Hazel Anna Rogers Archives - Carl Kruse

Bowie Went To Berlin

by Hazel Anna Rogerts for the Carl Kruse Arts Blog

Bowie went to Berlin to escape. That is how it seems. We weren’t there, most of us, so we don’t know. There is talk about cocaine, about notoriety, about noise. But we weren’t there, so we don’t know.

It makes a good story, doesn’t it? It always does. All the fame in the world, but a lonely man still. A man divided between art and celebrity. A city divided into two disparate halves.

On August 13^th, 1961, they built the wall. To the West, the democracy of the United States, the United Kingdom, and France. To the East, the Communism of the Soviet Union. Disparate states.

It’s 1977, and the people of Berlin are divided. There are people here, in the West, who have family over in the East, and that is sad. No amount of democracy can placate the grief of a married man whose wife did not make it over the Wall. There are soldiers here and there, and everywhere. On the one side, the American ones, the British ones, and the French ones. On the other side, the Russian ones. However ‘free’ a place might seem, it seems less free when uniforms of war are on the prowl.

There is a cyclist roaming the streets, and it is David Bowie. He has been here for two years. Today, in his diary, he has written ‘I have really now got the will. I will be and I will work’ (Rory MacLean, ‘BERLIN’, Weidenfeld & Nicolson (2015), pp. 332).

It is true. He works a lot while he’s here. He spends a fair amount of time alone. He lives in a small first-floor apartment in Schoneberg. His assistant, Coco Schwab, gets him paint and canvases, and she spends time with him. He also spends time with lots of other people. Iggy Pop, who moved with him to the city. Romy Haag, performer and nightclub owner. Later, Brian Eno.

He makes music, then he leaves, and he leaves all of his characters and props behind too. He is stripped naked by Berlin. It is good. He is happy about it. Berlin was a happy time for Bowie. He left part of his heart there.

Even knowing all this. Knowing all the people he knew, the friends he made, the drunken nights he spent in clubs and at cabarets, there is a desire in me, and perhaps in you, to consider this a deeply lonely time for David Bowie. It is an addictive image. The image of him sat on a hotel bed in a dressing gown. Or the one of him smoking by a big window. Or the one of him stood in the street in a long leather jacket, frowning at the camera. But then isn’t the loneliest place in the world a crowd? A crowd of frantic fans, howling and screaming as he ducks away and out of sight, away from the stage, half dead from the cocaine, and off to take some more.

We love it. We love the torture of it. The cracks in the artist’s smile. The diary pages we read when they have left us. The videos and photos and testimonies that we pore over. We love how sad they were. We love how tortured they were.

I say not that David Bowie was a sad man. Rather the contrary seems to be the case. By all accounts, Bowie was a gentle, affable, well-mannered man who had a besotted wife – Iman – and loving friends and family. Things were difficult, perhaps; in Berlin, the consensus seems to be that Bowie drank and partied frequently, but he was simultaneously coming back to himself – David Jones, musician, dressed in a checked shirt and jeans, cycling unknown through the city streets.

But this is not just about David Bowie. This is about them all. Edgar Allan Poe. Paul Gauguin. Vincent Van Gogh. Sylvia Plath. Kurt Cobain. Ian Curtis. Amy Winehouse. We love the cabaret of it all, don’t we? The tortured artist. We pore over the music and the art that they left behind, and we mourn what they could have done if they’d lasted just a little longer.

Ah. The Artist. I hesitate to call myself an artist, because I am in agreement with actress Beatrice Dalle, who says that she is not an artist, she just reads words off of a page. She said that in a radio interview that I listened to a few months ago.

But if we are to call me an artist, and to call many of my friends artists (many are actors, like me), then we are all prey to the addictive solitude that characterises the artist’s existence. It’s more poetic that way. It’s more poetic to frame our loneliness, our lack of consistent work, the hours and days spent waiting after an audition, the nights of alcohol and drugs and melancholy, the days spent learning scripts alone in our rooms, the evenings spent playing music that no-one will ever hear, the counting of notes in a wallet – it’s more poetic to frame it all as essential to becoming a great artist. After all, this life is all secrets and closed doors, so why would we not also close our doors and keep our secrets and our superstitions to ourselves? We all think we’re special, we all think we are the chosen ones, we all secretly think we are better than the others because we wouldn’t be able to bear it if we didn’t think that way. And, after all, what is interesting about an artist who is not in suffering, in some way or another? The artists we go back to, the ones we fascinate over, are the tormented ones, the strange ones, the ones who seemed separate from the rest. That isn’t to say they were. We just like the fantasy more than the truth.

