show me how you get down, ok!

SO I just watched this TED talk.

http://www.ted.com/talks/alexis_ohanian_how_to_make_a_splash_in_social_media.html

It's a nice little story about, essentially, the power of the internet and of social media and all sorts of good things and greenpeace. Greenpeace wanted to name a whale something and they wanted it to be meaningful and profound but instead everyone voted for Mister Splashy Pants and it won by a landslide. And because this name voting became so big, the cause that Greenpeace was actually pushing by way of naming the whale went through and they were successful in saving whales n what not.

But the thing that stuck with me was the point that speaker made that due to the conversational give and take nature of the internet ("social media" if you will) once Greenpeace put out this vote to the internet they couldn't control what people's response would be. When MSP seemed to be winning they extended the voting for a week in the hopes that it wouldn't be the final outcome, but by doing that everyone got really up in arms and the MSP campaign upped the ante.

This is an essential element of performance, that try as you might to construct a specific experience for the audience so that they come away with a single monolithic meaning of what they just experienced, you just can't. You can't control if something you said as a joke is not taken as such. I think too often people forget or ignore that fact and just plow forward with their VISION regardless of the audience response. Not to say that you can't stay true to yourself and your underlying message, but just be aware that it might not come through as clearly as you'd like. And that listening to an audience will help you chart your past work and maybe hone your communication skills to better convey what you're going for next time. it's all about communication, people.

Anyway, I'm excited to see this as a development in social communication and since we're such a my-voice-must-be-heard kind of group (twitter, facebook, what have you) audience response will, hopefully, become a factor closer to the forefront of people's minds.

Socrates himself was permanently pissed

I think I'll try an experiment where I'll live by a specific and different philosophy every day or every couple of days. I realize that's really vague. What I mean is I'll take some specific way of seeing the world, as a taoist or a narcissist or ecofella, and try and live it for a day or so. I imagine they won't be necessarily life changing or even too far outside my regular routine, but it might be a fun project to occupy time, break up the monotony, and shake up the ol world view. Not to mention it's a good and money-free way of spending my days. Maybe it will just be in the way I record the day; like maybe I'll be a beat poet for a day and not do anything differently, but I'll look back at the day's events with a certain voice. For that matter I could do each day as a different poet. This will probably involve carrying a notebook around.

Or maybe I could do a day as a character, like I'll spend the day as what I imagine a hipster to be. Without buying skinny jeans.

We'll see how that goes.

the places where people are

So I got thinking about the fable of Xua-Xua the other day, as one does. It's the story of the prehuman woman who discovered theater. Here's a summary stolen from A Fest In Deed:

Xua-Xua was attracted to a pre-human male, Li-Peng. They did all the things a pre-human can do together. Xua-Xua felt herself change physically as her belly grew and became conscious of herself and distanced herself with Li-Peng, who always considered her the best in their horde. Soon the ever swelling belly of Xua-Xua popped a part of her body out of her (what we humans now term as birth of a child, this one’s called Lig-Lig-Lee). Xua-Xua was convinced that this little body was part of her, that they were both one. Li-Peng, like a good member of the audience, watched silently from a distance. Lig-Lig-Lee, like any child, started becoming naughty and even disobeying Xua-Xua, which started confusing her, as if a part of her body would not move in a manner she is directing it to. Eventually, while she was asleep, Li-Peng took Lig-Lig Lee away and taught him things that Xua-Xua hadn’t. From the onset Li-Peng knew that they were two bodies and NOT one.

When Xua-Xua finally found them together, she demanded Lig-Lig-Lee to accompany her back, but he refused and wished to stay with Li-Peng. At that moment Xua-Xua realized that he was actually somebody else, with his own needs and desires; it made her aware that they were not one. This recognition forced her to identify herself. This moment when Xua-Xua gave up trying to recover her baby and keep him all for herself and instead accepted that he was somebody else, and looked at herself, she was at one and the same time, Actor and Spectator; she was Spect-Actor. In this moment, theatre was discovered, and in its discovering, the being became human. This is theatre; it is the art of looking at ourselves.

If I could I'd get this whole freaking story tattooed across my body because it so represents everything I think/feel/believe about theater- about being both actor and spectator, producer and consumer-and about life in general of acknowledging that there exist other people that are separate from us and that by that fact alone we're a community and a society.

This also leads me to a thing I've been thinking a lot about lately, namely that there doesn't seem to be a good deal of acknowledgement that there are in fact other people in the world. and it seems to have done away with any sort of inclination to be nice to each other. We've become such an informal (modern) society that unless we're told to we don't see a point to stick our necks out for other people. I don't want to get preachy about it, lord knows I'm not leading the brigade to save the world, but there's a lot of stupid shit out there and more often than not I encounter people looking out for themselves and who just don't seem to care about other people. Bummer, really.

Enough of that. Here's a thing that's good.

Go! And never darken my towels again!

So I recently got into the show Mad Men. Originally because I wanted to see how it addressed advertising in the 60s, but then of course got caught up in the stories and the excellent acting and all the goodness is has to offer. A major theme of the show, and a thing said explicitly in one episode, is to make your own life. As I haphazardly found myself in the 'real world' of acting, it's something I think about a lot.

Let me reiterate, if only to myself, that I had no intention of being an actor right away. I hoped it would happen at some point, but it was not my goal upon leaving college to start my award-winning career as an incomparable actor. It just sort of worked out that the people who called back were the people who wanted me to be an actor.

The other day I shot a 'corporate video.' A corporate video is a thing companies use to inform their employees about rules or strategies or guidelines or whatever. I have no idea what this one was about, closest I could figure it was about remembering a company's mission statement.

Anyway, during the shoot I tried so hard to focus on being professional and trying to be “corporate” and it just sort of worked out that the crew I was working with were my kind of people and I could be myself more than I thought I could. But despite that I kept thinking about how really, this stuff is just not my stuff. Of course, we starving artists go where the money is to pay the rent and sacrifice the artistic integrity and our passion to make ends meet, but in trying to see what’s really out there I have found that…that stuff is just not me. I don’t mind a gig here and there, but that will not be my career, if I had my druthers.

So it raises this question in me of “well if I’m uncomfortable doing something that isn’t what I ‘do’ anyway, am I really that good of an actor?” but then I have think WAIT no. By saying that, I just dismissed and trivialized my loves of commedia and clown and physical comedy and all that as illegitimate, a fight I’ve been fighting ever since I discovered it. and I guess at Hampshire everyone felt like they were fighting the man and doing something alternative and it just happened that my alternative was contrary to theirs but not seen as illegitimate. Apparently in this “real world” people reference, the average working actor just doesn’t do that. All these method-stanislavsky folks are getting all the work because they were taught to the test; they learned how to make a career for themselves by learning what was already out there. And might I say, all the people that identify as those kinds of actors are really boring people. No thank you.

And then that brings us back to this idea of ‘authenticity as an actor.’ The more it sits with me the more it doesn’t make sense. So I channel the work I did in Italy where I was asked to dredge up terrible memories and I made comic situations where I should have been serious and I kicked myself for it, for hiding when I should have been pouring myself out in a vial because that would’ve been authentic acting, that would have been real emotion. But then maybe I achieved that authenticity because in my mind real emotion isn’t what I put out onstage, I leave my real emotions for my private time and I put on a good show that gives the audience a good laugh. Maybe that was authentic.

So you know, I am a good actor. I love what I do when I get the chance to do it and I want to create more opportunities for people like me who don’t have to do stupid corporate videos to make money. And I should be really grateful that I got a gig like blue lou, even if we only do a handful of shows ever. Because that is doing what I love and I get paid for it.