#standard boilerplate: this is an in-character blog set in a fictional universe; it is filled with lies

[stagedelight]

[@light-up-the-stones] Do you ACTUALLY want literature recs from super obscure cultures, because if so I can totally hook you up, but if not I don't wanna waste your time?

I absolutely do!!

I have (to no one’s surprise) a soft spot for drama and poetry, but I’ll enjoy just about anything if it’s well-written; I read Tapap and Oahkar (and a smattering of a handful of other languages, but not enough to matter), so if you know of anything available in one of those, that would be fantastic.

[stagedelight]

Photoshoot ended early and we were all hanging about. I asked my hairdresser if she’d let me do her hair. Then the makeup artist and photographer got into it. Isn’t she lovely?

(Posted with her permission, of course!)

[stagedelight]

“Silence is consent”/“inaction puts you on the side of the oppressor”/“anyone not with us is against us” is a catchy slogan, but an unfair standard to hold even blues to, and downright ridiculous when you start applying it to any other caste.

Any given person (yes, including you; yes, including me) lacks the context to do so much as form an informed opinion on the vast majority of issues, let alone the resources to make a difference based on that opinion.

Nor is it reasonable to expect people to acquire that context; even if they have the capacity and resources to do so for any particular issue (which is far from given!), it is straightforwardly impossible for anyone to do so for every issue.

If someone recognizes that they don’t know enough about an issue to have an informed opinion on it -- if they refrain from choosing an uninformed opinion based on what will win them social points -- that’s a laudable act of self-awareness, not something to be condemned.

[stagedelight]

Hi, I'm a big fan! As an aspiring actor, I was very interested to read your post about portraying different castes. Since I don't really have the resources to go to acting school right now, could you recommend some media where they get it right? Maybe also some examples of particularly funny ways actors get things wrong about playing other castes?

It would be my pleasure! :)

For good portrayals, if I had to pick three (and keeping myself to things which should be relatively easy to obtain), I think I’d choose:

1. If I Could Fly(You want the original, not the remake; they’re frequently mislabeled online, but if any of the reviews describe it as “heartwarming,” you’ve got the wrong one.)

The story centers around three women, each of whom has lost an infant – the yellow was a surrogate, the blue’s baby died, and the gray’s was taken away because she didn’t have a credit. It’s intended as a gentle exploration of variations in the grieving process, and while the different kinds of loss are central to that, there’s also thoughtful and sensitive portrayals of how caste plays into the nature and expression of grief.

This one is my top choice, both for its quality as a work of art, and for the threefold structure, which offers good opportunities to do the sort of comparing and contrasting I’ve talked about in previous posts.

2. Future Imperfect

Fair warning on this one: it’s not, as a TV show, very good.

It’s not painfully bad, either; just mediocre. I wouldn’t usually recommend it, but I wouldn’t feel compelled to go turn it off if I walked into a room where it was playing in the background. (I’m sure there are people who very much like it, and that’s fine; I’m terribly picky about TV and movies.)

Nevertheless, it has to make the list here. For some reason, while the producers couldn’t be bothered to come up with a halfway original concept (“poor hardworking purple and rich lazy blue fall in love at first sight”) or any kind of character development (no one ever changes) or more than the one plot they use in every single episode (they’re finally ready to tell the world about their love! oh no hilarious misunderstanding will they break up? no wait they made up in the last five minutes) – despite all that, for some inscrutable reason, they insisted on absolute realism in the portrayal of castes and of intercaste relationships.

So do your best to tune out the plot, and pay careful attention to the little details. Watch different people ordering coffee in the intro to the first episode: yes, of course you’ll be able to see Rich Lazy Blue is the love interest from a mile away, but the way he orders coffee compared to the orange before him or the green before her is absolutely impeccable. Similarly, you’ll want to pay attention to the episode in the second season where the two leads get lost in a yellow neighborhood. And there are a number of episodes in which the two families have to interact for one reason or another, all of which are worth watching.

