I thought being an actor meant being famous. But most actors aren’t recognizable. It’s funny — I watch TV in a whole new way now. Like, I watch a show and I see the person who has three lines on Law & Order and I think, “Their family is gathered around the TV flipping out right now. I bet that was a huge deal for that person!” There are so many actors who make a living by doing support work on shows. I was that person for many years. For me to stay in this business, it had to be OK if I was never recognized. I learned that I loved the craft of acting more than the idea of being famous.My first piece of advice to someone who is serious about being a professional television or film actor is this: Move to Los Angeles. Moving to Los Angeles can be difficult, but it is the only city that doesn’t put a ceiling on where you can go with your career. New York is the place to go if you want to do theater, but if you want to be in film and television, move to L.A.
I had a college professor who said, “If you can think of anything else you are passionate about besides acting, do that. Your life will be better for it.” I actually think that might be good advice. I couldn’t come up with anything so, after graduation, I moved to L.A.
Archive for February, 2007
unrecognition
Wednesday, February 28th, 2007Organizational Design
Wednesday, February 28th, 2007I was talking with my girlfriend last night and the subject of lighting design came up. Specifically I was working on the hookup for an upcoming show and started explaining what the database is and how it works. I got into describing different ways of organizing the lighting information for a show and that got me to thinking about how the organization of the lighting itself impacts the final design and composition.
What does this mean?
I am not referring here to the placement of lights in space, or where they point or color or shape or anything physical to do with the lighting instruments at all. What I am talking about is wholly behind the scenes. Under the hood as it were. A lighting designer must divide the playing space up into various areas. Certainly this is true in the United States where the preference and thus the majority of the lighting equipment lends one to use lots of little spotlights working in concert to fill an entire stage. So let us imagine a small dance space, a nice rectangle that can be broken up into a simple 5 by 4 grid. Five areas across by four deep.
This leads to a stage that can be represented thusly:
(16) (17) (18) (19) (20)
(11) (12) (13) (14) (15)
( 6 ) ( 7 ) ( 8 ) ( 9 ) ( 10)
( 1 ) ( 2 ) ( 3 ) ( 4 ) ( 5 )
Some designers like everything to start in the same are so that the first light in every system is Downstage Right, or Area 1. This is good when the design is about creating distinct and discreet areas of light that follow the performer’s and action around the stage. It also means that looking at a computer display you can rapidly determine where a particular light is landing, or supposed to land, without reference to a cheat sheet of any kind.
Another common way to organize this information is with symmetrical systems. This means that if the Crosslight from Stage Right starts at Area (1) then the Crosslight from Stage Left begins at Area (5). This style of organization is often most useful when a more holistic composition is wanted. When the entire stage is lit as whole environment, rather than the more mechanistic sectioning off of areas.
There are of course many and various permutations and variations to these two main systems, but as general categories they work quite well. What fascinates me is that based upon how the EXACT SAME INFORMATION is organized, the compositions created from them can vary wildly.
I will vary the organizational structure of the lighting for a play or ballet depending upon the final composition I am looking to create. Some of the organization has to do with ease of access. Saying “Channel one at full” is easier than saying “channel two-oh-six at full.” Thus it makes more sense to place the lights being used primarily for a show lower in the Channel Hookup than accent lights.
So much of the design is based upon the non-physical aspects of light. In fact the organization of the lighting control has no direct impact on the quality of light itself and in theory it should have little to no bearing on the final composition. Yet, it is a powerful and important player in the negotiation toward the final composition.
Artfuckers Review NYTheatre.com
Wednesday, February 28th, 2007Machado, an esteemed and accomplished playwright in his own right, directs Artfuckers with compassion, but also with a keen eye towards the chilly, self-involvement rampant in its world (his and set designer Mikiko Suzuki’s use of the cinder block walled theatre emphasizes this). Light, costume, and sound designers Lucas Krech, Oana Botez-Ban, and David Lawson, respectively, also make invaluable contributions. And, the production is impeccably acted by Asher Goodman, Tuomas Hiltunen, Jessica Kaye, Nicole LaLiberte, and David Marcus. All five actors inhabit their roles so thoroughly as to suggest that they are those people, not just actors performing on stage. This is very impressive work by everyone.Artfuckers is both hip and moving, and introduces a company of talented artists worth keeping tabs on to a hopefully wider audience.
Reviewing the Patriarchy
Tuesday, February 27th, 2007It is bad form to whine about a review and that is certainly not what I am trying to do about this one in the Times. But the value system underlying the review troubles me. I have no problem receiving a bad review. Many plays I have worked on have been critically received with substantially less than enthusiasm. What I do take issue with is the propagandizing of reactionary patriarchal politics in the guise of a legitimate theatre review.
Let’s examine some core tenets of the Worldview underlying this review:
- Women who enjoy sex are sluts.
- “Fuck” is unprintable.
