Know Anna Deavere Smith?
aka National Security Advisor Nancy McNally on The West Wing, but so much more, including director of the Institute on the Arts and Civic Dialogue at New York University, has an excellent opinion piece in today's NYT on recent speechifyin':
"When Bill Clinton spoke, and dropped the first "Send me" in reference to John Kerry's decision to go to Vietnam, I was less interested in the comparison between Mr. Kerry and President Bush than in Mr. Clinton's laying of the groundwork to set the audience on fire with those words. And he did. Yet as I left the FleetCenter {...} my mind was twirling with the words, "How did he do that?"
Jack O'Brien, artistic director of the Old Globe Theater in San Diego, gave me a clue when I asked if there was any classical actor in America who could have done what Mr. Clinton did that night. "No," he said. "He is Shavian.
"There is a line from Bill Clinton that extends back through the work of Stoppard and then Shaw and then Shakespeare. One of the things we don't do is 'ideate,' which is how Shakespeare's characters speak. They don't go from moment to moment on a rosary, bead to bead. They get the entire idea and then they exhale it." Got it.
We 20th and 21st century American actors are smitten with the natural, invested in intimacy. We are not trained to grab the hearts and minds of our audience, just the hearts. And speaking of grabbing hearts and minds, we found a new model in Barack Obama. "You think to yourself, 'Oh, we will all be measured from here on by this. Obama is Brando in 'Streetcar,' '' Mr. O'Brien said to me with finality. Mr. Brando did change acting forever with his performance of Stanley, because he was mind, body and heart in a way we hadn't seen before.
Will Mr. Obama change black political oratory? His speech did not, for example, elicit the traditional call and response we associate with powerful black speech. The speech instead evoked speechlessness. "That guy's amazing," said the blond model sitting next to me in the hall. Mr. Obama comes out of a mixed tradition, and I'm not talking about his racial mix. He is mixing traditions of communication. As he himself explained to me: "I tap into the tradition that a lot of African-Americans tap into and that's the church. It's the church blended with a smattering of Hawaii and Indonesia and maybe Kansas, and I've learned a lot of the most important things in life from literature. I've been a professor of law. I'm accustomed to making an argument. When I am effective, it's coming from my gut."
So that's why they're so damn good. I'd exerpt more, but you should REALLY read it it its entirety.
"When Bill Clinton spoke, and dropped the first "Send me" in reference to John Kerry's decision to go to Vietnam, I was less interested in the comparison between Mr. Kerry and President Bush than in Mr. Clinton's laying of the groundwork to set the audience on fire with those words. And he did. Yet as I left the FleetCenter {...} my mind was twirling with the words, "How did he do that?"
Jack O'Brien, artistic director of the Old Globe Theater in San Diego, gave me a clue when I asked if there was any classical actor in America who could have done what Mr. Clinton did that night. "No," he said. "He is Shavian.
"There is a line from Bill Clinton that extends back through the work of Stoppard and then Shaw and then Shakespeare. One of the things we don't do is 'ideate,' which is how Shakespeare's characters speak. They don't go from moment to moment on a rosary, bead to bead. They get the entire idea and then they exhale it." Got it.
We 20th and 21st century American actors are smitten with the natural, invested in intimacy. We are not trained to grab the hearts and minds of our audience, just the hearts. And speaking of grabbing hearts and minds, we found a new model in Barack Obama. "You think to yourself, 'Oh, we will all be measured from here on by this. Obama is Brando in 'Streetcar,' '' Mr. O'Brien said to me with finality. Mr. Brando did change acting forever with his performance of Stanley, because he was mind, body and heart in a way we hadn't seen before.
Will Mr. Obama change black political oratory? His speech did not, for example, elicit the traditional call and response we associate with powerful black speech. The speech instead evoked speechlessness. "That guy's amazing," said the blond model sitting next to me in the hall. Mr. Obama comes out of a mixed tradition, and I'm not talking about his racial mix. He is mixing traditions of communication. As he himself explained to me: "I tap into the tradition that a lot of African-Americans tap into and that's the church. It's the church blended with a smattering of Hawaii and Indonesia and maybe Kansas, and I've learned a lot of the most important things in life from literature. I've been a professor of law. I'm accustomed to making an argument. When I am effective, it's coming from my gut."
So that's why they're so damn good. I'd exerpt more, but you should REALLY read it it its entirety.
posted by fabulous girl at
9:33 AM
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