights made possible lighting techniques that would make it possible for a large audience to see clearly actors behaving in a recognizably
believable fashion for the first time. Fortunately Anton Chekov was a writer who had in his long career writing hundreds of short stories had become a master of the expression of realistic detail. When Constantin Stanislavski and Nemirovich Danchenko created the Moscow Art Theatre as a means of developing actors capable of truthfully expressing the developing body of realistic drama they were lucky to become fellow collaborators with Chekov who, more than any writer at that time was capable of challenging the new theories in acting to their highest form.
believable fashion for the first time. Fortunately Anton Chekov was a writer who had in his long career writing hundreds of short stories had become a master of the expression of realistic detail. When Constantin Stanislavski and Nemirovich Danchenko created the Moscow Art Theatre as a means of developing actors capable of truthfully expressing the developing body of realistic drama they were lucky to become fellow collaborators with Chekov who, more than any writer at that time was capable of challenging the new theories in acting to their highest form.
At the end of the 19th century theatre attendance was, by and large, an elitist activity. The technological changes of the 20th century changed the character of the audience and with it the character of theatre. Movies, radio, television, color television, live tv as made possible first by cable and then by then the internet made everyone in the civilized world an expert in the wide variety of human behavior. And because they saw theatrical performances via the same media that brought them the evening news they started to develop the same standard of believability they expected from real life. Everyone had become an expert theatre critic.
(I’m going to continue this blog in the next episode of My Front Porch. I don’t think many people want to read more than a page of history of the theatre at one time. Next time a capsule overview of the conventions of theatrical production through time as dictated by the technological limitations of the day. So why should we care? Because many contemporary productions draw their imaginative thrust by the synthesis of realistic acting styles with the conventions of the past.)
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In my last post to My Front Porch I promised a capsule overview of the history of the theatre.
I wrote the following four paragraphs. By the time I finished I had almost bored myself to death. Those of you with a deep interest in Greek theatre but very little information may choose to read those paragraphs. The rest of you (and by that I mean most of you/all of you) skip those four paragraphs and go on to the observations that lead most directly to the subject—what I call the hyperrealism of the present.
To start with—briefest thumbnail sketch of the history of the theatre up until the present ever: Greek Theatre—probably evolved out of choral poetry sung and danced by a chorus with a choral leader. Performed as part of religious rituals. The popular narrative asserts that Thespis stepped out of the chorus and spoke in the first person rather than the third person. For example, instead of “Achilles arose at dawn and addressed himself to the dawn as Aurora trailed her rosey fingers across the sky. Calling his man to him, he dawned his gleaming armor, beaten from . . .” he said, “I, Achilles. I rise to greet the dawn as the goddess Aurora trails her rosey . . . “. You get the idea. Because the dithyrambs were performed in temples in great open air amphitheatrical seatings, the plays adopted the same practice. This kind of setting is called architectural theatre. More about that when drama enters, first the church, and then inn courtyards in the Elizabethan period. The architecture of the Temple of Dionysus had and has amazing acoustical qualities making it possible for the audience in the cheap seats could hear clearly. However, in order to improve their ability to see the drama (the noun theatre comes from theatron meaning the seeing place) and in order to feature a number of
characters they developed character masks and costumes including cothurnus boots for the actors. (Think the highest platforms in Kinky Boots).
characters they developed character masks and costumes including cothurnus boots for the actors. (Think the highest platforms in Kinky Boots).
Over an unbelievably short time plays begun with a chorus of fifty and one actor under Aeschylus changed into plays with increasingly smaller choruses and three actors. Increasingly the episodes lengthened and the choral songs decreased in importance. Three actors made it possible for playwrights to achieve the ideal formula for action: three actors onstage simultaneously can be protagonist, antagonist, and a third person whose entrance may bring in new information but, more importantly, changes the balance of power between antagonist and protagonist. Finally, friezes of painted scenery were added to the temples before which the plays were performed so that, at least iconographically, actors were seen within the context of a place in the world—temple, forest, interior room and the like. Drama had within hardly a hundred years achieved the theoretical fullness of its form thanks to the dramaturgy of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. (OK, not that brief but a lot shorter than Oscar Brockett’s briefest précis of this portion of history of the theatre and trust me, I’ve read them all.)
The purpose of the arts is fundamentally the one that Horace called teaching by pleasing. In the past a great story teller like Homer could take the listener to the imagination of gods and goddesses, heroes, lovers, sacrifice, betrayal and all the other things belonging to the war between Greece and Troy. It was a way of learning what pleased by describing war as a
narrative. Our brains have developed to make sense of a world that is far too complex to be understood in its entirety by reducing it to a narrative. Novels, plays, operas, songs, etc. take us to a place through imagination and understanding that makes the concepts represented easier to understand and remember than all but the most dramatic events of our own lives.
narrative. Our brains have developed to make sense of a world that is far too complex to be understood in its entirety by reducing it to a narrative. Novels, plays, operas, songs, etc. take us to a place through imagination and understanding that makes the concepts represented easier to understand and remember than all but the most dramatic events of our own lives.
As technology (photography, recording, film, television, computers, cgi, etc. made it possible to be present at dramatic events of the real world only two things were left. We still needed comprehensible narratives to make sense of a world of bewildering phenomena and behavior of actors so accurate that the entire audience would be able to “read” that behavior with the same eyes and ears by which we stay safe in the world. But, as I wrote in an earlier post, we have become so expert in witnessing the vocabulary or real-life behavior that what we require of actors in the present time is behavior based accurately on reality but not having the “noise” of behavior in real life. In the same way that increasingly we expect every single speech, word, and sentence, and speech of a play to illuminate the ideas of the text, we now expect every gesture, every element of the ten elements of behavior with which we write our lives in the air at every moment.
This vocabulary of the ten elements of behavior was first developed by anthropologists as a way of describing the behavior or unfamiliar societies. The vocabulary was borrowed by those in communication theory as a way of doing the same thing in analyzing group interactions in the world. I borrowed the vocabulary because I finally had found something that met a need I felt since my own undergraduate education. The most frequent feedback we were given was something like “You need more behavior,” “You need more interesting behavior,” “You need more accurate behavior.” And Inwardly I would be thinking. Fine! Tell me where the behavior store is and I’ll get me some.” The vocabulary of the ten elements behavior, discovered by me about fifteen years ago, I recognized immediately as the behavior store and I have been working on turning that vocabulary into exercises and working principles for actors ever since—a way for actors to satisfy the need for a realism so pure that it would be recognized by every audience member capable of empathy as truthful.
Next time I will try and unpack (with some brevity) the ten elements of behavior.
For those of you who aren’t actors, it will make people watching much more interesting and understandable - as you observe
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