Entelechy

So I've just learned about this word/concept and it's been making me stagger a bit.

It's Greek in origin, and the Greek word means something like 'having a goal' or 'creating completion'

Aristotle uses it when talking about plants and seeds.  It's the essence of what's in a seed that makes it grow into the right kind of plant - the essential thing that makes a tomato seed grow a tomato plant or a pumpkin seed a pumpkin vine.  In other words, the entelechy of the acorn is an oak tree, the entelechy of a caterpillar is a butterfly and so on.

It's a fantastic word that holds in it the concepts of soul, potential, growth, transformation, self-actualization, possibility.  It's a way to name one's purpose and reason for being.

What kind of oak tree is already there, waiting for me to manifest it?

Open-Gender Casting: read about it over at HowlRound

I love this HowlRound post not just because it gives me a newer, better piece of vocabulary: open-gender casting - the idea that a character can be played by an actor of either gender as their own gender. An example from my resume: playing Toby Belch as a female character.  Another example of this would be a playwright writing characters with the intention that they can be played by either gender.

The other term I've been using as a catch all is cross-gender casting.  Moving forward, I'll be using this term to describe scenarios where a character is played by an actor of the opposite gender as the gender of the character.  An example from my resume: playing MacBeth as written, as a male character.

The post over at HowlRound by Susan Stroupe is intended as a conversation starter on this issue.  So head on over, and make some comments!

Why I'm not an actress

I introduce myself as an actor. It's right there in the name of this blog. I can't remember when I last chose to call myself an actress.  I don't know if it was conscious at first, but here's why.

I'm an actor because actors have more options.  Actors play the hero or the comic relief or the villain.  They're at the center of the action, the one the story is about.  That's who I want to be.  Actors are the total package - a voice and a body and technique and more.

I can feel objectification in the word actress - it's not too different from the word starlet, somehow.  And starlets are usually hot or sultry or sexy, and not much beyond.  For me, there's also something in this word that connects to the ideas in the poem/story  'Ladies First'  written by Shel Silverstein and read by Marlo Thomas on Free to Be You & Me, the supremely awesome 70's collection of poems and songs and stories with an anti-gender stereotype message.  The protagonist of 'Ladies First' is a 'tender sweet young thing' who goes on safari, and keeps insisting on special treatment, and meets an untimely end.  I'm not looking to be treated differently because of my gender, and identifying as an actress feels like I'm asking for that.

Ultimately though, it comes down to this: there are women's films (chick flicks), women's novels (chick lit) and women's plays.  But the other category isn't men's films, men's novels or men's plays - those are just called films, novels and plays.
I'd like to see the various 'stories for women' categories become 'stories for humans' categories.  And I think part of the way to get there, is to use a gender-neutral term for what I do.  I act.  I'm an actor.

Do other people feel this way about the word actress?  I'm very curious...

where performance lives

'She likes to juggle.  Instead of balls or batons, she practices with four or five perceptual experiences at once.  She drops balls but it doesn't matter.  She retrieves them when their absence is noticed. The director should know she prefers juggling to catching the ball.  There is no time to capture or translate when someone is juggling.  This freedom from knowing arouses the curiosity that precedes question-making. And this is where she feels performance lives.'

Deborah Hay, my body, the buddhist

Welcome!!

Thanks for joining me!  I'm going to be writing about what happens in an actor's life, for an actor working in a regional market.

Two things you'll need to know:
1. The San Francisco Bay Area refers to the northern California nine county region that includes San Francisco, Alameda, Contra Costa, Santa Clara, Marin, Sonoma, San Mateo, Solano, and Napa.
2. I believe actor is a gender neutral term.  I'm female, but I never call myself an actress, any more than I'd call a woman who directs a directress, a woman who heals the sick a doctoress, etc. I may unpack this more later.

But in the meantime, thanks for pulling up a screen as I get started!