Dear Reader
As a dramatic artist, the academic degree I am pursuing in sociocultural anthropology and archaeology along with the artistic degree I am pursuing, inform and inspire each other. When I told my parents I wanted to follow my artistic dream of studying theatre in college, they said, “Don’t do anything halfway. If you want it, go get it.”
I enthusiastically committed myself to four years studying the dramatic arts with an intensity unlike any I had ever known. However, my interests have always been interdisciplinary. Even though acting awakens a unique purpose in me, I derive equally excited and interested satisfaction in pursuing more academic fields of study. To join these seemingly divergent desires, I decided to pursue a Bachelors of Arts and get two degrees and do two things all the way: acting and academics. And in choosing and committing to this path, the academic helps inform, inspire and is a vital part of my artistic process.
Now, in my senior year and finishing not one Bachelor of Arts but two, my love for interdisciplinary study and exploration flourishes. My second degree is in Sociocultural Anthropology and Archaeology. When applying to college before I even knew I wanted to be an interdisciplinary artist, I had to decide as an actor whether I wanted to pursue a BA or BFA. The main difference between a Bachelor of Arts and a Bachelor of Fine Arts is that a Bachelor of Fine Arts has little class schedule mobility and is more class heavy, with the same small cohort of about ten students in all your classes. And with a BFA, it is unlikely or impossible to get any other degree because the BFA is so specialized. On one hand, the focus of an education in acting might have been more immersive pursuing a BFA, but it would have meant giving up the academic pursuits that are a huge part of my artistic inspiration and process. More importantly, it would mean denying a core piece of who I am.
As I committed to my two degrees, my artistic path led me to apply for a program and accept their offer to study abroad in London for a semester where I received a BFA-like intensive training, in the style of how BFA programs are run, but for a shorter period of time. I had an absolutely fulfilling experience in that program. I enjoyed the total immersion in theatre and the art of character creation.
I also discovered that it was not the way I could best inform my life and artistic balance. While it was so refreshing to experience this type of exhaustive learning and living for a short period, I found myself missing the stimulation of academic pursuit and the rest of my interests that I indulge in the United States. Part of having a diverse educational experience is building on skills that are useful for critical thinking and existing in the world.
Learning solely about art only gets you so far. You have to live a rich, varied life in order to actually create meaningful work. In order to inhabit and develop a character or behave like other people, I have to experience life, compassion, and get to know different people, their emotions, and the circumstances both personal and in the larger historical context that make them who they are.
For me, that isn’t going to come from being in classes all day with the same ten people, even if I am studying things that I love, such as high comedy, movement, character development, and theatre criticism. For me, the way that I invent and create my art is through interacting with people, life, and knowledge in all the different ways and spaces and studies I possibly can. I even want to interact with people through different times, which is why I am majoring in anthropology and archaeology.
As an actor and an artist, my attitude to developing a character is a holistic creative approach. I generally disapprove of any creative process intent on employing only one process. I believe it narrows the necessary broader vision of humanity required for rich character development. For example, certain versions of Method acting have no appeal to me. In fact, I wholeheartedly believe they are not a legitimate form of art and also not a substantial way for an actor to create characters.
The Method is an acting technique founded by some of the 20th century’s greatest actors. One of them, Lee Strausberg developed the American version of The Method, which influences many Method actors’ performances today. This version of The Method is about dropping into the psyche of a character to truly inhabit them.
I have no problem with this approach. I’m critical of the immersive acting technique often used by Hollywood actors that causes them to become the living embodiment of their character outside of the stage or film set, often using the technique as an excuse for otherwise intolerable behavior simply because they are “artists”. This perversion of Strausberg’s Method technique is a way for actors to mistreat others or themselves, instead of pursuing and implementing the skills necessary to becoming another person. And sometimes narrow, insufficient techniques like these are used by those who live 24/7 in a world of actors, acting coaches and teachers, with little to no exposure to outside knowledge, influences, i.e., the real world.