3. After the Beep

This one’s a radio show, for a change of pace! Old episodes go up free online after thirty days, so there’s an archive of about a hundred now which anyone can access. It won’t help you with anything visual, of course, but it’s excellent material for studying speech patterns (which are easily overlooked – actors get careless and rely on the scriptwriters. But even the best scriptwriter can’t do your accent and intonation for you.)

The episodes are entirely composed of fictive messages left on the characters’ answering machines (hence the title). It’s a lovely twist on an epistolary format that makes brilliant use of the medium, and creates a mysterious, surreal atmosphere which is perfect for a narrative set in an eerie postapocalyptic world. (Do listen to the episodes in order; there aren’t big twists, exactly, but there’s a definite accumulation of information about the setting.)

Like If I Could Fly, this show would merit a recommendation if you were just looking for pleasure listening; but it also features excellent examples of different dialects and registers, including some belonging to demographics which are shamefully underrepresented in most media (rich rural purples! yellows in healthcare!) And because it’s so low-budget, and by nature features a lot of brief cameos, they were able to get actual members of the appropriate demographics for many of the briefer appearances; they weren’t going to reach anyone’s income cap.

Finally: bad portrayals are harder to avoid than come by, of course, but if you want something which had me giggling the entire time from the sheer magnitude of catastrophe, I’d recommend:

4. Adrift: First Fall

As the title suggests, it was meant to be the first movie in a quatrology; but (thankfully) that never came to pass, because literally no one has ever watched Adrift and come away thinking “gosh, we should make a sequel to that.” Also, hardly anyone has in fact watched Adrift; you’re most likely to recognize it from that one reaction gif of a cardboard tree falling over and hitting a blue on the head while he’s in the middle of proposing marriage. (Yes, that was in the final cut. No, it wasn’t intentional.)

I genuinely cannot describe what a catastrophe this movie is from beginning to end; exactly one actor who appears in it ever got hired for anything else, and that was the director’s daughter who was half a season old and appeared in one scene where they needed a baby. (She actually went on to a perfectly respectable career; I assume she doesn’t list Adrift on her resume.) The entire animation team quit the moment their contracts were up, and went off and started a rock band together. (It’s not a great band, but their music is still better than Adrift.)

Besides all the other ways Adrift is a disaster (the lead wore bunny slippers for all the filming, and they didn’t always manage to keep them off camera! the plot ends with half an hour left and so a new and completely unconnected plot starts and then after half an hour the movie ends without any kind of attempt to resolve it!), the attempts to portray different castes leave you wondering if the entire cast was composed of blind aliens who got “castes” confused with “ice cream flavors.” Words genuinely fail me; you’ll have to watch it for yourself. (Or, more prudently: don’t.)

[stagedelight]

King and Courtesan in an Anitami National Ballet performance of “Fallen Things.”

(Source: @justspringthings)

I have so much respect for the way that gray dancers make physical art, and for the labor they put into it. This is a beautiful display of expertise.

[ooc: source]

[stagedelight]

My mother sent me a picture of a ballerina she’s coaching on stage presence! It’s so good to see her working with students again; after I graduated I was starting to really think she might never take another.

[stagedelight]

What do you do to convincingly perform as a different caste? What sort of things do people pick up on?

Gosh! Okay, this is a big question, and I’m really much too green even to get started on answering it -- at the end of the day, explaining something that big to someone who’s not already seriously invested in the field is an orange skill. The answer’s not a book, it’s a library, and if I try to so much as summarize an outline of the card catalog of that library, I’m going to end up falling into a slough of caste stereotypes and it’s going to be terrible.

