On Acting: Or, how you can't always fake it 'till you make it...

Holding off on the literary criticism for a bit, I wanted to share an interesting little experience I had in rehearsal last night...

Sarastro, my character, is in the same class as people like Dumbledore in Harry Potter, Gandalf in Lord of the Rings, or Nelson Mandela in Invictus. In other words, he has serious amounts of prestige, authority and power, but also expresses it gently and humanely. This is a pretty easy concept to grasp and very easy to spot on stage. It's also, as it turns out, very hard to produce... that is to say, hard to produce when you don't have it.

Authority is one of those tricky things. It's subtle. It's a subtext. It's when your posture, your tone of voice, and your very being project a blazing confidence that you are in control. As my staging coach mentioned in rehearsal, it's a lot different from exerting and posturing power over others. It's much more about the awareness that you could.

This is all well and good, and I could write pages explaining the concept. However, something else came up last night... see, I'm younger than most of the cast, new at this level of performance, and generally have been out of my element wandering around rehearsal spaces in the city after rushing there from work. All this put together, plus a few inner personal life issues, and it turns out Steve doesn't have a lot of that inner confidence that needs to be showcased. This makes acting the role rather hard.

Now, this is not going to turn into an emotive post. I'm not writing this to say "hey everyone look at me the emo kid who feels intimidated." Not at all. In fact, I found that very authority-reservoir within myself a bit more on my 10 minute walk back to my car that night, when I was listening to my iPod music and was more in my element...

...But it just served to illustrate pretty clearly to me that acting isn't all, well, acting. In a lot of cases, the only reason actors can pull of what they're doing on the stage is because they're not faking it. They're drawing on their own experiences, their own inner reserves, to go to that place (or show that emotion, or whatever) in the fake environment on the stage. It's the setting that's fictitious, not the actions.

If you think about that, there are huge connotations and implications on the nature of acting, or watching someone act, and the effect of it all on us as people.

For one thing, it raises the bar as to what you are messing with if the material is controversial or disturbing...
For another, it also holds more potential for the actor to discover things about himself or grow in the process of "taking on" a role. Indeed, more than that, it makes the euphemism "taking on a role" really mean something fairly concrete.

Often when coaching someone in public speaking or beginning any position of authority, it's often said "fake it 'till you make it". That points to the fact that we learn by doing more than we learn, then do it. But there's also a flip side to that little phrase... and I think that sometimes it may more true to say that you can't fake it until you've made it.

Introducing the Magic Flute: Or, here we go again, Steve is in a show...

Now that the production of The Magic Flute by MetroWest Opera is kicking into full gear, I've finally had the chance to dig into the story some more and I'm really surprised by how many things I've found in it that I like. (Particularly since the work when staged with its original text and setting is a rather bizarre surrealist Freemason allegory.)

Fortunately the directors of MetroWest are taking a few moves out of the modern theater playbook and are playing fast and loose with it to make it a bit more enjoyable. On most occasions, I'd balk at such things, but in this case, I think it works. We've gotten rid of a lot of the misogynistic and racists spots and with my own few subversive tweaks here and there, there's almost nothing objectionable to it now. In fact, since the plot is admittedly vague and uses a lot of generic symbols (light and darkness, vanity and virtue, "righteousness"...) I'm finding plenty to think and write about while working with it. I hope to share a few of those in the next couple of weeks.

Here's a quick run-down for those of you who don't know the story, so I don't lose anybody later in my musings...

Tamino, a noble and enthusiastic brave lad, is rescued by the servants of the Queen of the Night from a tight spot with a giant dragon... they in turn recruit him to rescue the Queen's daughter Pamina, who has been kidnapped by the ominous Sarastro. Tamino, seeing her picture, is all for it and marches off...along with the help of a goofy and cowardly man named Papageno, a bird catcher with a weird costume. Oh yes, and in order to help them accomplish their mission, they're given a Magic Flute and some Magic Bells.