I am not especially sad. I smile a lot of the time. I am often quite superstitious. Last time I had an audition, and I felt that it did not go well, I listened to ‘Touch me in the morning’ (the Marlena Shaw version) and danced around my flat. I got a callback a few days later. After that callback, I got an email that made me think I hadn’t gotten the role, so I listened to ‘Touch me in the morning’ in the shower, and cried a little. The following morning, I learned that I had landed the role. I listened to ‘Touch me in the morning’, and danced in my living room with my sister. So now, this song seems to represent something magical. Now, I feel a compulsion to play this song when I next have an audition.

Regardless, it is a wonderful song. You should have a listen to it, right now. Marlena Shaw’s version has an upbeat, disco energy that is not so present in Diana Ross’ original version. I like Ross’ version too. It was the first version I heard. It was on a CD called ‘Sunday Morning’ that came free with The Sunday Times magazine. I think it was called that. I found a copy in a charity shop a couple years ago. We had the same CD at home while I was growing up, and we played it often. A compilation CD. I like listening to CDs. I also liked watching DVDs when I lived at home, and I liked listening to cassette tapes and watching VHS cassettes too. It feels sometimes like we don’t own anything anymore, like everything is up in the cloud, the digital cloud, and it could disappear in an instant. There’s something about these tortured artists that feels like nostalgia. Maybe that’s also why we like the image of it so much. David Bowie wasn’t posting Instagram photos of himself when he was in Berlin. He met people in the street, in nightclubs, and if he called them, he called them through a telephone whose curled wire was attached to a box on his bedside table. The time he spent in his apartment, he spent reading, or painting, or reflecting, or writing. He could live a private, secret life, should he wish to. All he had to do was lock his door, for there was no mobile phone on his nightstand that would buzz and buzz and buzz until he picked it up.

It is difficult to be so secretive, so unknown, nowadays. It is difficult to be mysterious. It is counterintuitive to try to be so, too. If I had not made my short films and put them on YouTube, if I had not posted my films and creations onto my Instagram, then I probably wouldn’t have landed my first role in a paid short film. Thus, I would probably not have managed to have signed with my current agent. Thus, I would not have had that audition I mentioned earlier, and I would not have listened to ‘Touch me in the morning’ in the shower. It’s all so different, now. In some ways, I long to be Bowie in Berlin, hat tilted over my eyes, checked shirt billowing a little in the breeze, cycling anonymous over Potsdamer Platz with my pockets empty save for some coins for coffee, knowing in my heart that I have really now got the will, that I will be and I will work, that I am an artist with something to give, something essential, something beautiful.

Maybe it is not so different. In the city, where many of us live, it is not so difficult to be secretive, to be unknown. It is not so difficult to be mysterious. All one must do is walk a mile or two away from home, to where the crowds are – for no-one who is no-one is anyone in a crowd. And when the crowds walk by, perhaps I will know in my heart that I have really now got the will, that I will be and I will work – that I am an artist.

=============
The Carl Kruse Arts Blog homepage is at https://carlkruse.net.
Contact: carl AT carlkruse DOT com
Other articles by Hazel include Bowie’s Alter Ego, The New Art, and Grimes, Music and the Future of Art.
You can also find Carl Kruse on Buzzfeed and on one of the older Carl Kruse Blogs.

Art for Art’s Sake: Noh Theater in the Age of Images

by Hazel Anna Rogers for the Carl Kruse Arts Blog

Carl Kruse Arts Blog - Noh Theater Image

This is a photograph of two women in front of a photograph of couples dancing.

You do not know these women.

What can we deduce from this image? Many a thing. The old woman is looking at the camera. She knows she is being watched. But it seems as though there is a roughness to her shape, potentially indicating that she has recently turned her head and only just observed her onlooker, thus her expression could be one of shock, or surprise. She is smiling – does she know her voyeur? Is she posing for them? Do we see a melancholy in her eye, something tired and weary of life? The woman turned away from us – does she know the old woman? Does she know she has been seen? Is she observing another photograph beside the one before her, or might she be gazing off in a reverie about the dancing people, or, perhaps, has she spotted someone else that she knows? And on the form of the photograph – is this a triptych of sorts, a three-part story in a zigzag pattern from right to left of young (the faceless woman), old (the old woman), and older, but likely passed from this world (the people in the photograph)? Are we being shown the course of life through this photograph? Is this a play on Magritte’s Le Chef-d’Oeuvre ou les Mystères de l’Horizon (1955), where all parties exist within the same frame and yet simultaneously exist within their own realities? Or maybe this is a feminist piece, one centred on revealing the beauty of old age as being in the wizened, knowing eyes and smile-creases on an elderly woman as opposed to the younger woman, whose beauty is in her flesh, her form, and so her face is not shown, as opposed to the women in the photograph whose beauty is used solely for the entertainment of the men they are dancing with?

