The Three Musketeers

Here is what I am up to these days. I'm currently playing D'artagnan in the Quintessence Theatre Group's world premiere adaptation of The Three Musketeers. It is quite the ride, by far the heaviest fight show I've ever done. Incredible choreography by fightmaster Ian Rose. The is directed by Alexander Burns and as you can see from the picture it has been staged in the round.

[Something] Artist [Something] Body [something profound]

Actor’s Body

[or my body’s statement of an artist]

[or something body something profound]

            My body, and more specifically the way I move, is my favorite thing to challenge and improve. I feel I have a gift for understanding how movement can be learned. I have always been active and as a child grew up running through the woods and swimming in the lake on my grandmothers farm in north Georgia. Swimming was my first learned movement outside of basic motor skills and as such has become the base of my full body connectivity and grace. I view myself as graceful thanks to swimming and my second learned movement Ballet.

[Stay with me here I promise this paper gets better]

 My godmother was a ballerina and owned a dance studio where my sister and I took lessons from roughly the age of 5 to 11. I was also homeschooled so I had far too much time on my hands and was able to play several sports. Soccer, karate, baseball, tennis, and through it all competitive swimming. By about 13 I had narrowed it down to just swimming and tennis. Tennis is a key to my movement as well as my appreciation and understanding of movement. My best friend and I would watch tennis matches, and then go out onto the court and try to imitate the way specific players moved and hit their shots. My idol was Roger Federer, I still long to have his sense of effortlessness and economy of movement. Like watching footballer Zinedine Zidane. Both men just seem to understand how their bodies work. Except for a tap class I didn’t get much dance through high school, but while at a fine arts camp I found a substitute for dance, stage combat. My freshman year in college I discovered parkour and became obsessed. The whole philosophy of “flowing”: the idea of moving through space from A to B as efficiently and creatively as possible became, almost a religious mantra. [I also just really liked jumping off buildings] To view the world as a creative playpen, and not as a linier “road”, is something I will continue to challenge myself to do. As I got better at parkour I began to realize that bodyweight training makes the healthiest me. I don’t want to be “Buff” I want to be able to move myself in everyway. This means that more flexibility, dexterity, coordination, and kinesthetic awareness, are now my lifelong goals. As I began my actor training I was lucky to have a very gifted and inspiring movement teacher named Brent Maddox. Under 3 years of his tutelage I took Laban movement analysis, Jacque Le Coque (neutral mask, character mask, and body of the actor), Viewpoints, and stage combat. The last show of my junior year I was Tybalt in production of Romeo and Juliet. Scott Mann, who is now a fight master [titles titles], choreographed the show but at the time was only a fight director [titles titles, you know how it bloody goes (name that TV show)] with the Society of American Fight Directors. After the production Scott said I had a gift for stage combat and should attend the National Actor Combatant Workshop, a three-week stage combat recognition program. So I attended that summer and had the most amazing time living and breathing combat for three weeks. Learning from some of the most talented men in the country. What I found so fascinating was discovering the human rational behind every motion. How our bodies move in response to very basic fight or flight stimulus, and how training affects the quality of that movement.

[Small tangent to do with definition of acting]

I had the opportunity to play Charlie in a production of Mary’s Wedding my junior year. I was not yet anything but a person capable of dynamically moving on stage, and saying lines [so not an actor]. The show is a beautiful two person romantic tragedy. From the very first read through I found myself to be the first one to start crying at the climax of the play. So much so that it was hard to continue. More importantly though those watching weren’t feeling what I was feeling. What they were feeling was a little concerned for me. But at first I was thrilled, “yay I can emotionally connect!” but as we staged it I had to pull back. The first performance I had this amazing discovery. I got to the moment where, in rehearsal, I always either started to cry, or had to pull back. Only this time I let myself go there emotionally but I fought to stay strong and this incredible thing happened. I didn’t cry, I stayed strong, but the audience wept. They were feeling exactly what I was feeling, I had given myself to them completely, but I stayed strong so they didn’t have to. This is when I understood an actor’s duty to an audience. To go on a journey with an audience, but be strong enough through it, so that they can yield enough to emerge changed.

[Back to movement]

 I entered my senior year without my movement teacher and mentor, who had moved on to a different school, and I found myself a very creative and dynamic mover who could feel, but, in my mind, only half way to becoming an actor. I spent my senior year focusing on what I perceived as the other half: “character” and teaching stage combat. I discovered I loved teaching and couldn’t get enough of it so I started teaching combat and improve workshops to high schools, while working as a freelance fight choreographer, and hosting and eventually bartending on the weekends; all this while taking 21 hours a semester and trying to graduate. While teaching I found; I discovered movement by doing it, but understood it after teaching it to others.  That last year is still a blur, I don’t think I got a full nights sleep till that summer and I found myself with a BA, waitlisted for grad school and not wanting to do anything but exist. But life is constantly moving us forward and within the first six months after graduating I had two theatre experiences that together have given me a goal that I will pursue for the rest of my artistic life. The first occurred while I was spending time with my Padrino in Toronto and seeing a bunch of theatre. [Here comes a big statement]

I saw a production of The Cherry Orchard and it changed my life.