Once they come to the gates of Sarastro's temple, they are blocked from entering by the guards. There the guards inform Tamino that he was deceived, that Sarastro is actually the paragon of goodness and the queen is evil.

After meeting Sarastro himself and being shown the error of his ways, Tamino agrees to undergo the Three Trials (cue thunder clap and rumble), become an initiate of the Temple of Wisdom (cue angelic choir and shiny lights), and generally rise to the status of brave and upright manly man...

...in the process, the evil queen is vanquished, a sketchy servant is foiled, Tamino gets the girl, Pagageno gets a wife, and lots of pyrotechnics are used.

Next entry I'll talk a little about the big themes that get worked out in the story, and maybe the big ideas of each character... in other words, why we care about such an odd story.

Christ Is Risen!

Indeed He is Risen!

Thy Resurrection, O Christ our Savior, the angels in heaven sing. Enable us on earth to glorify Thee with purity of heart!

Christ is risen from the dead trampling down death by death and upon those in the tombs bestowing life!

This is the day of Resurrection! Let us be radiant, o ye people! Pascha, the sacred Pascha of the Lord! From death to life, and from earth to heaven Christ our God has raised us who sing this hymn of victory!

Come, let us drink not drawn from a barren stone but the Fountain of Life, springing forth from the tomb of Christ, in whom we are established!

Divinely speaking Habakuk, now stands with us in vigil, and brings to light an angel saying Christ is risen as all powerful.

Let us arise in the dawn and instead of myrrh offer a hymn to the Lord, and we shall behold Christ, the Sun of Righteousness, who causes life to dawn on all.

Thou didst descend into the nether regions of the earth, O Christ, and didst shatter the eternal bars which held the prisoners captive, and like Jonah from the sea-monster, after three days Thou didst arise from the grave.

He Who delivered the Children from the furnace, and became man and suffers as mortal, and through suffering clothes mortality with the beauty of incorruption, is the only blessed and most glorious God of our fathers.

This is the chosen and holy day, the first of Sabbaths, the Sovereign and Queen of Days. The Feast of Feasts, Holy day of Holy Days, on which let us bless Christ forevermore.

Magnify, O my soul, Christ the Lifegiver, Who rose form the grave of the third day!

-The Matins Canon of Pascha

Methinks Thou Protest Too Much: or, how conservative critics often miss the point by being too detail-oriented

Normally I eschew apologizing for long lapses of absence, but in this case I'll make an exception, sorta. And while I'm at it, I apologize for using the word "eschew" in a sentence... I swear, my language gets 5x more hypocritically high-brow when I write these things... it just kinda comes out...

At any rate, in what little time I have these days (a few operas, Lent, and a job/housing search notwithstanding) I'm working on a project to collect, organize, and synthesize all my posts and essays on the Arts from the past few years. This has been taking me away from writing new posts (because I have the lingering feeling I'm cyclically repeating old arguments without meaning to) but it's also made me want to write more, too many more in one sitting actually... so I suppose it's a pro-and-con situation.

The comments I wanted to (maybe briefly?) make tonight just to get the ball back and rolling again has to do with moderation.

In the past few months I've heard a few really great talks and essays that in their own way have collected into a single theme for me. The paradox is a familiar one, if you think about it:

1. On the one hand, the little details really do matter.
You can have a fantastic story with exciting plot points and great techniques and moments, but as I've pointed out in previous posts, if it twists the final message just a little bit, it can honestly ruin the whole thing. (For an excellent example of this sometime, get me going on the move The Matrix...but I won't get into that now, the second point coming up is more important)

2. On the other hand, almost nothing annoys me more artistically than someone who is offering criticism that goes well beyond the original scope of the work's original intentions.
I was listening to a podcast this week talking about our environmental worldview, and the speaker usually has very good points to bring up, but he's also very often overly hyperbolic in his examples, which to me, very quickly undermines the whole adventure.

