NEXT 4-WEEK FILM-DEMO CLASS BEGINS AUGUST 6TH
In this workshop, you will shoot and edit your own film scene, with assistance of course. This is the best way to learn the differences between acting on stage and acting for camera. Limited to four students. Tuition is $250. Tuesday nights, 7-10:30pm. Reserve a space early!

HOOKS ACTORS WORKING
PAUL BRAVERMAN (scene study '00-01, comm 01) is playing Lank Hawkins in Stage1 Rep's production of "Crazy For You". The show runs weekends from July 19 through August 10. For more information go to the website www.stage1theatre.org. JAYSON MATTHEWS (s.stdy-f/tv - '00) stars in multiple character roles in "The Ghost of Molly Malone" at Venue 9, July 11-Aug. 2rd. Jason can also be seen in the upcoming film "Foucault Who?". DANA LEWENTHAL (comml '01) is in "The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas" at the Willows, through July 21st.

I MUST SHARE THE FOLLOWING VERY SPECIAL POEM WITH YOU. THE WORDS MOVE ME .... Ed

Circle in the Dirt

We are the bone rattlers.
Circling under unblinking sun.
We are the jesters and the snake charmers,
Our shadows scarred into sand.

We are the laughing, madcap wanderers,
Eyes winking under the spotlight.
Here we leap off the mountain's edge,
Fools who have faith in flight.

And when our hearts beat with the drum,
We walk into the fire, compelled to reflect truth
Back into the eyes of the thousand.

In this circle we draw substance from silence,
Tip our hats to gun & mud slingers alike,
We sing flesh & blood, life & death, terrible & beautiful both.
In this place, pain is as fine a colour as love.

Draw a circle in the dirt: truth lives here, truth lives here.

Mary Campbell
Chicago scene study - current
June 2002

NEW BAY AREA WORKSHOP WITH DANA LEWENTHAL
Bay Area actor/teacher DANA LEWENTHAL has designed a new workshop entitled "The Professional Performer" that she'll be offering through Theatre Bay Area on Monday, July 15, 2002 from 6:30 - 9:30 pm. Register by calling 415.430.1140.

DID YOU KNOW that I write two newsletters each month? It's true. I send out this one to actors and another one to animators. Check out the archived newsletters on the animator site if you'd like to see a different perspective on acting. http://www.actingforanimators.com. This month, for instance, the craft notes are about what makes people laugh. If you want to subscribe to the animator newsletter in addition to the Ed Hooks Newsletter, just drop me a note. It's free of course.

ED'S UPCOMING SCHEDULE
Acting for Animators, July 12th -- Electronic Arts, Los Angeles. (closed workshop). August 17-18, BioWare, Edmonton, Canada (closed workshop).

Scene Study (Chicago) -- ongoing, Monday and Wednesday night, 7-10:30. Free audit, start any time, 16-week commitment. $135/month.

Commercials workshop -- Weekend format, July 20-21. $250 ($175 if you are enrolled in scene study, too.)

Cold Reading/Audition Workout -- Saturday, August 3rd, 10am-5pm

Film Demo workshop -- Tuesday, August 6th, 7-10:30. Four-weeks.

CRAFT NOTES
"STORYTELLING"
Excerpted from Acting Strategies for the Cyber Age by Ed Hooks (Heinemann, 2001)

Drama is storytelling. Whether we're talking about Oedipus and his mom, Tom Winfield and his mom or Hamlet and his mom, it's all storytelling and is designed to make a point. Throughout history, from ancient Greece and earlier, right up through Shakespeare's England and Moliere's France, the actor has always been the primary storyteller. In the mid-20th century, however, the situation began to change. As the production of motion pictures became a glamorous and popular industry, the actor began to be pushed aside in favor of the auteur movie director. Mainstream acting training began to focus on teaching actors how to stimulate themselves emotionally rather than to tell stories. A well-trained actor would come to be defined as a person of strong body and voice that is emotionally accessible, sensitive to direction and highly castable.

Actors today face three primary challenges. First, there are some among us who are intimidated by all of these high tech developments. I have friends - good theater people, mainly over forty years of age - whose eyes glaze over whenever the conversation shifts onto the subject of the Internet. Rather than seeing the potential in broadband communication, they feel a threat. In their view, acting is a kind of zero sum game. A gain for cyber space is a loss for the legitimate theater. That is incorrect, of course, but it's easy to empathize with their fears. Actors are a touchy-feely group, and all of this Internet talk is the opposite of that. It's left-brain versus right-brain stuff.

