Tag Archives: community

August 15, 2012 · 6:40 am

Acting 101: For All of Us

Here’s what actors do, in one way or another.  Imaginatively, they work to enter the experience of a person, a character, imagining circumstances, beliefs, thought-life, sensory preferences, histories of relationships, and perhaps most importantly, what their particular characters are hungry for, long for, and have been living without.   They then shift their physical and emotional lives to somehow begin to interact with other players to present a story of what it means to be human in a very particular place with very particular cultural, historical, and personal factors in play.  (Note: Imaginative, sensory detail is important.  Where does the character’s particular hunger land in their body?)

One of the cardinal rules of acting is that you cannot judge your character and hope to enter into their hearts and minds.   Be it a murderer, a savior, a lover, or a hated foe, to judge the other as an actor is to kill the process of entering in.    People judge from the outside.   When you’re inside the head of the character, none of that judgment can be going on, because it’s not going in their heads.   Get it?   Whenever you watch an actor that somehow isn’t quite succeeding in disappearing into the character, one of the culprits to watch for is a position of judgment in the approach.

This is a process of play and of work.  It is imaginative, muscular work that takes time, energy, thought, research, conversation, experimentation, and failure.  We watch, we offer the work to others, we try to learn what we can about what it means to be human through these interactions.   Our work is to humanize the 2-D characters that lie on the writer’s page, enflesh them, give them voice, and hopefully, serve that character without judgment.

Will I play characters that are not like me?   Characters who hold opinions in politics and religion and sexuality and economics that differ from mine?   I hope so, or there won’t be much to do.

All of this is simply to suggest an exercise for all of us.   Especially if you’re not an actor, give this a shot.   Pick a person, a real human being (call them a character if you’d like) that sits on the opposite side of the fence from you on some piece of human living that you think is really important.   Perhaps it’s a person (in actor terms, a character) that you don’t like very much, that you’d shout down if you could, or maybe it’s someone you fear.  Pretend you got cast as that person, and now it’s your job to get inside their head, without judgment, to grasp what their hearts are like.   Where they came from, what they’re up to, what they see as important and necessary.    Where do their disappointments lie?   What are their heartbreaks?   What is the shape of their human brokenness?  What makes them laugh?   And what do they long for?   What do they want?

If you’re really gutsy, you’ll realize the only way to actually find any of this out is to move beyond your imagination and actually go ask them.   Befriend them, get to know them, differences and all.   Of course, the actor’s work is not try to change their characters.  The characters are what they are.   We will only understand them or not, enter in fully or not, offer our bodies as places for their stories to live or not, and finally, love them or not.

That’s all.

Let’s say you get all this good information about the character.   What’s the next step?   What’s the next piece of the work?  (You’re going to like this.)   Now your job is to figure out where all the deep, soulful things you found out about the other lie in you.   Because the work of the actor is not to find how the character differs from them, but to find where the places of intersection are.  How are we alike?   The assumption is this; all the soulful things that make one person unique are somehow also located in me, and all possibilities lie within us all.

Maybe call this the deep drilling into the old phrase, “There, but for the grace of God, go I.”

We are all the other.

Humanizing, isn’t it?

To restate the exercise: Be an actor.  Lay down your opinions for a minute and try to imaginatively enter the experience of those you oppose.  Your convictions may not change (changing anyone’s convictions is not the point), but I’m guessing the tone of voice, rhetoric, and conversation might.

And then, who knows what the possibilities might be.

All the world’s a stage…

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September 21, 2011 · 6:48 am

Making Sense and Nonsense: A Conversation at Vermillion

Last night I was privileged to hang out with my friend and collage artist extraordinaire Marty Gordon.   We decided to take in a conversation of seeming epic proportion at a Capitol Hill art gallery gathering place called Vermillion, where a man named John Boylan was hosting a artist-dense conversation on the notion of making sense in a world of increasing craziness and “new norms.”    Boylan has been leading these kinds of conversations for well over a decade, and the back room of the Vermillion was packed with folks of all ages, most of whom were artists of some kind.  There were painters and teachers and non-practitioners, the common thread being the conviction that artists had a role to play in helping the world make sense of reality.

It began with politics and a bit of education on the history of art regarding surrealism and dadaism as attempts to forgo making sense in the cultural landscape that was WWI.   The conversation careened around the room with lots of folks willing to pitch in.   Machine noises (refrigeration units?) would kick on occasionally, making hearing difficult, but I supposed we kept trying to hear because we wanted so much to make sense of things.   There was the much-agreed-upon craziness of the right (they’re driving an anti-intellectual mood just now), the ongoing pitch of Eastern mysticism as a means to non-violence (think Ghandi and TM), and the very sane idea that artists should be working in the communities of which they are a part, embedded among the people they serve.    The artist as hero didn’t get much traction, but one articulate painter called into question the whole Modernist notion of the artist as solitary vision meister or revolutionary.  That’s over, he said.   Television is in some sense the Surrealism of today, and the politics we are living in is just “lies, lies, and more lies.”

