8. How To Be A Person : In Translation
THE NEWSLETTER FOR JANUARY 14TH, 2024
I am not a great teacher yet. I haven’t been doing it long enough. I’m a great student but that’s because of mentors like Ben Immanuel and fellow actors like Michael Teigen and it’s also because I’ve started teaching. The teaching makes me a better actor. The teaching gives me so much. The students do too. If they only knew just how much. (But the click-through rate of 66% on this newsletter means that some will still remain in the dark about this.)
“The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources,” Albert Einstein
I still talk too much. I don’t ask enough questions. The teacher I will become I imagine is more of an interrogative sniper: from a chair off to the sides in the shadows I launch a well-placed query that spurs on shortcuts to learning.
So let me ask you this, Are you excited about the future?
When I bang on about copying the greats to see how you can do a version of what they are doing I don’t mean you reverse engineer a performance in order to replicate their results, I mean by copying the best you are better able to find your own voice, your own way to the questions I might not always be so good at asking.
What the greats do in performance, when they are at their most formidable, looks like magic to the uninformed but we know better. It’s technique honed by many hours of practice. There are no shortcuts to the hard work you have to put in. Luckily, a creative life only stops when you’re dead. So you have all the time in the world. The pressure is off to make it.
“Good artists copy, great artists steal.” - Picasso
The writer and critic Jacqueline Rose speaks of translation as not about equivalence but about a re-rendering. The actor translates those words on the page into the thing that is most them. You re-render ideas that came from another world (the writer’s) into your world, the physical. Translation is not mimicry. It’s an opinion, an interpretation.
The way we do this is by choosing a path. There are innumerable ones in front of you. There is no need to deliberate on which path to take first. Just take one. The learning is in the doing.
Above is a theory on learning retention. As you can see the teacher has the advantage. But second to that with a 75% retention rate is Practice by Doing. The only shortcut to becoming a good actor is by acting. In class, in auditions, by yourself, with friends. You take the class to get better at auditions and then you meet your people in that class and then outside of class you get together and scheme. In a darkened bar, at a cheap restaurant, drinking in a park (In other words, my youthful charges, this won’t happen via the phone). You plan your next short film, your next digital series, your demo reel. You do this not because it is easy or because it will get you somewhere. It isn’t and it won’t most likely. You do it because making stuff is the very reason why we got into this business in the first place. You’ve just forgotten it in yourself.
Proximity is Everything with Humans
Whatever concerns us it is almost always the thing we don’t have to go looking for. We’re lazy. So if it’s happening in our backyard or if it is splashed across the internet headlines we refuse to pay for we will react. We thrive on anecdotal information: better to generalize grossly with. We don’t want the whole story. Better to paint with broad strokes; he’s evil, she’s good. Russians are bad, Ukrainians are good. We need this to make sense of the world. We need self-righteousness when we lack confidence.
Have you noticed the person that accomplishes big things doesn’t get bogged down by how people drive? I want to be like that. To have the confidence to not react to the small things that are right under my nose because I see the big things coming on the horizon. There’s gold in them hills.
To re-orient, to respond instead of reacting, to re-render. That’s what actors do. That’s what the calm, the sage and wise do. They stand back and when something happens to them they don’t ascribe meaning, instead they say “Good thing, bad thing, who knows?” Because we don’t. Maybe that person that comes to my class and copies the things I say and then regurgitates them online is the very person I need to make my education wholly unique and proprietary. Maybe the person that wouldn’t let you into that lane on the expressway is the one that gets clipped by the speeding truck and you don’t. Maybe that great performance you copied was also copied. Picasso didn’t enter the world out of a void. Glenn Close doesn’t operate in a vacuum. Nor did Glen Gould. The electric vehicle is more than 100 years old. Before there was Elon there was Tesla. Before Streep there was Sara Bernhardt. Before there was Putin there was Stalin. The world is unoriginal. These bad times are not unique. Our suffering is constant because we chose it to be that way. Because it’s easier.
You have more agency than you think, I say to myself.
Re-render your point of view and watch a whole new world open up to you.
And don’t think for a moment that I’ve figured this out. Only on paper am I a master of anything. I am a student at this. The more I teach, the better the teachings. The more I study the better the student. The more I beg/borrow/copy/steal the more lead I have to amalgamate into something possibly worthwhile in them hills.
great sly self deprication