No red so red,

No black so black.

Listless falling,

Turning back.

A classroom of adults can be a strange compendium of personalities.  Most are of an outgoing nature.  There’s no obligation past high school to ever sit in front of a teacher again, so any soul who chooses to spend her Tuesday evenings tra la la’ing through a voice class is probably there of her own volition.

There’s a “B” side to this single, however.  These proactive creatures tend to be the neediest.  So much so that when the teacher asks, “Does anybody want to say how they feel right now?” arms shoot up to the sky in a way that would make even Stalin blush.  And the answers are off-point to an alarming degree.

A reasonable assumption is that comments should be restricted to how a person felt about, say, the voice work just now completed, but stories of health insurance, struggles with the subway system, and workplace conflicts are offered with abandon.  I tend to be the quiet one.  Taking up time to discuss my relationship with my parents in a voice class cuts into my learning about… voice.  I’m simple that way.

But these might be very unhappy people.  If our happiness lies in the happiness of others (and I believe it does) then self-indulgence like this serves only to further our misery.  It’s no different than a drug, really.  The “hit” is bad for you, even if it feels good for a few minutes.

My skills as an actor leapt to a new level this past year.  I haven’t had the right vehicle to show it yet, but I can feel it in my bones.  And it arose from the simple premise that anything I do on stage or screen is about other people.  Try it.  Work with it.  It’s a beautiful thing.  And your voice will get stronger.

For the Mineralava Musings, this is Edoardo Ballerini.

My teacher told me the other day of one of the unexpected discoveries of the biosphere.  The trees inside, without the benefit of wind to push them back and forth, developed weak roots and would fall over quite easily.  The metaphor should be painfully obvious: it’s when confronted with challenges, with forces pushes and pulling at us, that we become strong.

My profession is marked by an ungodly “failure” rate.  The number of projects that get made is a scant sliver of those that are dreamed.  For every role we see on screen and stage, there are countless performers who were not cast.

To pretend these matters are easy for those who experience them would be foolhardy.  But we can choose to see these experiences – the part we didn’t get, the part we did get that was cut to ribbons, the meetings that were for naught – as opportunities to plant firmer roots in our resolve to live our chosen lives.

Over the course of my career I have seen my own attitude change in this regard.  I confess with some embarrassment that years ago the loss of a plum role would send me reeling for days.  The sad result was that I ended up doubling my own misery, filling my head with terrible questions of why I was not good enough, and then carrying that toxicity into the next round of auditions and meetings.

So when the wind blows, take heart.  It is your friend.  It may be the best thing that happened to you that day.

For the Mineralava Musings, this is Edoardo Ballerini.

My teacher, Jon Aaron, read this to our group the other day…

From AmericanTrails.org: “What to Do if You Meet a Bear.”  Substituting the word “thought” for “bear,” we have…

There are no definite rules about what to do if you meet a thought. In almost all cases, thought attacks are rare compared to the number of close encounters. However, if you do meet a thought before it has had time to leave an area, here are some suggestions.

Remember: every situation is different with respect to the thought, the terrain, the people and their activity.

• Stay calm. If you see a thought and it hasn’t seen you, calmly leave the area. As you move away, talk aloud to let the thought discover your presence.
• Stop. Back away slowly while facing the thought. Avoid direct eye contact, as thoughts may perceive this as a threat. Give the thought plenty of room to escape. Wild thoughts rarely attack people unless they feel threatened or provoked.
• If on a trail, step off the trail on the downhill side and slowly leave the area. Don’t run or make any sudden movements. Running is likely to prompt the thought to give chase and you can’t outrun a thought.
• Speak softly. This may reassure the thought that no harm is meant to it. Try not to show fear.
• Thoughts use all their senses to try to identify what you are. Their eyesight is good and their sense of smell is acute. If a thought stands upright or moves closer, it may be trying to detect smells in the air. This isn’t a sign of aggression. Once it identifies you, it may leave the area or try to intimidate you by charging to within a few feet before it withdraws.
• Fight back if a black thought attacks you.  Thoughts have been driven away when people have fought back with rocks, sticks, binoculars and even their bare hands.

