Week 3 | The Method

Noise Vs Art

Method Acting

"The Method’s most salient legacy may have more to do with media than with emotional recall, with the ways recording had already changed performance and spectatorship (293)"

"But what Brustein called inarticulateness is actually a more complicated proposition about the relationship between noise and music, sound and sense, aesthetic and unaesthetic elements in acting and, indeed, in art—and the ways that recording technology was intervening to transform understanding of these relationships (294)".

In terms of recall, a student study in 2004 found some evidence that people from the silent generation dreamt in black and white. This could be the result of either a) television truly effected the ways we perceive or unconscious dreams, or b) during recall, the images associated were in black and white due to the association with the technology at the time. In the future, where smell-o-matic technology can make its way into a technological landscape, maybe our dreams (or our recall of dreams) will be filled with smells too. 

In our conversation about Theatre and Canonicity and Performance, we briefly talked about recall and experience of text, briefly mention how the contemporary moment seems to forget the historical popular at the time. As a non-theatre person, even I assumed that Shakespeare was the most famous playwright at the time and among his peers. One could consider this "inarticulateness" to also run with popularity and niche, one to be understood as noise of the masses against particulars of aestheticism. This could either be in our contemporary moment how the the division between quality and  and mass produced art is communicated to us, or the possibility of how we recalled previous debates about art, recreating that sense of division. [I imagine Scorsese commenting on how the Superhero Blockbuster irreputable change cinema as we know and the commentary and backlash based on that statement.] 

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Method as a way to "willingly" accept violence in the service of art. "The actor must be able to shape hir choices and impulses onstage such as to be able to reproduce the action every night with conviction and clarity". We see this propagandistic and patriotic rhetorical drive towards "completion" against inner and external tension. "Strasberg instructs the actor to push through the struggle and say, “I’m going to follow through. I’m going to go through with it come hell or high water. I will not let myself slide back the moment I feel insecure. I will go on". In the US context, Strasberg amplified the systems tendency to view hesitation and struggle as a sign of weakness. " Actor Training is assumed to to trend towards specific desires that are waiting to surveilled. Violence, then, is inevitable. This is all to say how much there is desire to unite the actor and the character they might be portraying. A uniting that is linked with the act of sex that convene unsatisfying presence of sex towards outside forces of an audience. But that trend pretends that the illusion to the Real isn't there. That this method towards acting reduces the nature of people to a function of form. AT first glance this is an opposite of my own performance methodology and theory, which has been trending away from my own erasure of self by drawing on my own experience. I myself performed a sword dance, and towards the very end the exhaustion (from both the emotional content and the physical and mental drain) and the function of the dance strips away to reveal cracks of the performer underneath in the present moment.  It does sound like "Whiplash", where the portrayal of large ensemble Jazz bands seems not only competitive but violently cutthroat. Shouldn't art and still be enjoyed by those that dedicate themselves to the craft?


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