- Theatre oriented towards a younger audience is less legitimate than theatre oriented towards a middle age audience.
- The passion of youth is worthy of mockery.
Now let’s look more closely.
1) Women who enjoy sex are sluts
Last I checked we were no longer in 1953. In fact I thought that of the many lessons we learned from the women’s rights movement was that women are in fact people. Not only are women people, they are people with the same rights and due the same respect as men.
Why do we know this attitude is propagated only against the female characters int he play? Well, as an example of ‘wry dialog’ a gay male fashion designer talks about exchanging sex for fabric. This is funny. This is healthy male sexuality. But a woman who enjoys sex is a slut. How dare a woman take over the male privilege of sexual enjoyment? /sarcasm
2) “Fuck” is unprintable
Seriously. This is absurd. Every listing has the title Artfuckers except the Times.
3) Theatre oriented towards a younger audience is less legitimate than theatre oriented towards a middle age audience.
Now this one really bothers me. Was the reviewer expecting Dinner with Friends? A quick internet search reveals that NONE of the reviews of that play for its many productions criticized it for ‘consciously writing for’ a middle-class, middle-aged white audience. In fact if such criteria were subject for legitimate criticism, then the lion’s share of plays produced would have that criticism.
True the play does not pander to the values of mainstay theatre production. It does not make itself easy for middle-aged middle-class white value structures. Is this reason to criticize it?
Dinner with Friends and its ilk hold little to no interest for me as an audience member. The value systems propagated in the plays have no bearing upon my life or experiences. Yet, this does not make them illegitimate works for their intended audience. In fact, they are right for their intended audience precisely because I have no way of relating to the characters or situations therein.
I have worked on many plays whose value structures do not reflect my own. Not that they are opposed, but that they simply follow a parallel if not tangential tack. I find these works to be interesting because I must learn to appreciate another value system. I ask questions like, “What is the play trying to achieve?” and “Does it reach those goals?” These feel to me more reasonable questions than “Does this reinforce my personal value structure, because if not then it is worthless?”
4) The passion of youth is worthy of mockery.
This last point comes in from an oblique angle. The given circumstances that set in motion the events of the play are a drug overdose by one of the characters. This is precipitated by a scathingly negative review of the characters work in Artforum. For a young man in his early twenties, obsessed with his art, passionate about the work, this could and probably would to many seem to be the final statement about his as both person and artist.
The play of course outlines the events leading up to this rather drastic action and shows the review to be a proximate rather than ultimate cause. The Times reviewer makes his charge in a pseudo-selfdeprecatory fashion asking “Who tries to kill himself over one bad review these days, when blog- and e-mail-fueled word of mouth has sapped the power of old-media critics?” While this is a bit of an overstatement, just as the character Owen’s actions are a bit of an overreaction, the generally full houses at the perfomances seem to prove it somewhat correct.
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Backstage has another review for those interested.
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I have probably now doomed myself to a life of poor reviews for writing this. Or at least never receiving mention in reviews. I suppose time will tell.
I love clouds
Sunday, February 25th, 2007I was, I don’t know, perhaps eight years old. It was a school trip at lunch or perhaps one summer, I do not remember the details too clearly. I was laying on my back on the grass looking up at the sky. I became mesmerized by the clouds. The slow moving and transforming chaos so filled my consciousness that I totally lost track of time. I can tell this only because I remember at some point a breeze came by and with it time came flooding back into my consciousness. The timeless calm went away but not the captivating qualities of clouds.
Perhaps my love of clouds is wholly astrological, I am a Pisces with Gemini Moon, the fusion of mutable water and mutable air. Or it may simply be that they are transcendently beautiful. Always changing, there is no way to truly capture a cloud. The moment they are there, they are gone once again. Very much like the conscious mind itself it always changes in mood or sensory input or memory or thought. Never the same but echoes and patterns reappear and disappear with alacrity.
I think there is a lot to be learned from clouds. Impermanence. Patience. Tranquility. All these and more are embodied in the life of the cloud. They are change at every level. The counterpart to rivers and lakes and oceans. Before the rain drops fall, after the water evaporates, there are clouds.
Clouds protect us from the constant harshness of the sun. They block a lot of dangerous UV radiation. They can also cause quite a ruckus, storing electricity that unleashes as lightning. From calm to tempest they are powerful and many changing things.
The Next Step Was Training Robot Psychologists
Sunday, February 25th, 2007The project involves building a series of robots that can take sensory input from the humans they are interacting with and then adapt their behaviour accordingly.Dr Canamero likens the robots to babies that learn their behaviour from the patterns of movement and emotional state of the world around them.
The robots themselves are simple machines – and in some cases they are off-the-shelf machines. The most interesting aspect of the project is the software.
Dr Canamero said: “We will use very simple robots as the hardware, and for some of the machines we will build expressive heads ourselves.