That being said, it’s a good question, and one I’m very interested in (it’s just that the answer is half my education!) So how about this: I’ll take the opening to indulge my vanity and share a picture, and talk about what’s going on in it, and if you come back with a more specific question I’ll try and answer that too. :)

Here’s a still of me from that upcoming art film I mentioned a while back. (Perks of working on little grassroots projects: there aren’t three different corporations competing for various rights, so if you want to go ahead and share a sneak peek, you can just ask the producer nicely. :P)

I’m playing orange here, obviously; but the hair’s not the only clue to that. Look at the body language: the character’s tilting her head like she’s listening carefully to her interlocutor -- but she’s also got her arms folded across her chest, closing herself off.

That particular flavor of mixed signals is something you’ll see from oranges more often than any other caste. A green wouldn’t signal interest if they weren’t interested; a blue would, but they would be more careful about it, they’d have all their body language working together. Grays tend to be very conscious of their body language: they wouldn’t have contradictory signals like that going on, because from a gray that’ll make other castes very nervous. A yellow or purple might do the same, but they’re much less likely to, and they’ll usually use different body language to convey the sentiment.

Oranges, on the other hand, are quite likely to signal “I’m listening,” even when they dislike what they’re hearing enough to close themselves off like this character is. (Think of a therapist saying “it sounds like you’re very upset about that” -- they don’t necessarily agree with the patient, right?)

What’s more, “closed off” is a class of body language which oranges are particularly prone to displaying without really intending to. There’s an orange tendency, in conversation, to fall back on empathy: trying to see things from the other person’s point of view, feel what they’re feeling. If the other person has an unpleasant point of view which the orange doesn’t want to take on, they’re likely to close themselves off, emotionally and physically. It’s a kind of unconscious self-defense.

So -- head tilted, arms crossed: orange. And in the same vein of body language, you can see that I’m facing directly towards the other (off-camera) actor: the character doesn’t like what she’s hearing, but she’s still totally engaged with the conversation. Again, this is very orange! In other castes, you’ll more often see people turned partly away, trying to signal disinterest or find an escape; they’ll be looking at the person they’re talking to, because everyone learns that as basic manners, but their knees or shoulders will be turned aside.

Things that aren’t body language: the jacket draped over the arms. Oranges do that all the time. I don’t have a good explanation for why; it’s possible it’s just one of those things.

And then the fingernails: trimmed short, not painted, but clean, no dirt under them. You see that on people who have a job which requires excellent cleanliness, lots of hand-washing: nurses, doctors, cooks, the occasional academic who handles a lot of old historical documents. But a green or purple is much more likely to go ahead and paint their nails and not mind that it’ll chip quickly; purples think it would be overly fussy to mind, greens are countersignaling. But to an orange, chipped nail-polish looks like a purple thing, so an orange who expects to wear through theirs fast is more likely to skip it altogether.

And of course all that’s just in a still picture! There’s a lot to be said about how people move around, and interact, and react to things, and about speech patterns, and so on. But, well, I’m pretty sure this post is already long enough. ;)

[stagedelight]

That post about jobs-for-people-who-don’t-fit-their-caste is going around again, so here’s your regularly scheduled debunk post about caste affinities and acting.

(I apologize in advance for length -- get a green talking...)

The Post, which I shall not link to, repeats the popular idea that if you’re a green who feels like they’d do better as some other caste (because you’re half-something, or were raised in an odd situation, or for any number of reasons), you should consider being an actor: you can act as that caste, and you’ll have an advantage over all the greens who fit their caste better!

To put it bluntly: this is a lie. To put it more gently, it’s a misconception perpetuated by well-meaning people who’ve never set foot backstage in their lives. I have never met an actual professional actor who didn’t think the very idea was laughable.

Yes, if you’re half-orange and were raised in an orange neighborhood by your orange parent and speak with an orange accent and wear orange clothes and have orange hair and mannerisms and friends (but you’re green), you can probably get some orange roles in serious productions. And that’s not nothing; if you genuinely can’t get work any other way, well, you’d be a fool to turn that down.