I didn’t say much, save for a comment at the end about our increasing discomfort with the discovery that our romantic notions of peacefully coexisting “senses” (read “conclusions”) will only go so far.   People really do come to different narrative conclusions–they tell the story differently.   And different readings of reality really do matter when it comes to street-level living.   The narratives of human enterprise, human community, human consumption and production, human sexuality…the stories being told by differing groups can sometimes co-exist peacefully together, and sometimes not, depending on which story we’re talking about, and just where power lies.

Ghandi and Buddha both got nods as having good ideas.   No one spoke of the Christ, and the disdain for what seemed to be the only public face of Jesus in this discussion was evident and strong.

Marty and I left the meeting a bit unsure of what to make of it.  Passionate, intelligent conversation that left me more bewildered than inspired.   Artists are sensitive folks with huge hearts, with radars that instinctively lean in a Jesus-like direction: solidarity with the poor and the less privileged.  I kept thinking of Walter Brueggemann’s idea that the prophet has to make two moves: 1) bring the critical voice to the ruling falseness of the day, and 2) energize the community through a renewed vision of the real.   These artists really want to live as prophets.  But to do that, you have to first make sense of what reality is.

And the basic human problem is this, and we’ve been struggling with it since the beginning:  how do you make sense of what is obviously so much more than we can wrap our heads and hearts around?  We used to struggle with just a few narratives.  Now there are thousands.   “Sense” must be made even though our knowledge and understanding has limits, and eventually we must all turn to faith in something we cannot see.   For that is our design.   And since for so many, God is long dead and gone, where does our design for faith turn?

The leap to faith (even if not in God, but in something else) will always seem to be nonsense to many.

This is not an easy world we live in…

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October 19, 2010 · 7:10 am

Thoughtful Creatives, Resonance, and Hospitality

This past weekend was a game-changer.

At the end of a pretty bumpy road just outside of Cle Elum sits a place called Chalet Talley, and there I spent a couple of days in the company of dear friends I’d never met before.    It began with a ninety minute ride from Seattle with a beautiful poet of a man.  We talked of Milosz, Rilke, metaphor, Christ, translation, language, and the surprising ease of the conversation.   We eased into Chalet Talley, not sure what the weekend would bring, but heartened by the blessing already given, and by the beauty of the setting.

Host Jack, a falstaffian sort of man exuding hospitality, wit, and quiet wisdom, greeted us from an open window, shouting, “I’m the cook!”    Soon we found ourselves amidst a near-dozen band of artists, mystics, and fools, all of us gathered for a weekend of long, thoughtful conversation about the life and work of faith in Christ as it relates to the processes of making beauty, making art, and making life.   There was no agenda, no set of exercises to work through, no pre-conceived notion of what might happen.  We had not been informed of who else would be there; we’d simply been invited to come to the conversation.   And to top it off, Chalet Talley’s beauty was not only in the charming architecture of a Swiss chalet in the Cascade mountains, but inside there were relief carvings commissioned by the owner, deeply cut renderings of biblical scenes, and they hovered over us, and as we talked, we were constantly reminded of the cloud of witnesses watching.

So we talked.

How do you describe the healing power of being in the presence of those who understand?  Shared experience and thought-life created quick connection, and the burdens of living with the inescapable ambiguities that we artists try to hold up and honor in a religious world that largely demands clarity and easy answers…lifted.    Musicians, writers, photographers, actors, directors…we read poetry, spoke of the Incarnation and sat in quiet wonder about the entry of God into the world, and what it meant for us as we try to emulate that coming.   We wondered how to tease depth out of this swift, shallow culture, wondering about our role in the marketplace.   We marveled together at God’s work in the world, at His refusal to wait for His church to speak truth into the culture, using whatever artist or clown He could find to get the word of His love out there.  We shared our work, spoke of next projects, wept at failures and disappointment, collectively pushing back against the darkness that always threatens to steal into us.

We ate together, shared wine and bread and laughter, and the bounty was more than any of us deserved, a felt reality, a picture of grace and joy, a picture of the great banquet of God that awaits those who love and follow Him.   With eleven men ranging in age from early 20′s to mid 60′s gathered around an absolutely gorgeous table, simply decorated with fall foliage, some of it gathered from a neighbor’s tree (with the neighbor’s permission, of course…spectacular yellow), the conversation was by turns quiet, raucous, funny, intense…even sad.   Resonance abounded.

A community of love is one thing.    A community of love where people resonate with each other is another.

I learned a lot about what it means to create space for such conversation and relationship.   Yes, I’ve been around the block enough to know the dynamic of the mountaintop retreat and the  subsequent fade of luster as post-retreat life begins again.   But I couldn’t help but walk away thinking about how to replicate such space for folks like me more often.  So many of my friends struggle to find companionship that resonates.   Resonant space, resonate hospitality, resonant beauty.

The other big message I got was simply this:  stop whining, be a professional, do the work, show up, push back the dark, get into the marketplace, let my voice be heard, be obedient, trust God, serve the work, tell the truth, let the work heal as God uses it.   Results are not up to me, but the effort of creation belongs to us, animated by God and the One who made all things, and who energizes our making as well.

