Last week I showed Ben and Erik Uzumaki, and they saw the performance I liked by the "bad girl." Ben said, "what you like is Chinese opera," and then he started doing a really good imitation of a Chinese opera singer—highly stylized gestures, tiny footsteps, and dramatic poses. Ben actually did some performing in China when he was 10 years old so he has that as a reference. Anyway, Ben is probably right. A lot of modernism is just rehashed Asian thinking. And there's something I like, as Ben later mentioned, about performances that just look like performances.
So when I say, "stylized performance," I mean "Chinese opera-like" or "Kabuki-like." That's part of the problem of not having a background in drama or theater—my vocabulary and understanding of certain things is pretty limited. I found that being trained in a discipline provides a starting point for your own thinking and creates a common ground that helps you communicate with others. When I was working on Shim Ch'ong one of the performers (one of her credits is Chopper Chicks in Zombietown) asked the director about her character. James' response was "it's sort of like Emily in Our Town." The actress seemed to understand instantly. I will probably never have a rich understanding of theatrical canon. But it's nice to have a starting point for my thinking about stylization in performances.
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