Here's a case example of what I mean: The speaker was talking about going too far in our "environmental conservation" mindset that we lapse into demoting humans and their place in the world. This is a really important point. He was denouncing the kind of generic spiritual "mother earth" language that wrongfully deifies Nature. But then he brought in the film Avatar. He then went on to say that the film, through it's Native American-style spiritual content, was promoting a dangerous pantheistic religious worldview which was also suggesting that the only real sollution to man's pollution of the planet is to evict humanity from it. Now I'm gonna stop right there and say, "no it doesn't."

For the record, the film was proposing an fictional alternate ending to the tragedy of the Native American conquest. Yes, it was environmentally based. But the world of Pandora was a direct metaphor for the New World, aka North America. It wasn't saying we ought to take Earth and ship out our people to space. That's just the kind of analysis that goes too far which I'm speaking against here.

From here I want to take one step back and address one more broader point, one that some of you have heard me say many times before... Sometimes for a story to be effective and true to itself, it has to contain elements which are in themselves ...not ideal. In this case, the film contained a Native American style spirituality. Obviously a Christian observer would not endorse converting to animism when (s)he extols the film's environmental message. Would the story even work if the Navi had a monotheistic religion that looked surprisingly like Christianity? This sound ludicrous, but I almost feel like I have to go this far to counteract the points I hear a lot. This is the essence of the whole anti-Harry Potter mania that came out of the Religious Right.

It comes down to misunderstanding a very important rule of Art: In fiction, not every element is a 1-to-1 parallel to the real world.

So a balance has to be made. And I'll admit, it's a tricky balance. The first half of the paradox still stands. Details do matter. If those little elements do manage to push the final message over an edge, then it has to be called out. But let's not go nuts here. Especially when we're talking about art which is made by non-Christians.

Life, Digital Life and Dangerous Art: Or, why I just might keep watching Caprica…

Today I came home and sat down to check online for episodes from a few of my regular shows. I don’t have cable, and so I’m at the mercy of channels that post “rewind” courtesy episodes on their websites. Fortunately, most of the shows I watch do so. In the process, I stumbled upon Caprica, the prequel spin-off to the recently finished Battlestar Galactica run. At first I told myself I wouldn’t get into that show, because I didn’t care for the way they were teasing it on the trailers. But since the pilot was still posted, I thought I’d give it a chance.

Without spoiling anything too drastically, the setting is a world basically like our own, though with some really interesting twists (classical Greek polytheism meets late 20th-century religious cynicism for one). The premise is still really vague and mysterious, but it seems to be that a teenage girl designed an artificial intelligence, which due to being misunderstood and abused by humankind, will eventually go “bad” and become the Cylon badguy of Battlestar.

Ok, forgive me for the dry Science Fiction, but I had to give some context. What sparked my attention was how aptly it addresses the idea of the Internet and technology in today's world (as any good sci-fi should). There’s a line where the intelligent program is defending herself as a real person and she lists-off how people leave lots more than just "footprints" online. Credit card purchases, photos, journal entries, newspaper archives, medical records… in short, biological and psychological profiles...

Here's where my attention really got caught...

While I was watching this show, I was also on something of a mission. My good friend is getting married soon, and she wanted a picture of my tuxedo. I didn’t have one, but I knew other people did. This led me to manually searching through the Facebook picture archives of a dozen of my old College Choir alumni friends, looking for candid and performance shots with our short-coats. That in itself led me to pause for a moment or two.

With only a little premise, I could easily dig through 6+ years of many, many people’s lives. Moreover, thanks to the friends-of-friends feature and people’s penchant for posting large amounts of personal information and photos online, I found that if I wanted to, I could probably reconstruct a decent outline of the last decade of the lives of complete strangers.

Without trying, and in a very real way, I’d proven the very point of the episode. Science fiction to social commentary, just like that. This also seems to resonate with my last post, where I reflected a little bit on the dominant metaphor of the film Avatar. (The movie audience vicariously lives the story by technology the same way the character lived in an avatar.)

Where am I going with this? I mostly wanted to bring up the situation anecdotally, share the moment of coincidence and just say “hey creepy.” I also wanted to plug Caprica, because despite how disturbing the show’s producers can get, they touch on some really apt themes and messages that are worth looking at.

