Commonwealth Games

Sorry about the lack of posts this week. It's been pretty hectic at school arriving at the end of a shortened academic term due to the XVIII Commonwealth Games being held in Melbourne over the next couple of weeks.

On that note, I am sure the opening ceremony next Wednesday evening 15th March will be a major theatrical event. I have encouraged my Drama students to view this as a form of theatre and to analyse why this will be the case with various aspects of the ceremony.

A couple of nights ago I went for a walk around the glorious Melbourne Cricket Ground stadium which was almost at lock-down stage for passers-by, but fortunately not completely. Through the glass doors of a couple of entrances I could see a light show being rehearsed inside the massive walls of this Goliath of world sporting stadiums. There at the centre of it all was a mammoth stage, unusually high off the ground, where much of the action will take place.

Clearly visible were the large cables suspended from the nape of several of the MCG's tall light towers where performers will be suspended as part of the ceremony's action. A brisk walk over the recently opened Barak Bridge over Brunton Avenue ended in the beautiful parkland of Birrarung Marr beside the Yarra River. It was here that 'rehearsal' fireworks were blasting out of the centre of a few of the large metal fishes that will also form part of the opening ceremony.

There is now an official media ban on leaking opening ceremony events as games organisers panic about too much content being revealed in advance. And fair enough, too.

Next week, I'll post comments on the 'theatricality' displayed in this ceremony. We wait in anticipation of a splendid display of Australian culture.

Oscars

Oscar success this year produced one surprise and one dead ringer in Crash and Philip Seymour Hoffman, respectively.

But I thought I'd write this post in defence of Heath Ledger and his portrayal of Ennis Del Mar in Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain.

On the surface one could almost be forgiven for wondering why Ledger got nominted for an Oscar in the first place? It certainly seems the acting in Brokeback Mountain was overshadowed in the media by other issues.

I laughed when reading one American reviewer's comments about the movie, claiming Ledger appeared to be performing the role with some form of lock-jaw! He certainly was difficult to understand and I don't recall listening so hard to the spoken words in a movie for quite some time. For a while I was waiting for the subtitles to appear on screen because I swore I was watching a foreign film when listening to Ledger speak! To boot, at a superficial level, his acting wasn't really anything to write home about, either.

But it wasn't until I dug beneath the surface that I realised I wasn't watching Heath Ledger playing his role at all. What I was seeing was Ledger's success in underplaying the role of Ennis, and it was his mastery at underplaying the role that made his acting so powerful.

Subtlety in acting is underrated.

I think one of the easiest ways to get a student to understand and believe you is to honestly give them an example from your own experiences, even if it embarrasses you in the process. In the student's eyes, all of a sudden you're human again and they temporarily forget you're a 'teacher'. I often tell my Drama students of the time I played Odysseus in a Greek tragedy in a 1st year play at university. I don't think I had a clue about the inner life of my character and all I was concerned about at the time was the exernal side of my role; what I looked like on stage to the audience. Generally speaking, merely physicalising a character is not going to win you an Oscar! But my portrayal of Odysseus was so physical and hammed up that I think I looked more like I had a broom stick shoved up my you know where as I tried to look 'soldierish', rather than appearing authentic as my character.

Even in such a highly physical role in Gladiator (2000), Russell Crowe, partly through scripting and partly through fine acting, was able to show us the human elements of his character. It still would have been a great film and a worthy portrayal of Maximus Decimus Meridius if we had not been invited in to the see the emotional side of Crowe's character. But it was the subtleties in Crowe's portrayal of his larger than life character that catapulted his acting from braun to brains. Crowe might have thrown a phone at a hotel clerk one night in New York, but on screen he is one intelligent actor.

And so it is with Ledger. When one realises that the character they are watching in a film does not stand out, does not hit them in the face, does not keep them talking about it for hours after the event and does not give them something to write home about .... then sometimes it is these very character portrayals that are examples of some of the finest acting you will ever see.

Ledger's acting in Brokeback Mountain, along with many roles by Crowe and Nicole Kidman (I know, it 's sounding a bit Aussie, here!) are so beautifully played with such subtlety and finesse, that the line between actor and character appears permanently blurred.

My indicator of a brilliant character performance in the Drama classroom is the 'goose bumps factor'. If I've got goose bumps on my arms after a performance, then it's an A+ for sure. I sometimes tell students that their acting was so authentic, I was standing there on stage with them during the entire performance.

I'm not begrudging Philip Seymour Hoffman for winning Best Actor at the Oscars. He was a worthy winner. It is rather a case of not forgetting exactly why Heath Ledger's performance was so powerful.

In the cinema that night, I had goose bumps down my arms, and in my head I was up there next to Ennis Del Mar the whole time. So real and true was Ledger's acting in this film, that for a couple of hours I was completely transported into the life of his character and the real world just disappeared into the darkness around me.

I'll finish with Al Pacino's comments about the great acting teacher Lee Strasberg:

He said, "You know, always have a little reserve, don’t go to the top of what you’ve got. Stay under it. Don’t hit the top. Don’t hit that top note." You know? And, because there’s the tendency for the actor to want to really feel that they’re fulfilling whatever it is they’re trying to fulfill if they go as far as you can go. And he always would say, "Pull it back."