But. You will be typecast. You will be condemned to be a character actor playing stereotyped bit parts forever. Even if you are a genuinely good actor, if you lean hard on caste like that early in your career, you will trap yourself in a morass from which there is no escaping.

And here’s the thing: acting, like many green professions, is very much a pyramid. So while you can certainly make enough as a character actor to keep the lights on and the water running -- you will never make enough to afford a credit.

Let me say that one more time: you will never get a credit as a character actor. It just doesn’t happen.

There are some careers, even green careers, where if you’re stuck low in the hierarchy but work hard and save hard your whole life, you’ll be able to put together the money for a credit, maybe even for two. Acting isn’t like that. Too many people want to act. If you work your whole life as a character actor, you will not have any children.

Now, people will argue this. Those people? Are wrong. They will all cite one example, and it will be the same example. I’ll say it right now: Liap Aperi. Yes, he was a character actor; yes, he had four kids; yes, it was on his own income, no help from his parents and not much from his wife.

But what people don’t realize (or willfully overlook) is: the reason Liap Aperi was a character actor is that he was an immigrant -- political refugee -- and he never managed to shake his accent. And you know how he got one of those coveted refugee slots (besides the fact that he was almost certainly going to be killed if he didn’t)? He was one of the greatest actors his home country had ever known. He had been to the best schools, he brought down the house in starring roles time and time again. And then he came here and got slotted into the role of “creepy, slightly bumbling foreign villain,” and he played it beautifully, he played it like it had never been played before. There’s a reason he’s famous. So, yes, technically he was a character actor. You are not Liap Aperi.

This is not to say that you can’t be an actor if you aren’t the stereotypical green! If you have the strengths of another caste and you apply them to acting, you can be genuinely great. Acting uses lots of skills which aren’t typically green. But you must take those strengths and apply them to acting; you must absolutely not take the route of pitching yourself as “good at playing [insert caste here].”

[stagedelight]

What is Adrift: First Fall even *about*? On the strength of your ..... dis-recommendation ..... I'm considering hosting a party to watch it with friends and laugh about how bad it is, but I know not all bad movies are good for this kind of thing.

This is a good question. A question which haunts my dreams.

... I would try to give you the genre, at least, except that is a much harder question than it really ever ought to be. Genres Adrift tries to be include but are not limited to:

fantasy

superhero

mystery

science fiction

slapstick comedy

romance

historical fiction

the twenty minutes where it’s inexplicably a hospital drama???

porn

family sitcom

crime thriller

post-apocalyptic

action

Or maybe a character list? There’s...

the orange who gets half an hour of Mysterious Hints At Backstory and then dies offscreen and nothing ever gets explained

the gray sex worker (except in one scene apparently a soldier instead, because Plot?) who is established early on to be also blue (????) and then this is never mentioned again

the green who has magic powers, despite the fact that there is literally no magic anywhere else in the setting (this is never addressed)

the purple whose entire purpose in life is to break the fourth wall, except clearly at some point someone realized how annoying this was, so halfway through the movie he’s walking through a hallway and the ceiling collapses for literally no reason and he dies

the other purple, whose full name takes two minutes and thirty-seven seconds to say

the three miscellaneous grays who are so completely interchangeable that the actors kept getting them mixed up and the scriptwriters had to add in an incoherent cheating plotline to explain why the parts filmed so far were inconsistent about who was married to whom

the green who speaks in verse throughout (the other characters treat this as completely unremarkable)

...if this hasn’t dissuaded you from watching it, there may in fact be no hope for you. ... Good luck?

[stagedelight]

Okay, I’ve made posts about this before, but I have a slew of new followers (hi!), so this seems like a good time to reiterate.

I have very strong (very green) philosophical convictions about art as an inalienable right, which I promise you don’t want me to get into, because I will talk your ear off. Suffice it to say that I think that everyone has a right to have art -- good art, great art -- in their lives, and that this is a fundamental right which cannot be forfeited by wrongdoing or poor decisions or any other means imaginable.