All of these are tepid assumptions, just like most of those propounded in popular artistic and literary theory. But I’m sure you warmed to one or another, thinking it to bear some truth.

The woman looking to the camera is my mother’s mother, and the other woman is my mother. I took the photograph when we were visiting a gallery on a hot summer’s day in France, where my grandmother lives, and where my mother is from. You see how I was able to use this image to promulgate any theory I wished, any social cause that came to mind, any artistic vision that I could think of off of the top of my head. I could swindle you, tug you in to believe any narrative I wished just through using believable-sounding words.

Peter Brook, in his novel The Empty Space, asks this pertinent question: ‘Is it that we are living in an age of images?’. I think we do. As illustrated by my annoying and somewhat pretentious vernacular about the photograph above, it is clear that meaning can be gleaned without the need for language, for, as John Berger asserts in his text Ways of Seeing; ‘Seeing comes before words’, and further that ‘this seeing which comes before words [] can never quite be covered by them’. We are born with an innate propensity towards the visual, and it is from the visual that we oftentimes learn language.

We have known the significance of images as importers of meaning since the beginning of time; for what is a painting if not a meaning, an explanation of a feeling, a narrative without words? For what is a photograph, if not a condensing of words and emotions within a frame? But, perhaps, words can also exist as images. Perhaps we should not limit the term ‘image’ to denote something purely visual in this instance. Take the Noh play, for instance. Not much ‘happens’ in a Noh play. That is to say there are not many events within traditional Noh plays. A Noh play could be said to be a visualisation of a metaphor, peppered with historically prominent symbols and actions. Because of this, the dialogue in a Noh play tends to be limited, allowing space for meaning to be derived from the specificity of its choreography and instrumental accompaniment. The Noh play creates a series of images, images passed down generation after generation, whose perfect translation is facilitated by the use of masks on its performers. The specificity of the movement, music, and setting of a Noh play is strictly protected by the Nohgaku Performers’ Association (Nōgaku Kyōkai), and so it is indeed possible that a Noh play performed some 200 years ago may be a mirror image to the same play performed today.

What I know of Noh Theatre has mostly come from Toyoitiro and Toyoichirō Nogami’s comprehensive text Japanese Noh Plays: How to See Them (2005), which details the essential structural and artistic components of Noh Theatre. To avoid simply regurgitating the Nogami’s scripture, I shall describe the environment of Noh as best I can in my own words: there is the stage, where the actors perform; the back stage, where the musicians and prompters seat themselves; the veranda to the right, where the chorus performs; and the corridor to the left, where the musicians and actors journey to and from the stage. This corridor is also known as the Bridge. There is a pine tree painted onto the wall at the back of the stage. This tree is ever present in all Noh performances. The set does not change, regardless of which play is performed. It is up to the performers themselves to make something happen.

Why do I bring up Noh in my discussion of images? Consider my comment on assumptions and vernaculars propounded by popular literary and artistic theorists. While I was studying literature in Brighton, I came across many tedious commentaries made about such prolific writers as Shakespeare, Twain, and Hemingway. In the West, we are constantly preoccupied with finding the political issues, the social issues, the identity issues associated with art. We find this in both the literary and plastic arts. An image cannot simply be one, or simply be beheld for its beauty, or its enlightening insights on this fickle, strange thing we call life. In the West, we act as if it is of the utmost importance for us to reduce an image down to the gender, political leanings, and social status of its creator and of the characters they depict. We act as if this will give us a greater knowledge of art, but, in fact, it reduces art by looking behind the canvas, or the page, rather than at it. In the West, we decide that we can no longer look at certain books, certain artworks, certain buildings, because we believe that this act of erasure will make us better people. In the West, we decide to adapt pieces of work to make them more palatable to our audiences. Noh refuses this. Noh remains as Noh has always been; an image solidified through the centuries.