The second challenge is that many actors have either not learned or have forgotten that acting is storytelling. It has been bred out of them by our lowest-common-denominator pop culture. If you ask a new actor today why he wants to act, he is likely to become tongue-tied. He doesn't know why; he only knows that he wants to. Like a thoroughbred horse that comes to favor the racetrack over the meadow, many actors today are disoriented and disconnected from himself or herself. They have the impulse to perform, but it is not in the service of the story or the community. Instead, it is for self-validation. Acting for some has become an elixir for delivering up psychic visibility in a complex, alienating culture and Andy Warhol's fifteen minutes of fame.

Finally, some aspiring actors have no idea what is required of them in terms of training if they are to have a career in the arts. Again, the confusion is easy to understand because they have been raised on a diet of television shows which feature casts comprised of sports figures, stand-up comics and models as often as actual actors. Then, when they begin searching for acting training, they find the choices bewildering.

The United States is a society that does not enthusiastically support the arts which is why acting as an art form is not widely understood. Actors are forced to spend far too much of their time searching for work instead of acting. We have an imbalanced system of supply and demand in the entertainment industry. There are many more applicants than there are actor-job vacancies. Actors are continually placed in a low-status posture in the marketplace. "Pul-eeeze cast me!" we implore, assuming a subservient posture time and again. This dynamic is antithetical to that of the actor-as-shaman, the actor-as-storyteller, and the actor-as-leader. Cyber age technology promises to re-empower the actor.

In my acting classes, I routinely ask new students if they are actors now or if they hope to be actors some day. If they say they hope to be actors some day, I explain that they have a problem. I cannot snap my fingers and turn a person into an actor. I cannot teach acting to someone who wants to be an actor some day. I can only help the person who already considers himself to be an actor to become a better actor. No teacher - and this includes Constantin Stanislavsky and Lee Strasberg and the entire roster of contemporary teachers - can make an actor out of someone who does not already consider himself to be one. This points up the paradox in many acting schools. The traditional relationship between student and teacher is one in which the teacher leads and the student follows. But acting doesn't work like that. When it comes to acting, the student must lead from the very first moment. The teacher may lead in lecture and notes on scenes, but the actor must take high-status when he is performing. Unfortunately, many acting teachers thrive emotionally and financially by keeping the student actor in a subservient position, which is what leads to the acting-teacher-as-guru syndrome and turns some people into perpetual students instead of actors.

The burden is on the teacher to create an atmosphere in workshop that allows the student to lead when he is on stage. Stanislavsky himself enunciated the challenge in "My Life in Art": "Without talent or ability one must not go on the stage. In our organized schools of dramatic art it is not so today. What they need is a certain quantity of paying pupils. And not everyone who can pay has talent or can hope to become an actor." (Stanislavsky, 1925, p 79)

A new actor arrives on the scene at one of the most exciting moments in theatrical history, but he does not know how to proceed. He's stuck in a conundrum. He feels in his gut that he wants to act, but he doesn't feel qualified and doesn't know how to proceed. He wants the validation of training, but he doesn't know which training is necessary or which teachers are best. He feels the impulse to lead, but that conflicts with the evident necessity that he follow, first in school and then in pursuit of employment.

There is an overabundance of information in cyberspace delivered to the consumer/citizen at a clock- speed much too fast for many people to keep up with. It is easy to feel isolated, left behind and alienated in the 21st century. The tribe has lost its form, and families are scattered across continents. A person of fragile self-esteem might conclude that there is power in the visual image itself. If one manages to get ones image onto a movie or television screen, then ones life must be meaningful, right? Seeing is believing. The impulse that brings such a person to acting is distorted and focused inward on himself rather than outward on the audience. Consequently, some aspiring actors are skipping the legitimate theater altogether. They see no point in the stage because they are not thinking about audiences in the amphitheater or Globe sense of the word. They are lured by the prospect of fame, celebrity and acceptance, and they easily find acting schools that will cater to this orientation. Jean Smart, a respected and award-winning, stage-trained veteran actor of movies and television was interviewed in connection with the opening of a new Broadway show. When asked about her experiences in Hollywood, she said, "I was stunned when I came to LA, (at the) number of actors I met who had never done theater. I actually didn't know that such people existed. I really didn't. I didn't get it." (San Francisco Examiner, August 19, 2000) Carey Perloff, Artistic Director of San Francisco's American Conservatory Theater, shook her artistic head over the same issue in another interview: "After this cadre of actors, it's over. Actors today may start in the theater, but they find themselves in TV and film eventually." (San Jose Mercury News, July 2, 2000).