Should me no shoulds, Kent: I just said that was a model which made sense
to me.
>One thing that occurs
>to me right off, in resposne to Alison's remark, is that the vast majority
>of poets today, even those who have trained their voices to become supple
>and flexible instruments, insist on "playing themselves." And it's this
>scripted role (ah, the real and arrased script of ideology, as Dana Gioia
>said-- no, just kidding) that underwrites the "common-sense" conflation of
>"voice" with normative, legal poetic identity.
To which I blame the American dominance of Sandford/Meisner and so-called
Method etc etc, which fits in fine with what appears from here to be an
American obsession with ego, a la Oprah and Philip Roth (given the US
colonising of what remains of Australian screen culture, it is alas also
dominant in the mainstream here). The US - with a few honorable
exceptions (Joseph Chaikin etc) - has never coped especially well with
Beckett, say, or Joe Orton, or any playwright - from Shakespeare to
Howard Barker - who is not especially interested in the small "self"
invented by popular psychology: whose plays might even be said to be
_language_ driven.
There are of course many other modes of acting which involve other
modalities of self, and the opening out of self into a role as it were
rather than the nailing shut of a role into the self. One of the
interesting aspects of the parallels with poetry - and they are only
parallels, hardly exact analogues - is that an actor only has him/her
self to work with, and (presuming they're playing a scripted role) the
resources of language. The thing about the dominant acting methodology
in contemporary America, as bruited by those I have been bothered to
read, is that it seems to devolve on the ego (to use a Freudian model,
for convenience) where really powerful acting - say someone like Vanessa
Redgrave, who does things that most US actors can't manage - dissolves
the ego in the text, and permits something much more anarchic to emerge.
Best
Alison
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