But it also leaves me with something of an open-ended question too, which I might pursue in later posts. There are a lot of shows out there that are pretty powerful because they touch on real questions. But it’s also important to be really aware of what answers are being put forth.

For the past few years I’ve written and advocated that valuable artistic engagement is based not so much on aesthetics (whether it’s pretty) but more on the validity of its thematic content (whether it’s true). I’ve since come to learn the hard way that such a philosophy is a bit dangerously naïve. It’s not just whether the question is valid, you also have to see how they’re answering the questions.

These days I give my compliments to television producers. They’re asking better questions than they used to. It used to just be drama for emotion’s sake and comedy sit-coms for the masses. Now they’re delving into stuff. Bravo. But some of their solutions have been far from wholesome. I got caught in the middle of it for a while…still do sometimes. And I’m curious to see what Caprica brings up.

The Fickle Avatar, or why a movie can be simple but still good

Editors note: I appologize for the rambling nature of this one, it's been a long while since I've written here, so I'm out of practice, and I have a lot of divergent thoughts spinning in my head at the moment. So please take the ideas as more underdeveloped than I'd wish...

So I have to admit two things up front:

1. I loved James Cameron's Avatar
2. I'm really really tired of people ragging on the movie.

I keep hearing the same complaints over and over again, the plot is too simplistic, the story is nieve...etc. Well, I'm going to try my best to avoid being snippy about all this, but I'll put out here right now my thoughts on those ideas. I'm reminded of Johannes Brahms' comments when a music critic remarked how his 1st Symphony was awfully similar to Beethoven's 9th. (For those of you who aren't music nerds, his response was "Any @#$( can see that.")

His point? The same as mine: Get over it.

Dear critics, you think you can do better, try yourself to make a movie that makes more money. (Oh yeah, and by the way, last time I checked, it's the highest grossing film ever, not counting inflation.)

Ok. My little hissyfit is over. Thanks for being patient with me. Now on to some real comments about it.

1. A simple plot, a simple message.
I don't have a problem with simple plots. The message was straightforward. It's a thinly veiled allegory or parable for how we did some serious damage to the Native Americans. And we really did. Sometimes I think this really gets lost on my generation. We hear about it so much we're really cynical. So instead we deride any depiction of "over-utopian" views of Indian life before the big bad colonists came along. That's a defense mechanism on our part. It doesn't change the fact that we still haven't come to grips with the fact that as a civilization we came in and erradicated another one. I'm not saying we can undo it, but I don't think we can ignore it either.

While on that note, I think it's also worth mentioning that other than the historical theme, the basic pro-environmental view is also worth looking at. This is where religious people start tweaking out and getting fidgety. "It's promoting pantheism!" They decry. I say no it's not, really. It's depicting a society that saw their connection with Nature as a whole. They gave it an theomorphic name. (And by the way, they hid it behind science quite directly too, noticing the rather high-caliber biological explanations for their religious attitudes.) It's not really my aim to get on a high-horse on that one, I just felt like mentioning it.

2. Bigger and deeper things

For those of you who still don't like my defense of the plot's simplicity, then here are two much deeper elements that nobody seems to notice or talk about. The avatars themselves... they present quite an interesting metaphor. The use of digital technology to lead a person to eventually come to a much deeper appreciation and harmony with nature? Critics seem to look at that as hypocracy. I see it as a very subtle and deep irony. Moreover, it's a metaphor for what we're doing as audience members.

The film is most famous for its "groundbreaking" 3D technology. In essence, we're emersing ourselves into the reality of the film as deeply as our technology can go, so much that our nervous systems are being tricked into thinking we're surrounded by the sensory experiences of the world on the screen... Hmmm, does that sound...familiar?

