The Fear Factor: One of Commodification's Side Effects

Yes I'm unprepared
And in the face of it all I guess I get just the littlest bit scared
Yeah me
I feel around the darkness of an empty house and there's nothing there
Just a terrified chameleon hiding out in the thinnest of air

- From "Thinnest of Air" by Blues Traveler

In my last post, I explored a little bit of contemporary actor training, particularly the process of commodification that the student undergoes in order to be prepared "for the market."  Today, I want to start unpacking the overall effects of some of this, particularly what I call "the fear factor."

I have been teaching theatre in one shape or another for 15 years now, and one of the majors things I have been struck by recently is the level of fear in my students, particularly fear around making and committing to a decision.  In my experience, one of the primary responsibilities of the actor is to "make interesting choices."  Since they are the one playing the character, they need to decide on things such as actions and the given circumstances.  However, when I begin asking questions about things like objectives and tactics, I notice that, a majority of the time, the student freezes.

The effects of this freeze are noticeable on a physical level.  What is particularly noticeable is that their shoulders begin to creep up toward their ears and they begin pulling their necks in.  This is, essentially, the textbook startle reflex, where the body begins trying to protect its soft bits from attack.  Often, the scale of this response can be quite substantial, and recent studies have found that the more extreme startle reflex shown by the individual, the higher their generalized anxiety overall.  

And anxiety does run rampant in our acting programs.  Recently I had the opportunity to teach lessons on The Alexander Technique on another campus of the school where I teach.  From this perspective as something of an outsider, I was particularly struck by the amount of fear students expressed of the instructors on their home campus.  Whereas I was an "outsider" and thus "safe," students were keenly conscious of the fact that the faculty of their home campus had the power to cast them (or not), and thus horded a great deal of social and professional capital.  Margrit Schildrick acknowledges this element of training in a field like the theatre, writing "in the specular economy, such intertwined relations cannot be acknowledged, and the ethics of modernity are predicated on the separation and independence of subjects."  In essence, such power dynamics cannot be acknowledged least the system fall apart.   Schildrick goes on to point out that boundary crossing by instructors, as opposed to being a form of shared vulnerability, can amount to a bodily colonization.

 

Given all of this, it should come as no surprise that our students feel as if they were living in a veritable panopticon.  They're afraid of slipping up, of making a mistake, lest that mistake disqualify them from the continuing gamble that is a life and career in the arts.  Yet this fear can also be a major inhibitor of their pursuit.  Teva Bjerken and Belinda Mello write, "Fear of making a mistake is an obstacle to the free flow of imagination and expression in the actors' process."  The student essentially faces a potential "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation where they cannot afford to make a mistake and they cannot afford to freeze.  They think that there is a "right answer" and that they "have to get it in one."  Much of the workforce-centered education in the United States contributes to this as well.

 

Much like the "terrified chameleon" from the Blues Traveler song, our commodified students are trying to be completely fungible, and that is a daunting task for anybody.

 

What is to be done in the face of this fear?  I plan to continue this exploration and examine how we as educators can address this lack of comfort and bravery in upcoming posts.

Commodification and Capitalism in Actor Training

 

Who am I anyway?
Am I my resume?
That is a picture of a person I don't know
What does he want from me?
What should I try to be?
--From "I Hope I Get It," The opening number of A Chorus Line.

 Perhaps it is simply a streak of curmudgeonly contrariness, but I really don't much like A Chorus Line.  Beginning as it does with a desperate cry for work, proceeding through an exploitative "baring of the soul" and finishing with each of the formerly individual dancers tricked out in identical costuming as part of a never-ending ensemble, it is a piece that points up a great deal of what I find wrong with American performer training today.

When a system has you asking questions along the lines of "What should I try to be?" it should be abundantly clear that this system is broken.  Or at the very least not fit for human occupation, as broken indicates that the system is not working as intended.  In this case, it very much is, the reduction of vibrant individuals into interchangeable cogs.  Nor is this a merely a problem in the United States, Dr. Mark Seton of the University of Sydney also noted in his observation of actor training "Above all, we were to be taught what works and how we could commodify ourselves for the marketplace."

This bears out a great deal in my own training as an actor in college and graduate school.  We were taught to neutralize regional accents, work toward fitting an ideal (or set of ideal) body types, and embrace certain techniques of self-erasure, all in the name of becoming castable.  This is the process of "commodification."

In economic terms, a commodity is something which is a raw material considered primarily for its exchange value, and is fully or highly fungible.  Of particular importance is the fact that this substance can be bought and sold in the market, exchanged easily for other things of similar value.  In a capitalistic, market-oriented system, this is done regularly in order to facilitate the world of work as well as the procurement of goods and services.  

Take, for example, the emphasis on relaxation that often accompanies beginning actor training.  Many of the exercises I have encountered in the warmup of the beginning actor is rooted in trying to find relaxation.  Teva Bjerken and Belinda Mello note this in their own studies, finding "They overemphasize relaxation, especially at the beginning of their studies, when they attempt to embody neutral readiness."  The fully relaxed individual, if there ever could be such a thing, is essentially a palimpsest for inscribing, a blank slate that almost anything can be written upon.

That this is done in the name of joining the creative and expressive arts may seem contradictory on an intuitive level.  Actors are ostensibly chosen for the power, clarity, and effectiveness of their expression.  The very best, or at least most prominent, are rewarded handsomely for their abilities.  Could one imagine a De Niro or Dench commodified?

But those examples lie at the other end of a spectrum of wealth, fame, and power that is light years different than what the characters in A Chorus Line, or even my own students in the acting studio face.  They face a system that looks to commodify them and reduce their expression to liquidity in order to exchange it for value and profit.

This lies at the very heart of what I find wrong with much of American actor training, wrapping tendrils around the hearts, minds, and bodies of aspiring performers.  The question is, and what I propose to continue exploring, is what is to be done about this?