It is true that we are living in an age of image, as Brook believes, but it is also true that these images lack constancy – we are so hungry to find the images that we believe we want that we find ourselves inundated with such a vast amount of them that we no longer know where to look. Instagram, TikTok, adverts, YouTube, immersive gallery showings, memes, GIFs, emojis; these are the facilitators of our hunger for the perfect image, an image that supports our political and social leanings, an image whose creator is unproblematic, an image that satisfies us aesthetically. We are greedy, these days. It seems that we are beginning to lack the humility to acknowledge the potential of l’art pour l’art, or art for art’s sake; that is, that the fundamental value of art is separate from its political, moralistic, or ethically instructive function. Of course, that is not to say that art is meaningless, because it is surely not. Art, as Nietzsche asserts, is ‘the great stimulus of life’ (Twilight of the Idols: or How to Philosophize With a Hammer, 1889), and the meaning we glean from it is so subjective and personally driven that I simply argue that it is an insanity to try and pin down a work with its backstory, and further to reject or embrace it purely as a result of that backstory.

In Noh, we can look onto the stage, and realise that no matter how many images we destroy or create, nothing can change the fundamental things of life that Noh portrays, amongst them being love, death, and the magical mysteries of life itself. Noh unknowingly rejects our penchant towards the politicisation of art by presenting us with an unchangeable form, one which does not cater to our erratic political and didactic whims, and invites us simply to watch and see all the bountiful emotions and experiences that frame the oddity of our human existence.

Perhaps I am wrong. Of course, Noh addresses socio-political issues of its time, and other issues therein, because it is almost impossible to create an art that does not reflect one’s lived experience of the time one is living within. But, as Earle Ernst propounds, Noh is ‘an exquisitely precise theatre based on the artistic principle of reduction to essential forms’ (The Influence of Japanese Theatrical Style on Western Theatre, 1969); it is the form of Noh that is its artistic power, its inimitable fusion of voice, movement, dance, music, acting, poetry, and prose to create enduring images. It is Noh theatre that presents the ultimate challenge to our currents views about art.
===========
The Carl Kruse Arts Blog homepage is at https://carlkruse.net
Contact: carl AT carlkruse DOT com
Other articles by Hazel Anna Rogers include When The Show Is Over, Finding My Clown, Acting and Art, and What Does it Mean to be Wealthy.
Carl Kruse is also on Buzzfeed.

When the Show is Over

by Hazel Anna Rogers for the Carl Kruse Arts Blog

The mist has lifted, and life is back. It is an abyss, a swamp of unknowing and learning how to live without the glistening sheen of adrenaline that glosses over your eyes for the weeks and days preceding and encompassing a show. You lie flat, and all appears flat. Everything reminds you of it, and you are reminded of the loss of it. Life is back, and it is clear as day.

My company and I were reminded on the last day of the show that theatre is ‘live’, and that that is both the beauty and the curse of it. Its liveness is what can make it so much greater than any other acting form, and yet it is also its downfall – while simultaneously, if it is indeed great, it will be remembered, it must yet always live within the mind of its beholder, never to be looked upon again, and so its greatness dies a death after the final bow.

Carl Kruse Arts Blog - Close of the show

The stage is effortlessly alive. It is a space to breathe and swim in, and its heart is palpable, touchable, unlike the screen. I love film, and television, but theatre is a beast apart from these things. How wonderful to be able to reach out and brush the leg of the actor as they scurry in the round, to smell their skin and feel their breath on you as they pant and sweat and scream and whisper. How is it than an art so old can be breathed into and brought back to light out of the fetid dust it has oftentimes become. Theatre is a difficult place, a breeding ground for ham and cringe and fault. It demands much, and, if committed to, its reward is jubilance and a drug-like high. Laziness is all too obvious, all too noticeable on a stage. One cannot hide, one cannot be tired, one cannot be human, when one acts in the theatre. A missed beat hangs like a rotting beam of wood. A forgotten prop is befitted with mime, and it breaks the mind of the observer in half, letting reality seep through like worms pushing through a rain-covered mud. A bored actor stood in the corner of a stage stands out like a pustule, bringing all eyes to their ugly treason. There is no room for mediocrity in theatre, and yet mediocre theatre is made, making the art harder and harder to work within. One bad song can be skipped. But a bad play repulses like a disease. An hour trudges by as boots through a waterlogged field. An uncomfortable chair takes the attention’s precedence over the action afore the onlooker. This is why the inevitable end of the run of an astonishing play is so very sad. It is a tragedy that the world must keep turning, and that we can dwell but for a second on a moment so great.

