AUDIENCE COLLABORATION.....

...SEEMS TO NOT ONLY BE CONFINED TO OUR SPECIES...

BARBARA COOK: SAFETY OF THE MOST DANGEROUS PLACE...

I quoted Barbara Cook on an earlier post. Here it is again -- reminding my students to take the risk and explore the safety of the most dangerous places.

"If you can get to the point where you are ready to use every joy, every death, every lover who has left you...If you are willing to explore that within the song, you cannot be wrong."  And especially when her disjointed sentence told a student, "The very place where safety lies for us is the same that seems most dangerous, and the sharing - the courage to let people really, really get into what life is into -- and sets it free."

MITT ROMNEY - EMOTION DERIVED FROM COGNITION AND...

...as well, the circumstances under which those thoughts/images are being evoked.  Mr. Romney read from a written text, one that must have gone through careful preparation, rewrite and editing to be sure he had accurately expressed his ideas.  I'm guessing he read it aloud several times; to himself and others.   We don't have that information, but surely he didn't intend to find himself overcome with emotion, unable to continue, when he said, "I am profoundly religious.  My faith is at the heart of who I am."  I think that a heightened awareness of whom one needs to reach with one's thoughts is what produces an emotion that under other circumstances might not appear.  Therefore, we're back to the action, the need -- what do I need to do to my partner?

For Mr. Romney, in this particular circumstance, it was his colleagues -- his fellow citizens - the world.

 

BEING SIMON CALLOW: "Acting is thinking the thoughts of another person."

Hey, everybody!  I've been talking about this interview to so many of you, that I decided to look for it, and here it is:

BARBRA STREISAND, SARAH VAUGHAN - PERFORMER / AUDIENCE CONNECTIONS

Whomever it was Streisand had in mind is not someone we'd know of with certainty, but what's obvious is that she had someone in mind. Note that when the camera moved to the audience and focused on one of its members, that that woman connected to her own life experience, not Streisand's life experience.  Did that woman say to herself, when she bought her ticket, "Oh, my, I'm going to Streisand's concert soon; I must go over all my romantic experiences in order to be able to find my substitutions and connect with my emotions!"?  Regardless of the story, what makes a member of the audience spontaneously laugh, cry, get angry, remember an event, etc.?  Isn't it a connection to the ideas/images they hear?  That's why I suggest diving head first into the character's actions because how and if they will resonate for you will be discovered by trusting that it's somewhere there in your body.  Both Hagen and Adler suggested, in writing, to seek a substitution only if all else failed.

Here's Sarah Vaughan with the same song and a different life experience.  She moves me with every song I've heard her sing because she seems to combine her words with the musical notes in a particular way that vibrates, illuminates, the idea/images she needs to convey.

And another one -- ah, the angst we'd need to go through dredging up memories days, hours, before taking a comfortable seat, seeing who's in the audience, pleased we dressed appropriately for the occasion, and then again, preparing our painful memories in order to participate in the audience's experience listening to:

IN MY MIND'S EYE

I first saw this photograph of Stella Adler in the role of Bessie Berger in Clifford Odets' play, Awake and Sing hanging on a wall with other photo memorabilia of the Group Theatre at the Stella Adler Academy in Hollywood.  I'd usually stop to look at it whenever I was there because each time I did, I noticed something I hadn't noted before, and just the other day, while discussing thought, I mentioned it to an actor who's prepping for a production that goes before the cameras this month.

Note and get from it what you will -- but just to remind you, the play was performed on a stage in a theatre, and what Stella was actually looking at was whatever objects stagehands had assembled to be used in other scenes and those walls were actually flats, the odor of which I can still remember, and in my experience didn't diminish from opening to closing night performances.

HEADING FOR A PRODUCTION AT THE GROUP THEATRE OR DINNER WITH STELLA AND HAROLD

 

AH, IMAGINING...opening night of The House of Connelly and being invited to meet them at Sardi's after the show?  Imagine....