Acting: An Education

I love watching people. I always try to be very stealthy in my people-watching, but I am quite positive I have alarmed more than a few people in my day. The things that people do when they think no one is watching fascinates me the most: Why did they make that face? Why are they talking to themselves? I always find myself creating stories about their lives based off of how they hold their coffee cup or smoke their cigarette. I think artists have the amazing capability of looking at almost anything and creating a story, or just noticing specific details about objects or people that most people do not notice. Everything is heightened, given extra value or importance, and I find that beautiful.

I was drawn into acting for these reasons, and it is what continues to fascinate me: as an actor, you delve into the life of another character, you create a human being, you live through the eyes of another. Human beings are incredibly complex, so it fits that the training required for portraying human beings would be complex as well. In addition to reading acting books and plays, I study psychology books and science books on bioenergetics and muscle and emotional memory, so that I will be further educated on how to represent humanity. It always astounds me how people pick up and move to Los Angeles or New York City to pursue acting careers without any sort of training. While I admire their ambition and faith, I have never found acting to be something that could be “picked up” during a weekend course at the Stella Adler Studio, due to the fact that as an actor, there is no end to education or training.

Growing up, I always had a passion for theatre, and I was fortunate enough to have parents that supported my decision to gain an undergraduate degree in theatre from the University of Southern California. As a senior in high school, I vacillated between attending an acting conservatory or a university; I have found that my decision to attend a university has helped me in countless ways in my acting. The people that I met and interacted with, the professors I learned from, the classes I attended that were not theatrically based, have all given me tools and experiences that I would not have gained had I attended a conservatory. I also earned a minor in Communication within the Entertainment Industry, which allowed me to gain further knowledge in theories of mass media and entertainment—this was priceless information for an artist preparing to cultivate a career in a society immersed in mass media and popular culture. However, I was given the opportunity my junior year at USC to audition for the British American Drama Academy conservatory in London. Eight students from USC, including myself, were accepted for their spring semester program. Classes were held everyday from eight in the morning to six at night; while most students were exhausted and mentally tired after the semester, I found myself more invigorated each day as I became more stimulated and challenged than I had ever been before at USC. The more I studied, the more I craved theatre. This video is from my stage combat class--one of the many classes I took at BADA that I have found to be invaluable to my training as an actor.



Note: This is not me in the video. I wish it was haha, but it is my instructor. However, this is the routine that we learned in class. The ending that my partner and I performed was a bit different: instead of stealing away her dagger with my arm, I did it with my leg after she punched me to the ground.

My experience at BADA only reinforced my love for acting, and showed me that my education as an actor is never over. With such a small class size at BADA, I knew that I was surrounded by exceptionally talented actors, and watching their work while simultaneously watching them grow as actors was probably what taught me the most about theatre. Recently I have decided to apply to graduate MFA programs: UCI, UCSD, Old Globe/USD, Calarts, and Yale. Besides the brilliant faculty that these schools offer, their small class sizes ensure that my creativity and passion for theatre will be constantly enhanced due to being in the company of amazing actors. I will also be surrounded by actors similar as me, who are willing to challenge themselves, take risks in their acting, give fully of themselves to their classmates and teachers, and most importantly, are not looking for fame or fortune, but merely the chance to do what they love. Acting is about creating a complex human being, but it is also about conveying humanity and revealing the small details in life that other people might take for granted. It is looking at life through a magnifying glass. It is being private in a very public place.

Perhaps that is why I love people watching—it gives me a peek into someone else’s life, and I glimpse them in a moment of vulnerability when the facades and masks are gone. I think everyone feels lonely and lost, and it is our responsibility as artists to connect with people that we have never met before and show them that they are not alone. My favorite pieces of art are the ones that when I leave, I feel emotionally stirred—I do not feel as lonely or as lost, and I am reminded again that everyone is struggling, searching.

Other Art Work

I will not even pretend that I am a visual artist or a photographer. I know that there are techniques, theories, methods, and overall, talent, that I do not obtain. However, this blog is about my journey from the south to Los Angeles, I thought it would be fitting to share the photos that I have taken of my home in the South.

The first five drawings on this site were done with charcoal and pastel. The photographs were taken on my digital camera, and because I am not trained or educated in photography, I did no retouching on the photos except a few color alterations (Like I said, obviously not a photographer haha). A lot of the photos are of the Mississippi River, or were taken inside old barns throughout Mississippi and Texas. The last photograph is the home my grandmother lived in when she was younger with eleven other siblings.

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Artist Statement

I have always been intrigued by things that are abandoned: farms, homes, warehouses. Growing up in the south, there is an abundance of land. Plantation homes sink into the ground, pillars rising up out of the earth like colossal giants. I grew up running around between fields and abandoned places, ducking in holes and springing out of underbrush, and I guess that it is the duality of abandonment and mystery that I carry in my blood and ultimately into my acting. It runs through my veins, a dirty Mississippi clay. My poor mother always has to pull over on the side of the road and let me take photos of abandoned red barns during the three-hour treck to my sister’s university. Abandoned places hold a sense of mystery and possibility to me—it is as if their owners still lurk in the walls and in the upholstery of the furniture they decided to leave behind. I am fascinated by what people decide or are forced to leave behind—an old piano, a wicker chair, a sofa. Why did they leave? Why were these things, articles that made up my playground, not able to venture forward along with their owners? Lives used to be played out on that couch. It used to have a purpose. When I approach these abandoned pieces and draw or photograph them, I feel as if I am giving them a purpose again. I find that my work as an actress parallels these ideas of abandonment while I dig for purposes, goals, and objectives for my characters.

