Interchangeable Parts : Acting, Industry, and Technology in US Theater (Video)
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- Hello, my name is Dr. Victor Holtcamp. I'm an
- Associate Professor in the Department of Theatre and Dance at Tulane University
- and I'm here to talk about my book, Interchangeable Parts: Acting, Industry,
- and Technology in US Theater. The big idea behind this book is that I
- was curious about how people learned how to learn
- to act. How did we end up in a place where there were schools of acting
- where someone could learn how to be an actor but perhaps
- be on stage very little over the course of their actual
- educational career. And that idea that there was a way to become an actor
- without just acting, it's actually a relatively recent
- innovation in the world of theater and dates to the late
- 1800s, the latter part of the 19th century.
- So what I decided to do was sort of look at how this came about.
- How did we create this system where people could figure out what it meant to
- be an actor independent of being on stage every day.
- Now prior to this period the way that you became an actor is very much like I
- was describing an apprenticeship model. You would apprentice yourself to a
- theater company, you would play small, very small roles, servants, spear
- carriers, that sort of thing. You'd watch other people
- and what they were doing. People who had more experience and bigger roles and
- you'd watch what they would do and then you would try to copy that and then
- eventually you get your chance to give that a try. And this changes,
- again starting in the late 1800s. Suddenly
- people are starting to say that maybe acting was a little bit more than just
- copying what somebody else was doing. There might be a
- system that could be worked out that would make somebody a better actor and
- that could be separated from just acting. And this was greeted
- with a great deal of suspicion by folks at the time who felt that trying to
- systematize something like art was antithetical to the very nature of
- the process. And a lot of people got flack just
- because they were proposing any system at all regardless of what the content of
- that system might be. But the idea that there could be a
- system proved remarkably seductive and one of the reasons that I posit that it
- was seductive is because it intersected with another
- strong strain and cultural currents at this time, which was the
- increasing embrace of industrialism, and industrial philosophy, and rhetoric. The
- same time that you start to get these schools of acting, let's say that you can
- break apart and play down into a series of sort of
- component skills that you could then build back together.
- Interchangeable parts technology as far as a manufacturing practice was also
- really coming into its own and was proving itself
- incredibly influential, and popular, and powerful. And so it's the
- intersection of these two areas, the rhetoric of industry on one side and the
- rhetoric of theatrical practice on the other that
- I try to explore in this book. Originally I'd only planned on looking
- at live theatrical practices but I determined as I was
- continuing to do research that there might be something sort of interesting
- to look at in film practice as well. And so I got a chance to dive into what
- was going on both in the silent film era and in the sound film era during the
- golden age of the Hollywood studio. And what I found is that there was a
- frank acknowledgement of the fact that it was not just
- looking good or the camera liking you that would make somebody a good actor
- or a bad actor. That there was in fact a sense that there was a skill that could
- be learned and that could be learned in a class
- before you actually got in front of the camera itself.
- And so I got a chance to look at how that argument was played out both in the
- live theater world and in the film world. And there's a lot
- of intersection between the two of those things.
- And as we head closer to our own time in the late 20th heading into the 21st
- century, what emerges is that some of the most influential
- acting practices and techniques and people from the 20th
- century, whose influence is definitely still felt today in a number of
- programs, really have a lot of their roots in this
- same batch of industrial rhetoric that I
- explore from this time period. So that's sort of
- an overview of the book itself. I was really excited to
- get to dive into this and that I get to spend some time with some of the
- writings of, again, some of the most influential
- teachers of acting in the United States in the 20th century. And I also got a
- chance to do some really fun archival work
- as well. I went out to Los Angeles and spent some time in the Motion Picture
- Academy of Arts and Sciences Archives, the people that
- brought you the Oscars. They have an archive as well. So I got to spend some
- time digging through studio files there. Warner Bros.,
- the studio, all of their papers are stored at the University of Southern
- California, so I spent some time at USC as well doing some research there.
- And I spent some time in the New York Public Library
- getting to do some research in their archives as well as pulling a few books
- from our own Special Collections here at Tulane.
- My hope is that if people read this book they'll come away with a better sense of
- what are the underlying assumptions behind a lot of approaches to acting
- technique and methodology that are still around today.
- And they'll have a better sense of the way that theater is not separate or
- independent from these larger cultural currents. That in fact
- it reflects them and can influence them as well
- as I think the overlap of these two particular areas really shows.
- The next thing I'm interested in looking at seems like it might be somewhat
- different. I'm interested in looking at stage and screen representations of New
- Orleans. So on the one hand it's definitely
- not as practice focused as my look at acting technique and pedagogy, but on the
- other hand for me it encompasses that same idea of
- trying to look at how theatrical practice and how screen practice
- reflect these larger cultural concerns and influences.
- So that's a little bit about me and the book. Thank you so much for watching and
- I hope that if you have any questions I'll get a chance to answer them.
- Thanks again.
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