The characters were so dynamic yet so subtle! I marveled at it and commented that “it was like watching life, but more so”. The actors had filled their characters with life. It was just a series of beautiful choices and I wanted to scream and say, “I want to be able to do that but I haven’t lived enough yet, I don’t have enough me yet”. The second was when I then went to Philadelphia for my first professional acting job, where I felt challenged by an excellent director to work more, look deeper, understand why, or what’s the point of doing anything at all. He has such an understanding of why that you can’t help but feel inspired to be a part of his meaning. I realized that if I going to be the kind of artist I intended to be, I had do more than just absorb life to fill my characters will truth. I needed my own meaning.  I now had to find a why, a need to my art. So I set about the next year and a half filling myself with living and searching for a need to share through art.

[Back again to my movement for a bit.]

 Thank you climbing. I found climbing a year ago and literally have ascended to be a better, stronger and more motivated human being. It’s been like going back to Parkour, just pure flow. It is creative physical challenge that builds my physical and mental balance. It is this Use that makes up how I function. I have full body awareness (though not as much control in my legs as I would like). Thanks to climbing my power rides in my back and shoulders, but I still lead with my chest. A little while ago I would have said, that because of my confidence I lead with my chest. Now, I think I feel confident because I lead with my chest. It is how I have used my body, (dance and sword work) this Use makes me walk the way I do. I am loose in my hips which leads to a bit of a swagger, though working in restaurants for the past few years has taken that away a little bit. I’ve noticed that when I’m working in a restaurant I take smaller, faster, steps, because I don’t want to slip while carrying plates. I can’t take a big step because then my weight is to far from my center and I can’t recover as easily if I slip. I don’t like walking this way. Quick, small steps, looked at from an energy standpoint, are not efficient. Also, even when I’m not working, this way of moving generates a nervous energy. To get ride of this way of walking I’ve fallen in love with dress shoes. I love hearing the leather heals striking the floor. I sometimes play with the pattern of my walk. I walk to sound as powerful as possible. This strong stride makes me more confident and seems to help my mind work better. I think a lot when I walk. Just like I think a lot when I swim.

            I think the culmination of all these influences on my movement has lead to a sense of ease, a physical confidence, and a greater desire to shift and move emotionally and maybe even geographically. I want to be:

Better, Stronger, Faster, More Expressive, and have a Greater Capacity for Body Education

Now for a little more of the acting part (warning: analogies imminent)

[“Actor is potential Universe”, an artist capable of creating truth, through being]

When you begin acting classes they often ask what you want to “get” from the class. One of my answers lately has been: To be able to paint with more refined brushes. I feel like I have a decent spectrum for my age but I’m not really focused on expanding my range at the moment I feel that will take care of itself. Getting back two the goals I mentioned earlier, I feel that the more life I experience, the more types of characters I will be capable of embodying. It is to improve the subtlety with which I can express characters within my range that has brought me to graduate school.

[Short sidetrack to talk about actors who inspire me]

Sometimes I have a hard time separating actor from acting. Acting wise:  Gary Oldman, David Thewlis, and Peter O’Toole are my greatest inspiration in terms of immersion and subtlety of character. Tom Cruise, Gary Grant, Brad Pitt, and George Clooney would make my list of actors who’s performances are lifted to a higher realm because of their charisma. I own and watch Lawrence of Arabia about once every six months because of depth of character in Peter O’Toole performance. I watch Oceans Eleven and Fight Club because of how vividly the actors live on screen. I had a casting director tell me one time, “You have to live three times as bright as regular people to be a screen actor”. Now, I don’t know if “bright’ is the right word, but here is what I took that sentence to mean: No one goes to the movies to watch characters that are slightly more interesting then regular people. Actors who make slightly more interesting choices are not going to be hired (or at least should not be hired). This of course, doesn’t mean “be big!” it means be a real, creative, artist. Getting back to my “like life but better”. It means, [here come the analogies!!] that if the director is painting a picture, the actors are the brushes, and the performances are the colors, and a director selects me to paint with, I want to produce the truest, purest colors. If an artist has the choice to paint a masterpiece using all pure, vivid, colors, or a set of pastels, he will always choose the pure colors.

[In case you haven’t noticed… I don’t really know what to do with commas]

From those he can craft anything; he can even make pastel if he finds he needs that, the point is his medium is not limiting his choices. It is the same for a director. I want to be capable of vivid truth, from that a director can craft my performance into exactly what he wants.

Critique

            The core of critique is simply interpretation.

[I may or may not spend the next several lines rephrasing that sentence]

When I say, "I want to be critiqued” I am asking, “What am I communicating”. By communicating I am including physical and verbal communication. With this definition the fear of critique comes in the form of a fear of being misinterpreted. This is a fear I have in life, but not when it comes to creating art. Once the piece is finished and is going into performances I sometimes feel a fear of misinterpretation, but only if I feel I haven’t been properly critiqued during the creation process. I have learned that as an actor and a person my ability to self-observe is far from perfect. My brain thinks a certain way, because of who I am and how I came to be who I am, and while I’ve made it a personal mission of mine to know people who think very differently from me, I simply can’t consider all the ways my actions can be interpreted. I will get better at this [I hope], especially if I continue to try and understand how other people respond to the world around them, but I will never be perfect [or anything remotely resembling it]. And when I am acting I don’t want to have to worry about how an audience is interpreting my performance. I want to be focused on how the other character in the scene is interpreting my communication. This is why the actor needs critique, so that after the scene or show, I can be told what I communicated to them and if it is wrong [or just horribly boring] I can make adjustments. Through critique and third-party observation I can evaluate whether or not my performance is meeting its goals, while, as an actor, remaining focused on my character’s goals. [Lights cigar and walks away]