Depredations of technique

While waiting in doctors' offices and customer lounges at the local speedy lube joint, I have been perusing Stella Adler's Art of Acting. The book is broken down into the individual elements that comprise the Adler technique. The text is Adler herself documenting what she and her teachers say, talk about, opine, and rail against in their technique classes.

Reading it brings me back, instantly, to my undergraduate days at NYU where I was placed in the Stella Adler Conservatory. Admission into the undergraduate drama program was by application followed by an audition and interview. At the conclusion of my comedic and dramatic monologues, my adjudicator (the head of the Experimental Theatre Wing at the time) spoke at length at how schizophrenic I was in that I could forge a career in a variety of different directions: commercial, classical, musical theatre. He was adamant that I should be placed in the Circle in the Square training program, which was the most commercial of the acting conservatories that provided training to NYU students.

Imagine my surprise when my placement letter arrived in the mail and I found out that I would be going to the Stella Adler Conservatory.

The Adler technique could be described as falling into the category of "classical" training. Classes were geared towards a life in the theatre where the good writing could be found. While I never studied with Stella herself (her classes were reserved to third-year students and I transferred out in the middle of my second year), the language of Art as Acting is nearly verbatim of what I remember of my studies with her teachers Alice Winston, Mario Siletti and Jimmy Tripp.

I'm reading Adler right now as her adage, or how I remember the adage as repeated by her teachers, was "Hamlet was not written about your mother." The adage was in reference to the idea that an actor should never rely on their own emotional memory to create a character. Instead, a character should be created from the actor's imagination as guided by the circumstances provided by the playwright's words and ideas. And it was this adage that seemed to come into stark contrast with what I encountered ten years later and 60+ blocks further uptown in my studies with Maxine Greene (Adler's conservatory was located in Carnegie Hall while Greene's lecture hall was located in Morningside Heights).

While in my mind Greene emphasizes the importance of the lived life in developing understanding and fostering multiple perspectives, Adler was adamant about the importance of technique which ultimately, in my mind, distances an actor from their daily life. I do understand the focus on technique for a performing artist as it provides a grounding to return to performance after performance, city after city. It guarantees a similar quality of experience for the Wednesday matinee attendee as it does for the Saturday night viewer. This distance that technique demands from the actor's own emotional life as provides a bulwark against burning out.

But it's interesting to read Adler in association with my close readings of Greene. In Landscapes of Learning Greene writes about the "depredations of technique" in relation to positivism and objectivity in cognition. She writes:

It must become clear again that reflection is not only rooted in experience, its entire purpose is to inform and clarify experience—or the lived world. If we add to this a conceived possibility of remaining in touch with our perceptual backgrounds and thus remaining present to ourselves, we may be better able to ward off the depredations of technique (1978, p. 17).

These "depredations of technique" were recently touched upon by Antony Tommasini in his New York Times article "Virtuosos Becoming a Dime a Dozen." In the article Tommasini writes about the numerous musicians these days who possess impeccable technique that enable them to perform the most difficult of works. He likens it to sports where records are made to be broken. This represents a new paradigm in the classical music performance world where "the first several decades of the 20th century are considered a golden era by many piano buffs, a time when artistic imagination and musical richness were valued more than technical perfection." While Tommasini never denigrates technique, you can sense a yearning for imagination and richness.

This new paradigm of the virtuosic might be rendering this quality to becoming commonplace. There is an audience demand for it. What is the impact on the art form? What is the impact on the experience of the viewer of the art form? Does the virtuosic leave space for the viewer/listener to enter into the work of art, as emphasized by Greene? Is the virtuosic an example of the depredation of technique?