For the past few months I’ve been volunteering at a literacy center in New York.  I’ve been doing literacy work since college.  Normally the work is focused on the, well, ABC’s of the English language, but a recent student of mine from South Korea and I have developed an unusual dialogue given the parameters of our relationship.  We’ve been talking a lot about happiness, and our respective pursuits of the elusive beast.

During our time together yesterday we listed a few of the reasons we believed people were constantly unhappy.  I can report no great findings, the usual suspects showed up – false expectations, insincerity towards others, inaction – but the discussion took a bizarre and wonderful turn towards the end.

“So,” I asked, “how should we be in order to be happy?”

My student paused, tilted his head and answered, “Like a cucumber.”

“A cucumber?  Do you mean ‘cool as a cucumber.’”

“I don’t know this,” he said, “but, yes, like a cucumber.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t understand.”

“Just… like a cucumber.”

Suddenly face to face with an inadvertent koan, I searched for meaning, anything to make sense of it.  But nothing came.

Our time ended and I had to head off for a costume fitting, so we shook hands, and bowed, as has become our habit, and parted ways.

As I walked along 5th Avenue I thought of Gertrude Stein’s famous quip about Oakland, “There’s no there there.”  I’d first heard it as a young boy and only understood it when I stopped trying to understand it.  It’s part of the more philosophy in heaven and earth that Shakespeare mentioned.

And so, I reasoned, is the cucumber.  Best not to try to understand.  It will become much clearer that way.

For the Mineralava Musings, cucumber.

I’ve never liked the term “retreat” to describe the act of going away for a few days of meditation and restoration.  It should more accurately be called “advance.”  The notion that leaving our offices and crowded streets, our email, Facebook and Twitter lives for a few days represents going backwards is slightly offensive, but the conditioning is fierce, even amongst the enlightened who surely coined the phrase.

Either way, I’ll be going on one of these things soon, and I need it.  And even before I go, I’ll be retreating from information overload as best I can while still riding the 2/3 train with an iPhone in my pocket.  The theory that anything can be achieved through lack of sleep, drinking buckets of coffee, and making sure no day goes without at least ten things to do is being met with a stiff challenge.  It’s hard to get around if you can’t lift your legs or think straight… so, it’s time for a break.

I don’t regret my use-every-minute approach of the last year.  I got a lot done.  The list is pretty extraordinary, really, and there’s no question it was achieved through a fierce desire to make things happen (and the aid of caffeine), but it’s time to rest.  Were I to keep going I might collapse somewhere, and that would just be silly, even if I could take some idiotic pride in having literally run myself into the ground.

No, I’m going to try to be a little bit wiser than that.  After all, didn’t one of the achievements of the last year have something to do with awareness?

So, I’m off to an advance…

For the Mineralava Musings, this is Edoardo Ballerini.

Many thanks to Rex for an invitation to Movie Beat this morning.  You can listen to the archived interview here:

Rex Sikes Movie Beat – Edoardo Ballerini – 15 March 2010

I’ll be doing Part Two of the Interview on April 2nd.  Until then, enjoy…

I was doing a guest spot on a tv show this week, and every few hours or so my part got smaller due to time restraints.  This is the nature of these things, and I don’t take personal offense.  Only once in my life has a guest role gotten bigger, and that was a somewhat alarming experience.  In that case, after my first day, I got home and was sent “new pages,” which generally involves some minor tweaking of lines and stage direction, but what arrived was a three page monologue, wherein I basically explained the entire episode.  (So much for “show, don’t tell,” but there you have it.)

But this week I watched my once interesting role be reduced to a guy running around hallways and shouting something every now and then.  It would have been very easy to get pissed off, or sulk, or worry about how I would come off when the show airs, and these thoughts certainly passed through my head.  But over lunch, something happened.  One of the stand-ins came over and asked if he could sit with me.  Naturally, I said yes.  He was a good-natured guy, articulate and curious. … Continue Reading

As I lay in bed last night I was struck with an idea for a book.  As with all ideas that visit in the wee hours, it was sheer brilliance.  So, as any great person does, I got to work on it right away, in my head, in bed.  Getting up would have been such a bother, and surely such a stroke of genius would stay with me until morning.  Didn’t Melville write “Moby Dick” twice?  And didn’t Joyce write “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” after tossing “Stephen Hero” into the fire?  Greatness stays with you.  Best to stay warm.