The upshot of this for you is: if, for whatever reason, you are unable to access live theater, and do not foresee this changing -- if you’re simply never going to be able to attend a show -- I would like to find a way for you to attend one of mine.

Three things I want to be clear on (so please don’t just skip to the end!):

(a) I will not be able to help everyone in this situation. There is only one of me, and there are a lot of people out there. But I have been doing this for a long time, and I can reliably arrange for about a dozen people to be at each of my public performances for whom this is almost certainly their only opportunity to see a play put on live.

(b) I really, seriously mean it about art as a fundamental right. I know there have been a couple of human interest pieces written about people who’ve come to my performances, and of course those always focus on kids with cancer or poor people with mobility impairments. And I am always glad when I have the privilege of performing for someone like that! But if you can’t attend live theater because you were paralyzed making stupid decisions at four, or because you lost all your money gambling, or something else that’s not going to show up in heartwarming human interest stories, you still deserve art. It is worth your time to get in touch with me, and I will not automatically rule you out.

(c) I would also encourage you to reach out to me even if you don’t think there’s anything I can do about your particular problem. Yes, it’s very straightforward for me to negotiate some free tickets into my contract and give them to people for whom the primary obstacle is financial. But (while I can’t share the details, for privacy reasons) I have been able to find ways to get past some absurdly arcane obstacles. Actors get a lot of leeway for being demanding and quirky, and I like to use my leeway on getting people into my theater. Let me give your case a try.

(If you skipped the above, go back and read it! <3)

So: if you -- whoever you are -- would like to see a play performed live, and you’re not otherwise going to be able to, I want you to contact me.

Send me a private message (it needs to be non-anonymous so I can reply privately, but an empty blog is fine) and ask for my contact information. I’ll send you my secure email address, you can write me there explaining your situation, and I’ll see what I can do.

Please don’t send me an ask on Tumblr explaining your situation. Send me an ask requesting my email, and explain it to me there. This isn’t just a matter of Tumblr losing asks and having character limits and so on (though that too); the details of people’s situations often include private medical information which really should not be discussed over something as insecure as Tumblr’s messaging system. My private email, on the other hand, is extremely secure. (It has to be -- people will do some nasty things to get private information about actors.)

I won’t be able to help everyone. I can’t help all the people who message me now. But if you will give me a chance, I will try my best; and I will be so grateful if I’m lucky enough to perform in the first show you watch live.

[stagedelight]

Did the stuff with the TV network budget cuts ever get resolved?

It continues to be an ongoing issue. With the Voan food crisis and subsequent war, it’s been easy for the networks not to give the budget dispute airtime, and (while I of course can’t speak to their motives with any kind of authority) I imagine they’re hoping that by the time anyone has attention to spare for this, the cuts will be too entrenched for protests to get any traction.

[stagedelight]

My thoughts go out to all those affected or potentially affected by the war, to our soldiers and their families, to civilians on both sides of the border, and to everyone who’s frightened, distressed, confused, or uncertain right now.

Here’s hoping for a swift and complete resolution, with as little loss of life as possible.

[stagedelight]

have you ever played a mixed-caste role? if so, what are the sort of things you might use to signal that - i'm sure it's specific to what exactly the mix is, but if there's anything more generalized (or if you want to get into specifics!) i'd be fascinated to hear it

I think the most broadly applicable thing is the presence of a certain amount of self-awareness about caste signals on the part of the character.

Everyone picks up mannerisms from a medley of conflicting sources -- parents, friends, teachers, TV, and so forth. Even if a child’s role models are all of their caste, they’ll still see people with different countries, economic backgrounds, careers, disabilities -- even hobbies can affect how people carry themselves. Most of the time, children acquire an eclectic mix of the mannerisms they see modeled, depending on their own country/economic status/track/disabilities/hobbies/etc/etc, not to mention their relationships with the people from whom they acquire those mannerisms.

