Miles Wide: Criticism of Practical Aesthetics
A very interesting thing happened this week, I found a fascinating article from an acting coach in San Francisco. In it he claims to have found the location of a weakness in Practical Aesthetics, a flaw in the Common Sense approach to acting. So I set a task for my advanced students to evaluate the article and let me know their thoughts. Ironically, on the very day that I published the task for my students, I received an anonymous message from somewhere out in the blogsphere asking me if I thought the author of the article had got the criticism spot on. Well, it is an interesting article, but I’m sad to say that like bad artillery, it’s miles wide of the mark, miles wide.
I thought that for my students, the unknown commentator and anyone interested, I would respond.
Andrew Utter runs Mother of Invention acting school, a great name for a school, and it also sets out his stall, necessity and need being vital to his way of thinking. He says he finds ‘plenty of good things to say about Practical Aesthetics’ but believes that he has discovered its limitations. Whilst he spends 220 words establishing his credentials, he doesn’t mention whether he has trained in Practical Aesthetics or just vigorously read A Practical Handbook for the Actor and perhaps True and False (has he read Robert Bella’s chapter on Practical Aesthetics in The Training of the American Actor (UK Link)).
He doesn’t mention any training in Practical Aesthetics, which leads me to believe that he has not studied it rigorously or intensively. It’s clear that he is experienced and well qualified, but not in Practical Aesthetics, at least not that he acknowledges. If he has, I’m not sure he understood it.
He rightly acknowledges that Practical Aesthetics is a ‘problem’ based approach to acting. This is in line with Stanislavski’s own practice of using the term ‘zadacha’ which can be translated as ‘problem’. In fact, when you read through the blog post, Utter’s only real criticism of Practical Aesthetics is that they ‘neglect what I call the sources of true urgency within’. Utter’s real problem with Practical Aesthetics (or his misunderstanding) comes from his belief that Practical Aesthetics is lacking ‘a strong way of addressing the precise WAY in which it is urgent to solve these problems’.
Firstly, the problems that he suggests for imbuing ‘an actor’s work with clarity, lucidity and credibility’ aren’t universal enough. They are concrete, but they don’t offer a universal enough way to connect character’s want with actor’s action. ‘Getting someone to marry you’ or ‘getting someone to lend you the car’ will NEVER initiate the actor to care, because these things don’t compel them.
Utter says that the trouble is that Practical Aesthetics doesn’t compel us to CARE about the problem. That’s true, his examples of the problem do not compel us to care, because these involve the WANTS of the character and not the universal essential actions that Practical Aesthetics uses. Essential actions help to connect the actor with the character’s problem/desire/goal. Stakes are certainly important, but if you do not phrase the problem in a way that the actor can take urgent action from, you simply make it impossible to care about it, so Utter is right, actors do not CARE about the WANTS of their character, but they must find a way to care, and this is achieved through the universality of an essential action.
In Practical Aesthetics, we connect to the problem, or in our case, the Essential Action by way of an ‘As If’. We work out what ‘to win an ally’ means to us by saying ‘It’s As If…..’ and we work out what it means to us by using an analogous scenario that connect us to it. This provides a level of care by asking two questions, why now and what if you don’t. This guides the actor to the compulsion of care and also automatically sets the stakes.
I’m somewhat confused by Utter’s belief that his teachers invented the notion of objective and super objective, because essentially that’s what he’s describing. Or let’s be more precise, he suggests that there are two types of objective: one is the problem, and the other is the need served by solving the problem. Interesting, but any Practical Aesthetic actor would now be pointing at their copy of Aristotle’s Poetics and pointing out that this was given to them on their first day of Script Analysis class when told that the second question you ask when analysing a script is ‘What is the character’s underlying need’. Sorry, your teachers didn’t invent this. Aristotle wrote it down 3000 years ago.
Utter suggests that the actor needs to connect to the underlying need. But the character’s underlying need only compels them to take action with urgency. They simply cannot be in an attempt of solving the problem AND be thinking about the underlying need at the same time. Furthermore, the underlying need is the character’s, not the actors. But more importantly, the current problem always outweighs anything else (even the higher need). In Meisner’s words ‘that which hinders your task IS your task’, or in other words we focus on the task (another translation of the word zadacha) at hand, because it’s immediacy demands more focus than the long term goal.
Utter believes that As-Iffing is similar to Uta Hagen’s ‘substitution’, which she later renamed ‘transference’ just as Utter does, but it isn’t the same thing. It simply provides us with a way to compel us. I think this is where Mr Utter’s lack of Practical Aesthetics training shows, because this is where his actual practical training is lacking. The actor uses ‘As If’ exercises to develop in the body the habit of performing the action with the size, speed, tempo, rhythm and compulsion provided by the As If situation. When this is habituated, the actor does not need to care for the character’s cares, they are imbued into their actions through habituation in rehearsal.
You do not need to care about the scene. You need to habituate the necessity, the need, or what the care/stakes DOES to the way that you perform the actions of the character. Once habituated, it’s not something that you need to worry about any more.
The problem is that the actor NEVER need care about their character’s needs. We do not need to care about the needs of fictional people, since they do not exist, but what we do need to do, as Utter suggests, is to compel the actor to how the ‘care’ drives the character’s actions, and therefore their own.
The final part of Mr Utter’s problem with Practical Aesthetics is a little bit vague, so it’s somewhat difficult to dechiper. It attends to Utter’s solution, and essentially, it lets the reader know why his school, and his way of working, solves this problem and is therefore more appropriate to the actor than Practical Aesthetics. Having not really understood As Iffing, not really understood Practical Aesthetics, his solution may well work, but it has nothing to do with a criticism of Practical Aesthetics. So whilst Utter’s criticism of Practical Aesthetics is wrong and misguided, he doesn’t really explain how he resolves it. It’s something to do with finding and naming what it is that the person gives you that you cannot do without. Why you care about the person enough to want to achieve the goal. These are taken care of in the ‘Why Now’ and ‘What if You Don’t’ of As-Iffing. The As If is a point of departure, a reference point or a way of understanding the content. I can’t make head nor tail of Utter’s vague technique for naming ‘what a brother means to you’, nor can I see that it has anything at all to do with the scene you are playing.
If Mr Utter reads this sometime, it would be great if he could go into more detail. His criticism is quite well thought through, it’s just a shame that his conclusion is weak and difficult to make any sense of. It seems the least practical part of his entire very articulate and intelligently written blog post is his solution.
To you, the best
Mark