Comedians@Google: Eddie Izzard
Uploaded on Aug 18, 2011
Eddie Izzard stops by Google for a conversation about his life, his influences, and comedy. The interview was conducted by Mark Day.
Drama Therapy
Sunday 9 June 2013IMAGE: THE LATE CARIS CORFMAN BEFORE HER BRAIN TUMOUR
Ever thought about what happens in the brains of actors and the audience during a theatrical performance? We hear about the therapeutic power of drama—and the story of how one actress, who lost her short term memory as the result of a brain tumour, found new meaning by writing and performing her own one-woman show.
Robert Landy, Professor of Educational Theatre and Applied Psychology, New York UniversityRebecca Nelson, New York actress, Co-director of film "Caris' Peace" with Gaylen Ross, Friend of Caris CorfmanHelen Morse, Award winning Australian actress, plays Peggy in the play "Sundowner"
Publications
Drama Therapy: Concepts, Theories, and PracticesRobert J.Landy
Films
Caris' Peace directed by Gaylen Ross & Rebecca Nelson
Jane Lynch: A Life Of 'Happy Accidents'
Happy Accidents
Hardcover, 304 pages | purchase
It's a big week for Jane Lynch. Her memoir, Happy Accidents, was released on Tuesday, and this Sunday night, she'll be hosting the Primetime Emmy Awards. And she's a reasonably good bet to pick one up, too: her second in a row for playing the scheming cheerleading coach Sue Sylvester on Fox'sGlee. On Friday's Morning Edition, she talks to David Greene about her career, her book, and the difficult process of telling her parents she was gay.Lynch learned perseverance early after she quit a school play in which she'd been cast because she was afraid of making mistakes. Despite the fact that wanting to be an actress was her "first conscious memory," she became so afraid of failing that she walked away from the project. "That is the last time I walked away from anything," she says. "I've been a yes person now for a long time."
One person to whom she eagerly said yes was director Christopher Guest, whose work on so-called "mockumentaries" like This Is Spinal Tap andWaiting For Guffman she already admired when she met him when he directed her in a commercial for Frosted Flakes. Lynch and Guest ran into each other again later, and he cast her in his 2000 film Best In Show, where she played one-half of a dog-showing couple opposite Jennifer Coolidge. She went on to appear in Guest's A Mighty Wind and For Your Consideration, as well as Judd Apatow's wildly popular The 40 Year Old Virgin, where she played Steve Carell's sexually accommodating boss who sings him what she says is a Guatemalan love song. As Lynch explains, though, the words come from a Spanish textbook and in fact vow to blame her mother for cleaning her room.But in spite of her many successes, Lynch says it wasn't easy for her when she told her parents she was gay. "I went to see a therapist," she says, "because I was just suffering so much over this alienation I felt from my family." The therapist convinced her to try writing her parents a letter, with the understanding that, of course, she didn't have to send it. But when she wrote it and the words came easily, she sent it after all — which, she says, was undoubtedly the point of the exercise.As she cruises into her high-profile hosting gig this weekend, Lynch says she's learned a lot about how to approach her own limitations: "I think the most important thing is that it's not like I'm done growing and evolving, but I certainly have so much more compassion and kindness for myself, and I have cut myself some slack."
Another cool episode of the Buddhist Geeks podcast. This is actually part two of Vince's interview with Stephanie Nash - part one, The Chief Facilitator, is available at the link.BG 223: Tuning In to the Truth of the Moment
Episode Description:
We’re joined again by meditation teacher and actress Stephanie Nash, this time to explore some of the striking parallels between the disciplines of acting and meditation. Stephanie shares how a month-long Shakespeare acting intensive was her gateway to the spiritual path and how at it’s core acting is about allow the flow of experience and emotion. She relates some of the Vajrayana practices to the techniques that actors use, and shares some of the ways that actors use the body to enter into an emotion. We conclude by discussing some of the ways that meditators might also learn from actors, especially when it comes to learning how to positively express emotions and stay embodied.This is part 2 of a two-part series. Listen to part 1, The Chief Facilitator.
Episode Links:
Transcript
Read the whole essay.What Arthur Miller Might Say About this Election
By Derek Alger
Mr. Alger is a freelance writer who is also the managing editor of PIF Magazine, an online literary journal.
Instead of paying attention to political pundits or those self-described Democratic or Republican consultants and their repetitive talking points, perhaps it would be more useful to consider what Pulitzer-Prize winning playwright Arthur Miller observed about acting and Presidential politics.
Miller, whose plays include Death of a Salesman, A View from the Bridge, and The Crucible, and was twice awarded the New York Drama Critics Award, was especially aware of the importance of a candidate’s acting ability in an age where every gesture and nuance is magnified through a television lens. In his book, On Politics and the Art of Acting, published in 2001, four years before his death, and shortly after the infamous Florida debacle involving George W. Bush and Al Gore, Miller turns his critical eye toward the symbiotic relationship of acting and politics.
Right off the bat, Miller acknowledges what most know intuitively, whether they admit it or not, that “It is not news that we are moved by our glandular reactions to a leader’s personality, his acting, than by proposals or by his moral character.”
Miller was well aware of style far outweighing substance, and his observations seem to have been further reinforced by so-called experts, meaning political science professors, grading the McCain/Obama debate in Nashville, as if the future of the nation could be determined by a report card. The categories in the New York Post the morning after the debate, in which such experts weighed in, included “Style, Delivered Punches, and "Connection with Viewers," leaving one unsure how each respective candidate might deal with, let’s say, a contemporary Cuban missile crisis, which may not be all that farfetched.
Miller states in On Politics and the Art of Acting that the “television lens becomes a microscope with the world as the eyepiece” and as a result, “the candidate’s self-control, his steadiness under fire, is dangerously magnified and becomes as crucial to his success as it is to the actor facing a thousand critics as he stands alone in a spotlight surrounded by darkness on a stage.”
While Miller quickly points out that we live in an age of entertainment, aware of the consequences of tragedy or farce, whether unintended or otherwise, he states, correctly, it would seem, that “Political leaders recognize in order to govern they must learn to act.”