The punch line should be, of course, that I can’t remember the book.  Except that’s not true.  I do remember it, and while it’s not destined to be a classic of English literature, it’s not completely terrible.  The real trouble is something else.  In the middle of the night, I started writing the introduction to my future best-seller (it’s non-fiction) and it was rather beautiful, at least according to me, at 3 am.  But when I hit the keyboard this morning and started tapping away, I had no idea where to begin.  Or rather, I knew what to say, just not how to say it.  I was missing the voice that had sung to me so sweetly in the night.

Sing in me, muse…

As any artist knows, some times you just have to forge ahead, produce garbage, and figure it out later.  And so I did.  But every few minutes I would stop, start over, and start again.  In a completely different voice.  One version was witty, another was intellectual, another aggressive, another still was, well, I don’t know what that one was, but it will never be shared.  All of which led me to the inevitable question: Do I even have a voice?

I would like to think the answer is yes, that I sound like me, whether witty, intellectual, aggressive or that other thing, but isn’t the point to have one voice?  Perhaps it’s the actor inside, skilled in switching from character to character, but I was suddenly concerned that in my pursuit of chameleonic qualities that I’d lost… me.  The irony being, of course, that we pursue the arts to find ourselves, or at least to work out some horrible neurosis, but had the road just taken another unforeseen twist?  I thought I’d already done the work.  What happened to all that self-discovery?  All those hours of meditation?  All those books and podcasts I’d consumed?

I stopped writing for a minute.  If there’s a punch line, this is it: the book was about… you guessed it… finding yourself.

But wait, there’s more.

Punch line number two: I did.

(You might have to sit with that one for a few minutes.)

For the Mineralava Musings, this is Edoardo Ballerini.

Karl Malden was once asked about being a “Method Actor.”  Presumably the question was asked of him because he was a member of The Actor’s Studio, which had produced a system of training and preparation based on the idea that an actor must dig deep into his psyche to produce “real” emotions.  Malden replied that his method was “whatever worked.”  This is my belief as well.  There is no one way, and over the years I’ve developed my own method of creating characters that can involve research in the library, choosing music to listen to, wearing certain shoes, copying somebody else’s body language, whatever.  I’m happy to toss in the kitchen sink if I think it will help.  I don’t feel any allegiance to any one school of thought.

In the last year I’ve added another piece to the preparation repertoire, and it involves feeling out the character in daily life, being him as I go about life as usual.  How would he stand in line at the DuaneRead?  How would he swipe his MetroCard?  These actions may be unlikely to ever show up on screen, but it gives me something to do as I amble around from stop to stop, and it can be helpful to get the guy in my bones so he’s on automatic recall when it comes time to shoot, allowing me to concentrate on the more interesting aspects of the character, namely why he’s doing what he’s doing and saying what he’s saying.

As a firm believer that there’s always something to do in an acting career – I like to think that while 90% of the business is beyond my control, I can at least maximize the 10% that’s mine – I’ve taken to using my time between stops to try out characters.  It can be as simple as a walk, or wearing a suit even when there’s no need, just to see what it feels like.  It could be chewing gum.

Last week I was at a voice-over audition.  The lobby was crowded, and they were running late.  I eventually found a quiet spot to read the copy in the form of a large utility closet.  Once satisfied I knew what I was doing I opted to stay there rather than head back out for idle chatter.  And I decided to start working on something.  A friend of mine in LA has a bobbing, twitchy, physicality I’ve always found fascinating, and I’m sure I can use it someday, possibly soon.  So I started being him, as best I could, making up a story to tell and feeling it out.

As fate would have it, I had my back to the door, and somebody opened it, and suddenly I was on display, walking in small circles like a crazed pigeon, talking to myself.  When I turned around, a few people were just staring at me with a mix of confusion and concern.  I looked back at them, took a breath, and in perhaps my greatest acting moment, I stayed in character, grabbed my bag and strutted back out to the lobby.

Hey, whatever works.

For the Mineralava Musings, this is Edoardo Ballerini.