Carl Kruse Arts Blog - Theater Closing Act

I don’t know what to do with myself. My whole body has come crashing down. My bones feel heavy, and I can barely lift myself. The wild rush of the show run has left me crumpled while, at the time, it made me feel as though I could go on and on and on without stopping. Veins of fire turned ash, now. Still. What a dream it was. You know, I still pinch myself thinking on it. Me? Here? Doing this? I could but wish for others to feel what I have felt during this past week. My mind strays back to the day I was accepted, and then further on to the first night I spent in my home in London, then to the first day of the course, when I walked home teary-eyed. Many a moon that was ago. Today I skip and leap even with my fragile temperament. I am low, but am ready to be lifted high again. How endless the process of a show is. How panicked one becomes when one really realises the show is come upon them after weeks of tough drudgery through lines of text not altogether imaginable until they’re spat on stage. How suddenly it all ends.

Mother Courage and Her Children is an important play. An integral play. It speaks to an audience in a way quite unlike the war films and history books do. Though the adaptation we performed was set in 2080, it harkens to our lives today, to the wars that prevail around and through us, and to the depravity and beauty of our sorry world. My character, Kattrin, was at once the beacon of hope and compassion at the centre of the play, and yet ended the play as the very horror at the root of it, Mother Courage herself. We have all of these things within us. The kindness and softness of a child, and the brutality and violence of a mother who has lived through trauma so profound she knows not what else to be other than tough and sharp and cold. I will be forever thankful to have lived through Brecht’s world, and to have revealed it to others.

I could continue at lengths about theatre and the stage and Brecht’s play itself, but perhaps I should end this piece by speaking on something else. For those who don’t know the dressing room, and for whom its name speaks of secrets and celebrity and mystery, I shall tell you of it now. It is a warm place, filled with the oddity of bodies fueled by nervousness and tiredness and excitability. Bodies naked and clothed, passing around sticks of charcoal to dirty the edges of their faces, bodies coated in thick layers of sweat and grime and cloth. Bodies dancing to music off of a small black speaker, laughing together, hugging, weeping together. Women howling and singing and stretching before they go into the wings around the stage. Women cheering one another, eating together, sharing thoughts and jokes and love and pain. The dressing room is the place in which it all begins. A stage manager comes in and calls the ‘half’. The squirming commences, the jumping about, the endless anxious toilet visits, the swigs of tepid water from old plastic bottles, the hand squeezes, the giggling. A stage manager comes in and calls ‘beginners’. The performers become cool, collected, zoned in. They breathe as one. I leave them, and wish them well. One clasps me by the head and says to me: ‘You are the heartbeat’. I go down, alone, and enter the stage. The audience have not yet arrived. I sit inside the metal frames of the ice cream van in the centre of the room, and become her. The audience file in. Blackness. Silence. The play begins.

==========

The Carl Kruse Arts Blog homepage is at CarlKruse.net
Contact: carl AT carlkruse DOT com
Other articles by Hazel Anna Rogers include Finding My Clown, Channeling Animals, and Six Viewpoints.
Carl Kruse is also on Stage 32.

Acting and Art: Channeling Animals

by Hazel Anna Rogers for the Carl Kruse Arts Blog

The studio floor is covered in bodies.

They are curled and strewn and spread and sprawled, as though they were dead.

But they are not.

Some breathe shallowly, quickly, as if their hearts fluttered about like moths.

Some breathe deeply, forcing air bull-like through their noses.

Others are almost inaudible, but, if you look closely, you will see their bodies heaving up and down, up and down, up and down.

These are the bodies of actors, and they are about to become animals.

A woman, sitting in the corner of the room with a notepad, begins counting down from ten. The actors start shuffling about in their sleep, yawning, groaning, growling, stretching. The woman calls out:

“One.”

The bodies spring up, and they begin to move. Each is a different animal, going about in the space unbeknownst to one another, acting as if isolated in their separate habitats. A body hangs from the ballet bar, chewing slowly: she is a sloth. Another rests on its back, fondling a ball on its chest and squeaking at intervals: he is an otter. Another prowls about, his shoulders rising above his head, his paws padding heavily, yet gracefully, into the sprung grey floor: he is a puma.

I am a gorilla. A silverback eastern mountain gorilla, one of the two subspecies of mountain gorilla known to exist. I grunt softly, and belch. I crawl around quadrupedally, resting my weight on my fists and keeping my lower body close to the ground so as to maintain the arch in my back. My buttocks are stuck out, and I collapse into them when I find a feeding place. My eyes do not dart, for I am considered, and controlled in my primate-hood. I need not rush, for I hold my place in the group without effort, without arrogance. I am a leader without raising a fist.