For me, part of the beauty of acting and the skill behind a great actor is their ability to step in and step out. There is no reason why an actor should inhabit a role all the time. That behavior is unhealthy for the psyche and unprofessional for an actor that should have mastered the skill of working with other people around them on a difficult set for twelve hours a day. As an actor and a human being, I believe that it is my purpose to approach my character development as a balanced holistic person, containing multitudes. There is skill in creating balance between work and life, and I believe that one of the most important skills as an artist and a human being is to establish that balance.
For example, when I portray a character for the stage, my first step is always to read the play. The play is your whole world while you work. Everything you need to know about a character is already written in the script. I read and absorb the play and attack it from a literary perspective, a perspective I would not have honed and strengthened without my years of academic pursuits. This initial step helps me intellectualize my character as a piece of the larger show without yet becoming biased towards the emotionality of a character I am preparing to “become.” In order to craft a performance that will serve the show as a whole (because actors are one part of a whole), an actor has to understand the world their character is inhabiting and where their character fits into the story being told. When I work, I am initially intellectual about it, doing background research on the author, old productions, the set, and when the play was written. Tragically, due to an inability or unwillingness by actors to do their research, subtext in literary sources are often lost by the actor when they don’t have the historical context of what was relevant to the times when it was written.
After I have gone through the intellectual process, I focus on the emotional aspects. To play a character, an actor must have empathy for that character. They have to know why the character does what they do and why they want what they work toward. In Uta Hagen’s practice, the actor must determine what their character’s objective is and what their actions are in order to achieve that goal. It is about piecing together the details of a character’s life that happens off the page or screen. This part of the character is worth putting together because it informs how the character acts in those moments. Again, if you don't know about the larger world and the way others have lived and their values, this part of the process is very difficult, if not impossible to do.
My favorite actor, and the person whose career I most want to emulate, Allison Janney, talks about how she prepares to play horrible characters such as Tonya Harding’s mother in I, Tonya, by understanding the character’s history and place in the universe at that time and her character’s mind to figure out why she does what she does. Connecting to a character like that, Janney explains, is necessary to create empathy and hopefully, feel what the character feels.
One of my favorite artists, Taylor Swift, writes her music as a great lover of literature, unfolding lyrical revelations to paint a picture of the true emotional journey each song unfolds. In her final song on her 2022 album Midnights, she writes to her audience on a track called Dear Reader, comparing her medium of songwriting with literature.
Swift admits she loves reading and writing, mixing her love of creation of songwriting with storytelling. In my view, the base of all performance art is storytelling. Artists need to create in order to tell stories that are inside us. Even though her predominant art form publicly is music, her job does not control how she spends all of her time. She consumes different forms of art (in this case devours literature) in order to inform her process, whose ultimate goal is to create a richer, more meaningful song.
If an actor is a true artist and not just an opportunist, they will be drawn to create and storytell however they can. For me, that means writing poetry that no one will ever read, or making playlists of music for characters I love, and using both my artistic and intellectual academic lives as resources. Not all I create or learn or research is for the purpose of showing the public, but it helps me in my process to really dive into the type of artist and actor I want to be. My anthropology major may not be full of acting classes or asking me to perform on stage, but it is equally important to my artistic quest. I believe that a more holistic education is the best way to teach artists how to be full human beings which in turn will make them better artists.
My philosophy and method when it comes to acting, anthropology, and life is searching for balance by incorporating the rich tapestry of artistic and academic influence the world has to offer.
No part of acting is just one thing. Performance requires a sense of the whole. Just like actors are one piece of a whole work of art, their performance can only be rich and nuanced with the knowledge of where the character they are portraying fits into the larger piece, their history and their larger world. There are so many moving parts of the whole that require a successful present performance, and without a well-rounded life, an actor simply will not have enough tools to make that successful performance happen.