That's the whole point of films. In video games, we use that very word, avatar, to describe our virtual projections into the created worlds. Some are highly critical of this. To keep it in the movie, let's look even deeper. The main character, through his avatar, comes to a deeper understanding of nature, it's what brings him to his crisis moment. However, interestingly enough, in the "simplistic plot" the avatar isn't enough. Eventually, he has to go through a deeper change that more fundamentally transcends his false-interface. If he's going to internalize and live out the lessons his technology taught him, he eventually has to go beyond just using that technology as a tool... I'd say that's a fairly nuanced and profound way of saying we can use our media to teach us lessons, but it's not just escapism, we need to actually change ourselves. That doesn't seem too superficial to me.

The second thread I won't go too deeply into, I think I've already touched on a lot so far. But if you're curious, I'd say look at just how many blazingly Christian metaphors are within the story. Conversion and Baptism/Resurrection in particular. My point is just this...

The plot may have been "predictable," but it wasn't meant to be a mystery...
It didn't present any original story twists, because it was essentially relating a true (rather that original) story...
The storyline might have been "simple," but its very ontological metaphors and secondary meanings go much deeper than anyone is giving it credit for.

I, for one, am going to see it again.

The Performance Paradox: or, why I sometimes hate doing what I love

So it seems I've let this go delinquent a bit, sorry about that. But anyone who knows a performing artist personally should know about the Winter season and what it does to us.

The ironic thing I find is that so often, this season is so hectic that we artists can forget to enjoy what we're doing. It sound ridiculous, I know. Especially for those of us who dedicate our lives to the stuff, and even write blogs gushing about it's power and importance. Sometimes, when we ought to be really grateful and lively, people, we're just flustered and aggravated.

Now, there is at least one valid reason for all that.

An old teacher and now colleague of mine, Prof. Thomas Brooks once told us when we were in the college choir that, in a lot of ways, we were like the college's flagship sports team. We had to act like a team, we had to do it all despite our academic work load, some of us even took the activities of the choir to be the real focus of our time at college, etc. The parallels match up pretty evenly. (And anyone who has been on riser-crew knows that concerts can be as strenuous as a full-contact sport). But there was one exception, a sports team has a season of wins and losses. The college choir, he said, couldn't. We had to have a perfect season every time. If we didn't, there was no going back.

Now, it was a bit of an exaggeration, but I think the point holds true. In sports, you have a lot of plays and sometimes they go bad. It's expected to an extent. You're just an athlete. In the arts, if it goes bad, it is not expected. It's a serious failure. You're not competing in a zero-sum game against an opponent, you're competing against yourself and all the logistical challenges of doing the art.

Any of you who do the arts knows this is true. However incredibly romanticized the performance world is, we don't just go up there and emote and sing and dance and story-tell naturally. We practice, we wrestle against our own nerves, the humidity, the acoustics of the room, etc. Now, if you're far enough along, you know how to overcome that stuff. If you're still learning, it's a battle. But even when you're good, it's still a conscious effort.

So all that to say, sometimes when the dice roll against you, as an artist you have to go into "survival" mode. You go on stage, you smile, you spend every moment controlling all the different factors and you get it done... the audience will usually still be happy, and the outcome can even still be pretty good. But in the process, as an artist, you didn't really do your thing. You just got through it. Then there are the times when you went up there and made music, did your art, told your story. Those are the real wins.

Contrary to popular opinion, the audience cannot tell the difference most of the time. I've known degree-recitals which went horribly, and very intelligent audience members said "I could really tell you were getting into it there" etc. That's fine. This is a testimony to those of us on the stage. We cannot let the audience know. We just have to carry it within ourselves.

Ok, now this post is rapidly becoming a bit of a downer. That's not my intention. But I did want to talk a little bit about the paradox between the art, how much we love it, how we even dedicate all our time to it, and yet how hard it is to pull it off, and when you're there, sometimes you're just not all there. It's weird. But it's just part of the job, I suppose. You can't really ignore it. But you certainly get work over it. I've done that sometimes, other times not so much.

So, this season, I won't tell you what my real score is, because on the outside it's still 3-0. Another one coming up tonight. But I will tell you that I, for one, intend to do my thing rather than just survive.