Thanks to Dick Staub, Nigel Goodwin, and Jeff Johnson for Kindling’s Hearth.    As far as I’m concerned, mission accomplished.   Re-kindled, flame on.

Nothing but grateful, and ready to work…

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October 26, 2009 · 7:52 am

Enchanted April’s Closing Weekend

Friday morning, as I stood with Scott and Pam Nolte in the Gordito’s parking lot watching water cascading into the lobby of Taproot Theatre, one thing was very clear: there would be no performance of Enchanted April that night.  There would be a mountain of work, sorting everything out, getting the theatre back on its feet, making the decisions needed to make the path back to normalcy clear.  But as the minutes ticked by, the staff of Taproot began to show up one by one, and the game was afoot…Enchanted April would continue…somehow.

I can’t give you the blow by blow of how the morning went at the administrative offices of Taproot Theatre as calls and emails went flying through Seattle’s theatre community.   I know there were mulitple offers of spaces from various theatres, and the machinery to move all the costumes and sets (the set pieces that could be moved) from Taproot to a new space was somehow cobbled into place.   (Examiner.com credits a Twitter campaign centered in the offices at A Contemporary Theatre downtown for getting the word out that help was needed.)   A touring show that was scheduled to play at a school Friday afternoon managed to get what they needed from the theatre and that show went on as planned, and there was another performance that afternoon featuring two members of the Enchanted April cast for a convention event of arts professionals.  Sometime late in the morning, the decision was made to accept that generous offer from Seattle Children’s Theatre to use one of their spaces, The Charlottle Martin Theatre, a beautiful 500 seat proscenium space.   The staging of the play would require adjustment–Taproot’s stage is an intimate 220 seat thrust space–so Friday night’s performance was cancelled in order to restage the play for two performances on Saturday.

As costumes were being dried (amazingly, the fire sprinklers in the dressings rooms had not turned on, though they had turned on in the adjacent green room) and treated (they reeked of smoke), as sets and props were being moved, every patron that had tickets for the weekend shows received a call detailing the situation and the options.  Friday night’s ticketholders would have their choice of shows on Saturday, and though some couldn’t make the change, most did.   We had no idea what audiences would be like on Saturday, but whoever was going to be there, we figured they’d bring a lot of love.

The rehearsal Friday night was smooth and fun.  The hospitality of SCT floored all of us; baked treats, well-wishes, kind hand-written notes, and lots of work on their part to help prep the space with lights, sound, and props.  And of course, it also meant altering their own work schedule in preparation for their upcoming production of Peter Pan.   As it turns out, one of the primary concerns about this whole event has turned out to be the inability for Taproot to ever be able to adequately thank or repay SCT and the rest of the Seattle theatre community.

The new digs for the show both demanded and created a new energy among the actors.  The performances had to grow in size to fill the larger space, and it was just great fun making the physical adjustments necessary for the new actor-audience relationship.  Saturday’s shows went beautifully, and as actors, we were thrilled to have the chance to experience a new life in these old lines we knew so well.  The discovery of new nuances, the happy realization that the production could indeed translate the experience well in a completely different venue, and the deeply satisfying confirmation of the support and love Taproot Theatre enjoys among its patrons and the larger Seattle theatre community all made for a rich and satisfying–and memorable–closing day.

Looking back on the experience from a bleary Monday morning, knowing that the Taproot staff is meeting even now to make huge decisions about what the immediate future holds, I count myself so fortunate and blessed to know these good people, and to be a part of this larger community.  In an age of technology, the live actor on a stage in front of the live audience can still deliver an experience that is unmatched and unparalleled by the best of films, the best of TV shows.  I know, it’s just different, but…

Film and TV I enjoy.

Theatre moves me, calls to me…

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September 4, 2009 · 9:07 am

Do We Need Each Other?

Anthony de Mello says not really.

So I’m having this conversation with someone, on whether we need each other or not, and whether our happiness depends on anyone else other that us and God.  And de Mello keeps coming up.

I don’t have his writings in front of me for exact quotes, but my memory is that de Mello posits that most unenlightened human interaction is all selfishly driven, and that when we say “I need you,” what we mean is that we expect “the other” to cater to us in order to keep us happy.   To need others is really to chain ourselves to them, and abdicate responsibility for our own happiness, fulfillment, etc.  He goes on to point the absurdity and selfishness of our own expectation that others–the ones we need–actually place our happiness above their own, and how we often accuse “the other” of being selfish when they place their own happiness above ours.

Okay, so there’s some truth to all that.  However, de Mello would leave us isolated, cut off in some way from the vital relational connection that is deeply embedded in our very nature–in fact, relationship is implied in the Imago Dei, a needed relationship.  The very processes of life are all dependent on relational exchange between various components.  It’s all well and good to say that we depend on God alone, but He exchanges energy and life with us through many, many portals, our fellow human beings being primary among them.

I think we need each other.

That’s all the time I have for now, so I’ll leave it with you.

What do you think?

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