When I approach a character, I always look at it as something discarded and abandoned by its last actor. What did they leave behind? How can I inhabit it? How can I change it, fix it, grow in it, fit my form into its nooks and crannies? Once again, I feel as if I am giving this person a purpose, giving them a voice and a body so that they can tell their story. And at the end of a run of a play, after the last curtain call and cast party, I am always surprised at how quickly that character, the character I had inhabited for two months, has left. And suddenly I am the abandoned one, left only with a remembrance of lines and the way they held their chin or moved their pinkie. It feels like a breakup—you wake up one morning, and they are gone.

I treat the end of the play like the end of a relationship. I hide everything about that play and character. I stick my notebooks and research and lines in a drawer and I do not open it. It makes me sad. I will never experience that person in the same way ever again. Even if I were to play that part again, it would be completely different because of the people in it and because of the time period of my life. And even though a house cannot pick up and leave its owner like the characters I inhabit leave me, each are constantly recycled and renewed, renovated and re-owned. Every character, like a house, has their own set of walls and defenses to protect themselves—these walls create mystery and intrigue; to me, the vulnerable parts that people keep hidden from others are the most fascinating.

It is difficult to say why I do what I do. I do not know what I do. I just do it. I had a teacher say to me once, “Good acting is like the kitchen sink.” I had no idea what he meant when he first said that, but as I grew as an actor I began to understand what he was saying—good acting is not a showing off of technique. It is not deciding, Ok I will cry here, or I will impress the audience now with my ability to scream really loud. Good acting is living. It is making your technique invisible through abandonment so that the audience is seeing a human being, and not an actor. My technique is a combination of Michael Chekhov, Stanislavski, Uta Hagen, Adler—I do not rely on one specific method, just how I do not play one specific character in every show I perform in. What is important is finding the technique within the script, and then fulfilling the playwright’s wishes through the method that is found. Michelangelo once said about his work that every piece of marble has a statue inside of it and that it was the job of the sculptor to find it. He also said that he sees angels inside the marble, and he carves away until he has set it free. I see humanity inside the lines written on the page, and I deconstruct and chip away at the walls, just how Michelangelo chipped away the walls of the marble, until I find the heart, the seed, of the character. I always leave the run of a show feeling fragmented, yet unified. I am part myself, and part that character—it is as if the character has attached itself to me, and I cannot shake off their gestures or speech pattern. It is always a mystery at the end of the run of a show what is left behind the walls of the character, what I never discovered, what questions I could not answer. What is always frustrating is when six months later I awake in the middle of the night in a moment of epiphany and wonder how I was ever so clueless as to not choose that gesture or see that emotional clue. Every now and then they run around inside me, filling me with their lines like my laughter used to fill those empty spaces. I guess my characters never really abandon me after all.

Autobahn

Two weeks ago I sat in a small black box theatre and for two hours watched a play take place in a car. I guess a lot of people would call that boring; there were no big fight scenes, no sex scenes, and no dancing and singing musical numbers. However, this play was incredibly intriguing and thought provoking. Written by Neil Labute, Autobahn is a series of vignettes that give the audience a peek into different kinds of relationships and actions, all taking place within a car. These seven scenes range from a young couple going "parking", to a pedophilic teacher and his young student going on a road trip. What was fantastic about this production and the direction was how the scenarios and the relationships, at first, seem familiar and bland; the scene picks up mid-dialogic conversation, forcing the audience to play catch-up and analyze what is taking place in the scene. However, as the scene progresses, the audience realizes that not everything is as it seems. As the director points out in his notes in the program, "some form of betrayal cries out to be addressed...the destination often holds a potential for violence, violation or the disintegration of a relationship."

There is also an interesting tension that is created by the confines of the car. Each actor is spatially constricted by the car, forcing them to think creatively in respect to their physicality in their acting; furthermore, the characters are restricted by the car and their relationships in that within the climax of the scene, the characters are forced to stay and talk--there is no escaping the inside of the speeding car, which only amplifies the drama and raises the stakes. For each character, the car is simultaneously a prison and a safe-haven, barring themselves in, while also ensuring the presence of their other-half. The characters are also restricted by the confines of language. Each scene is full of misunderstanding as characters struggle to articulate their desires and their fears.

While I loved the production and the directing, my main complaint comes as a consequence from the acting choices that were made. While it could be argued that my problems came from the work of the director, I feel as if the choices that were made were from a lack of preparation and studying by the actors, not as a result of the directing. I feel that it is the job of an actor to present something new to the audience that they would not have been able to discover on their own just by reading the play. It seemed that some of the actors in this production just focused on memorizing their lines and then delivering them in a natural-sounding tone. All of the actors are trained very well technically, that is obvious. However, there seemed to be a lack of commitment in a few of them to do their homework and discover what their characters wanted, what was in their way, and to then discover new tactics to getting their objective. Each scene was, on average, fifteen minutes in length; fifteen minutes can be a long time for an audience member when they are watching an actor do the same thing the whole time. What is brilliant about Neil Labute, and why he is one of my favorite playwrights, is that his writing seems so effortless and natural; however, this can be a trap for actors because an actor could become complacent in just sounding natural and decide to not push or strive for the deeper meaning of the work. In the end, all of the scenarios collide in a car crash, symbolizing the reckless decisions made by the characters that then lead to consequences, fatalities, and injuries when they crash into the lives of the other characters. If some of the actors had done more work, this last scene would have been much more dramatic and impacting. Unfortunately, some of the actors were on cruise control, and couldn't keep up with the racing performance of their cast mates.