Save when I am threatened.

The woman plays a track on her phone. Sirens begin resounding around the four walls. The animals in the room begin to panic, except for those too slow to do so (I speak of the sloth and the slow loris). Big cats ready themselves to pounce; a giraffe and an orynx start to prance about in terror on their dainty hooves; a meerkat scurries away back to her burrow; two penguins begin honking and waving their beaks around in distress; the slow loris raises her arms above her head, for she has poisonous glands in her armpits.

Carl Kruse Art Blog - Animal Studies — *Channeling Your Inner Animal*

I begin my ritualized charge; hastening hooting, symbolic feeding, getting up on my hind legs and lurching forwards bipedally, throwing plants, beating my chest, doing one-legged kicks, running quadrupedally (but sideways), slapping and thrashing vegetation, and whacking the ground with my palms. My hooting turns into screeching and roaring, and I throw myself around the space, expanding my chest and attempting to intimidate whatever was causing the ruckus.

The woman turns the sound off and replaces it with the sounds of birds singing and rustling leaves, perhaps those of a rainforest. I do not think. I see leaves, leaves which I know will taste good, and I eat them. I sit unselfconsciously, my belly protruding and my legs open, revealing myself. I do not think; instinct rules me.

The woman speaks: she tells us to return to our nests and settle ourselves into slumber. We do. She counts down from ten;

And only humans remain.

I have been studying the silverback mountain gorilla for a few weeks now. When I eat my dinner alone in my apartment, I watch endless documentaries about these great apes. When researching in order to embody an animal, one has to pay close attention to specific movements and characteristics which the animal exerts without effort; it is no use attempting to caricature the animal. We might find a slow loris or a sloth cute, but this is not their intention, and thus should not be our own. A gorilla does not come to standing, albeit quadrupedally not bipedally, in the same way a human does; they roll on their voluptuous buttocks onto their fists and come up this way, whereas we might throw ourselves forwards and push onto the palms of our hands to stand. A gorilla does not take care not to salivate nor to keep their mouths shut as they chew on the stringy stems of bamboo and the pithy interior of the banana tree, so I cannot if I am to truly embody the gorilla in all its intricacies.

There is something remarkably freeing about relenting the militant control that we force upon our bodies in order to be acceptable within human society. This may be obvious, but to be an animal is to be unselfconscious, or at least not self-judging in the way a human is as a result of exterior influences. To be an animal is to feel no guilt for resting, to have no cause for arbitrary stress over the need to work and exert oneself, to have no worry other than in the presence of a predator or if in fear of one’s young’s life. To be an animal and then to emerge from it is to realize the ridiculousness of the human, and yet also to admire it for its odd insecurities and nonsensical ways of being.

Most documentaries I have seen about various primate populations have emphasized their tenderness and their so-called ‘humanistic’ tendencies, and this seemed odd to me; it was as though we would only be able to find empathy and compassion for a being if we could find points of comparison between ourselves and it. I suppose this is normal, though. We are intellectual beings after all. These documentaries did bear some interesting revelations on how life could be, or could have been, had humanity’s aim been geared towards the joy of the many as opposed to the plenty of the few; the black-crested macaque, which lives on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, lives almost entirely without conflict – due to the abundance of food generated by the island’s hot climate and copious monsoon rains, the macaques rarely fight, and almost all disagreements are resolved by kisses and hugs. These primates cuddle each other constantly, and also seem to smile regularly (at least according to our human conception of a ‘smile’).

Animal Studies, as a practice, was created by Lee Strasberg during the twentieth century, with the aim of eventually distilling the ‘pure’ animal practice into something more human, and, ultimately, a character, such as Marlon Brando’s Stanley of Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire, which was famously based on the study of apes. The strength in this practice lies in the precision of the initial practice; by being so accurate and detailed in one’s observation and imitation of an animal, including its thoughts and habitual patterns of life, one might be able to find a similar dedication in the realization of a character and in doing so create a more rounded and human portrayal of said character as opposed to them being simply an extension of oneself.

To end, I would like to suggest that perhaps, in finding the simple joy and beauty of exploring our natural world in such a visceral way, we might also learn to have more compassion for this fragile planet we call our own.

============
The Carl Kruse Arts Blog Homepage.
Contact: carl AT carlkruse DOT com
Other articles by Hazel include – Six Viewpoints, Metropolis, and the World of Wearable Art.
The SEO folks insist on putting this Carl Kruse link here though this is not a site I am associated with.