“We are most interested in programming and developing behavioural capabilities, particularly in social and emotional interactions with humans.”
The robots will learn from the feedback they receive from humans.
“It’s mostly behavioural and contact feedback.
“Tactile feedback and emotional feedback through positive reinforcement, such as kind words, nice behaviour or helping the robot do something if it is stuck.”
[SNIP]
“One of the things we are going to use to detect expressions in faces and patterns in motion is a (artificial) neural network.”
Artificial neural networks are being used because they are very useful for adapting to changing inputs – in this case detecting patterns in behaviour, voice, movement etc.
“Neural networks learn patterns from examples of observation,” said Dr Canamero.
[SNIP]
“It is very important to detect when the human user is angry and the robot has done something wrong or if the human is lonely and the robot needs to cheer him or her up.
“We are focusing on emotions relevant to a baby robot that has to grow and help human with every day life.”
One of the first robots built in the project is exhibiting imprinted behaviour – which is found among birds and some mammals when born.
Yesterday's Meal Break
Sunday, February 25th, 2007
Diversifying Sustainability
Sunday, February 25th, 2007In a “sustainable” environment, we live in constant fear of greed, accident or malice tipping the balance away from sustainability, returning us to the spiral of over-consumption and environmental depletion. Ironically, the goal of environmental sustainability is highly likely to put us on the path of ongoing environmental management. To an extent, this is already true — ecologist Daniel Janzen argues that we’re better off thinking of the environment as a garden to be tended than as wilds to be preserved — but sustainability as a goal means constant vigilance. It’s not simply that the environment can no longer be considered “wild;” in the sustainability paradigm, the environment can only be considered a subject. A sustainable world is one that manages to avoid imminent disaster, but remains perpetually on the precipice.The underlying problem with the concept of “sustainability” is that it’s inherently static. It presumes that there’s a special point at which we can maintain ourselves and maintain the world, and once we find the right combination of behavior and technology that allows us to reduce our environmental footprint to a “one planet” world, we should stay there. For some sustainability advocates, this can include limiting ourselves technologically, as suggested by the frequency with which such advocates dismiss “techno-fixes” as simply allowing us to continue to behave badly. More broadly, as a strategic goal, sustainability pushes us towards striving to achieve success within boundaries; the primary emphasis of the concept is on stability.
“Resiliency,” conversely, admits that change is inevitable and in many cases out of our hands, so the environment — and our relationship with it — needs to be able to withstand unexpected shocks. Greed, accident or malice may have harmful results, but (barring something likely to lead to a Class 2 or Class 3 Apocalypse), such results can be absorbed without threat to the overall health of the planet’s ecosystem. If we talk about “environmental resiliency,” then, we mean a goal of supporting the planet’s ability to withstand and regenerate in the event of local or even widespread disruption.
Like sustainability, resiliency is a strategic concept, intended to guide how choices are made. But resiliency doesn’t presuppose limitations; rather, it encourages the diversification of capacities, in order to be responsive to uncertain future problems. We can think of this as “strategic flexibility” or “maintaining our options,” but it comes down to avoiding being trapped on a losing path.
When applied directly to environmental strategies, resiliency may appear similar to sustainability in superficial ways. Both sustainability and resilience would encourage aggressive moves to greater energy efficiency, for example. The similarity of tactics belies a divergence of intent, however; for sustainability the purpose is to reduce our impact to below a certain threshold, while for resilience, it’s to increase the resources available to meet future problems. We see overlap like this because resiliency embraces the near-term goal of sustainability, inasmuch as resiliency recognizes that the depletion of planetary resources and ecosystem diversity is a self-destructive process.
Designing Robotic Evolution
Saturday, February 24th, 2007Robots that artificially evolve ways to communicate with one another have been demonstrated by Swiss researchers. The experiments suggest that simulated evolution could be a useful tool for those designing of swarms of robots.Roboticists Dario Floreano, Sara Mitri, and Stéphane Magnenat at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne collaborated with biologist Laurent Keller from the University of Lausanne.
They first evolved colonies of robots in software then tested different strategies on real bots. Both simulated and real robots were set loose in an arena containing two types of objects – one classified as “food” and another designated “poison” – both lit up red.
Each bot had a built-in attraction to food and aversion to poison. They also have a randomly-generated set of parameters, dubbed “genomes” that define the way they move, process sensory information, and how they flash their own blue lights.
“They start with completely random behaviour,” Keller explains. “All they can do is discriminate food from poison.” The robots can see both food or poison from a distance of several metres but can only tell them apart when almost touching.
[SNIP]
Further experiments involving real robots will be used to investigate ways that evolution could be used as a practical design tool. Keller also plans to test what happens when evolved and un-evolved bots mix.
So You Want to See a Show
Friday, February 23rd, 2007Manhattan, NY
Artfuckers
Operation Ajax
The Last Word . . .
Delray Beach, FL
New York Theatre Ballet
