Everyday Life Performance and the Development of Character

A number of us are posting on here about Anna Deavere Smith and the work of hers that we've studied in class. I thought it might be useful to post on here about the kind of work she does, and how we might use it in our final performance so people in the community can get a sense of how we might represent their stories, but also why we're interested in working this way.

First, here are two videos. The first is a 60 Minutes interview with Anna Deavere Smith from 1994, I think, in which she talks with Ed Bradley about her work in Twilight: Los Angeles and Fires in the Mirror.



The second is a video of a performance assignment from a class I taught in 2009, in which students took a community based approach to developing character. They interviewed members of the community to build characters who were, in some way, completely different from who they imagined themselves to be, either in terms of race or gender or temprament. They were encouraged to include pieces of the interviews they conducted along with their own performances of those people to give the audience a sense of both how they were different from those people, and how they were able to empathize with them through performing their words:



One of the reasons this work seems useful when working with communities of people outside the classroom to develop a play is that it offers a different kind of research, that is, research that is qualitatively different than what's done using books and articles and the Internet. It's a physical kind of research that, I hope, results in a new kind of engagement with and empathy for other people, and a kind of embodied experience of the community.

Also, as I wrote on the blog for a previous semester of a class similar to this one, I appreciate the focus Deavere Smith's work gives both to empathy and difference. In her introduction to Fires in the Mirror, she writes, "Character lives in the obvious gap between the real person and my attempt to seem like them. I try to close the gap between us, but I applaud the gap between us. I am willing to display my own unlikeness" (xxxvii-xxxviii). Training actors for professional careers is so frequently internally focused and intent on emphasizing an actor's ability to be "natural," and actors in mainstream theatre, television and film are so often limited to roles "like them" into which they can conveniently and believably be cast, the value of listening, observing and behaving differently doesn't get enough time or attention. On a very basic level, it helps with certain important skills for an actor. In another sense, it helps with skills that are useful as a citizen and human being!