That kind of selection usually happens at a subconscious level; there’s some amount of conscious shaping (“chew with your mouth closed,” “why are you looking at me funny?,” “don’t fidget when you’re talking to someone important”), but it’s very unidirectional, towards a particular set of polite conventions.

On the other hand, not only do children from a mixed-caste background see two very distinct flavors of presentation in the adults around them, they very quickly become (or are made) conscious of the need to choose between those presentations. Someone with one orange parent and one yellow is much more likely than someone from an entirely yellow background to know that they’re using an orange turn of phrase, or gesturing like a yellow; often, they’re doing so deliberately, to signal or counter-signal caste affiliation.

Of course, since an actor is by default aware of the mannerisms they’re adopting, it’s an extra challenge to portray a character who is also self-aware -- in particular, to do so in a way distinct from how they would portray a character who isn’t. Personally, I find that particular kind of challenge really delightful, so I’m always excited by the chance to play a mixed-caste role.

[stagedelight]

hey heads up you reblogged from yearbyyearrecedesbeforeus and i'm sure you just hadn't heard but they're red jsyk

It’s sweet of you to think of me. :) On a quick perusal of their blog, I’m not actually seeing any evidence that that’s so; of course anyone can claim to be anything on the internet, but for just that reason I usually accept people’s self-identifications absent overwhelming evidence otherwise.

In any case, as a general policy I reblog posts based on their content, without trying to screen for anything about the author which doesn’t come up in the post itself. It’s true that this risks reblogging from someone whom I would find personally objectionable if I knew more about them; but if I tried to do any kind of screening I’d risk missing something and then appearing to endorse someone objectionable. It’s a personal decision, but I prefer the former risk to the latter.

[stagedelight]

One of the better-quality surviving photographs of my namesake, Shian Koref, the “Gem of the Tapai Ballet.” (Photograph now housed at the Municipal Gallery.)

[ooc: source]

[stagedelight]

Flipping through channels in my hotel room because there’s nothing on I want to watch, and started idly counting. Of the (non-reality) TV shows on currently, the caste breakdowns of the main characters are as follows...

Show A (police procedural): 0 blue | 2 green | 2 yellow | 5 gray | 0 orange | 1 purple

Show B (horror): 1 blue | 3 green | 1 yellow | 1 gray | 0 orange | 4 purple

Show C (dark comedy): 0 blue | 4 green | 1 yellow | 0 gray | 0 orange | 0 purple

Show D (courtroom drama): 2 blue | 0 green | 1 yellow | 1 gray | 1 orange | 1 purple

Show E (period drama): 1 blue | 1 green | 3 yellow | 1 gray | 2 orange | 0 purple

(Not naming names because I don’t want to get sidetracked into a discussion of the particular shows and their individual merits!)

To some extent I think the numbers speak for themselves, but a few brief observations:

The shortage of purples and excess of greens is of course the deadest horse in all of media discussion. And yet it still persists.

Writers who’ve noticed the problem of excessive greens, but can’t be bothered to write a character who isn’t, keep trying to cheat by writing in yellow characters who are exactly like greens except better at arithmetic. (It doesn’t work well.)

The horror show being the only one with multiple purples is almost too much of a cliché to be true.

What doesn’t get discussed as much is the lack of oranges on the screen. Look at those numbers -- there’s fewer oranges than blues or purples. And in the two shows which do feature oranges, one orange in each show fills the classic “recurring side character whose entire function is to make distressed fluttering noises over the injured, shirtless protagonist” role.

Show D looks like it’s doing an impressively good job of diversity, down to (for once) not featuring any green characters. This will of course already be a tip-off to the wary viewer. I admire attempts to go against trends in media, but the kind of fastidiously box-checking rectitude show D indulges in quickly becomes altogether too precious, especially without much in the way of plot or characterization to back it up.