Feeding the Rush: Or Why I Hate Giving Tuesday

 

The 1990's was a strange decade to have come of age in.  By about 1991, Communism and the USSR were largely a thing of the past.  One of the poles that propped up the world order had fallen, and barely 2 years into it, noted Historian Francis Fukuyama even went so far as to declare that history had indeed ended in the triumph of liberal democracy and market capitalism.  It was a strange and foul decade presided over a by a Rhodes Scholar Bubba from Little Rock who put his indelible Teflon stamp on the time.  If Richard Nixon "broke the heart of the American Dream," Bill Clinton pinched its ass and gave it a leer on the way out the door.  We didn't mind, our thoughts were elsewhere, for in the closing of the American Century, we wept for there were no more worlds left to conquer, and we did it at the mall.

Like many American men who spent their adolescence wafting past the strains of NAFTA (that great sucking sound is a problem for another day) and worrying about the twin spectres of the hole in the ozone layer and acid rain, I enjoyed the carbonated, caffeinated nectar known as Surge.  A citrus soda designed to compete with the venerable Mountain Dew, Surge was a "hardcore" experience that was evidently worth a hockey scrum to achieve.  It's caffeine content was such that a 12 oz bottle was sufficient to give you heart palpitations and allow you to hear colours.  Its flavour wasn't so much "good" as it was a "a lemon and a lime screwed in the underarm of a radioactive clown."  It was the pick-me-up accompaniment to pizza rolls for the more discerning Dungeons and Dragons nerds. 

The thrust of the ad campaign for Surge was the lengths one would go in order to get your hands on a bottle.  There is a veritable fight in the above video, which is a fair example of the genre.  Just a bloke and his five closest mates scrambling over a half-dozen hastily assembled filthy hobo couches in a back alley of some major Western metropolis.  No, no, nothing to see here officer.  No need to stop and frisk.  Just me and my friends here enjoying a soda.

All those fine upstanding young men being reduced to an atavistic frenzy at the merest chance at the bottle floated into my mind recently as we, once again, came around to that center of the charitable year: Giving Tuesday.  For those of you playing at home, Giving Tuesday is the youngest of a trio of psuedo-holidays that have sprung up in recent years between Thanksgiving Day and the beginning of December.  Those are, in order:

• Black Friday- The Friday following Thanksgiving, emerged as a distinct concept in the 1950's and is one of the largest shopping days of the year.  Named because this date often marked the breakeven point of the year for a retailer (moving from being "in the red" to "in the black").
• Cyber Monday- The Monday following Thanksgiving, the emergence of E-commerce in the 2000's marked this term being coined in 2005. This is where people do their online shopping for the holiday season, usually on their computers at work.
  
• Giving Tuesday- The Tuesday following Thanksgiving, has become a focal point in the nonprofit world, with numerous giving challenges, matching funds, and other gamified incentives to spur philanthropy.  The perfect opportunity to balm your conscience for dropping cash on Amazon or at the mall.  You might've spent enough money to install running water in a small village in the Sahel, but at least you've still got a bit left over for the "widows and orphans."

This unholy trinity in some ways form a henge of idolatry to the gods of late-stage capitalism.  Grouped with Thanksgiving in the United States it is a triptych of indulgence that would make Hieronymous Bosch slightly ill, followed by the figleaf of charity to set the consumer's mind at ease.  He can rest easy as night for he is no wallower in the city of swine, content upon his relishes.  He has also given to the Kiwanis, and thus can continue to dream his gravy dreams, content in the knowledge that he "helped make a difference."

Charity degrades and demoralises.... Charity creates a multitude of sins.

There is also this to be said. It is immoral to use private property in order to alleviate the horrible evils that result from the institution of private property. It is both immoral and unfair.

 --Oscar Wilde

Giving Tuesday is the foul idol to the neoliberal dogma that offloads the public good into private hands, trusting to the wisdom of the marketplace to decide what is worth keeping.  It is the logical outgrowth of an American cultural policy that created the 501(c)3 nonprofit system, which assumes it is sufficient public support to exempt from certain taxes organizations established for public benefit.  Celebrate them and encourage the individual to give.  The steel strings of gratitude that were played upon the previous Thursday and turned to garrote the individual.  "It's Giving Tuesday, after all.  Why aren't you giving?"  It becomes the individual, driven by guilt, who is called upon to contribute additionally and prop up the public good.

"Consider the pursuit of support and raising money as part of your artistic process. It is not a burden. It is a way of meeting people, building community and articulating ideas, concepts, and intentions… If you have an idea for a project by the time you’ve described it to forty people it will be a better idea." 

--Anne Bogart        

Giving Tuesday is prominent on my calendar because I work in education.  Not only do I work in education, I teach the theatre arts at a chronically under-resourced branch campus of a larger institution.  Each year, I go about my social media, hat in hand, and I ask support.  My workplace has incentivized this by offering $100k in matching funds, until it runs out.  But! If you get X number of individual donors, your fund gets a $500 boost!  So every fund and unit in the school dog-piles, throwing elbows, biting and gnashing, the fashion school is particularly adept with their scissors, and the athletes get in ahead of us all and drain the pot like a refreshing bottle of citrus soda loaded with carbos.

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?