A Quote by Anna Deavere Smith

A lot of acting techniques are very self-oriented. — © Anna Deavere Smith
A lot of acting techniques are very self-oriented.
There's so much to learn about acting and performance in general... I mean, acting is a very complex art, and there are a lot more theories and methods and techniques to it than I think anybody would think.
Everyone seems to think they know what acting techniques are. Techniques just help you get to a certain place, but if the thing is happening just by itself, you don't need those techniques.
Everyone seems to think they know what acting techniques are. Techniques just help you get to a certain place, but if the thing is happening just by itself you don't need those techniques.
Such techniques, including meta-discursive stuff, self-reference, irony, black humor, cynicism, grotesquerie and shock, it would be safe to say that television or televisual values rule the culture. Television is successfully using a lot of those same techniques but using them for a very different agenda, which is to sort of create an ethos and please people and to sell products to consumers.
A commercial civilization is money-oriented, profit-oriented. Commercial values always tend to wrench a society free of tradition.Economics from education to public service is being reorganized on the self-destructive basis of self-interest.
Luckily for me, I get a lot of acting-oriented scripts.
Having a guy on a microphone yelling lines at you is counter to a lot of acting techniques.
To me, acting is very therapeutic. I get out a lot of anger and frustration. It's maybe hard to believe, but as a kid I really had a lot of self-doubts. My father was very ill - he was an alcoholic - so there were a lot of things that built up for me. And because I was going to a Catholic school in a small German town, a lot of it was suppressed. I was angry and didn't know how to get it out.
I'm an ER doctor, period. I look at a problem with a certain lens: very action-oriented, very results-oriented.
Chicago has a burly, action-oriented but still self-assured and relaxed confidence to its stride. The city has a lot of wide-open space and all the possibilities that suggests. There's a lot of horizontal grandeur here.
It is now very clear that techniques of machine-human interfacing, pharmacology of the synthetic variety, all kinds of manipulative techniques, all kinds of data storage, imaging and retrieval techniques - all of this is coalescing toward the potential of a truly demonic or angelic kind of self-imaging of our culture... And the people who are on the demonic side are fully aware of this and hurrying full-tilt forward with their plans to capture everyone as a 100% believing consumer inside some kind of a beige furnished fascism that won't even raise a ripple.
I could probably go through our losses in a lot more detail than our wins, all through my career. But you have to be able to move on to what's next, and I'm very process-oriented and next-day oriented.
I was going to be a High School teacher. I was studying at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, up in Canada. I was also acting in a wonderfully supportive theatre community in Edmonton. There's a lot of support for theatre there. So, I was having a great time, but I didn't consider acting as a serious career initially, because even the most successful actors that I know in Edmonton are not super successful. Acting over there is just not a success-oriented career.
I think the whole point about self-control, the whole point about willpower, is to help people understand that there are endless self-nudge techniques that can be enormously helpful and are very simple.
I think a lot of acting is about the removal of self-consciousness. The actor is going to be in front of a lot of people, and will naturally feel self-conscious. So a lot of the preparation for that is the removal of that idea. Like you embody or are connected to this character, therefore you can present this character in a way that eventually, when you come back to see it, you feel not exactly ashamed of.
There's a lot of hip-hop that's oriented toward a progressive view of America because it's oriented toward a civil rights progress and a critique of the power structure.
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