Category Archives: Notes

Albert Einstein, Living Philosophies, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1931

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Strange is our situation here upon earth. Each of us comes for a short visit, not knowing why, yet sometimes seeming to divine a purpose.

From the standpoint of daily life, however, there is one thing we do know: that man is here for the sake of other men —above all for those upon whose smile and well-being our own happiness depends, and also for the countless unknown souls with whose fate we are connected by a bond of sympathy. Many times a day I realize how much my own outer and inner life is built upon the labors of my fellowmen, both living and dead, and how earnestly I must exert myself in order to give in return as much as I have received. My peace of mind is often troubled by the depressing sense that I have borrowed too heavily from the work of other men.

I do not believe we can have any freedom at all in the philosophical sense, for we act not only under external compulsion but also by inner necessity. Schopenhauer’s saying— “A man can surely do what he wills to do, but he cannot determine what he wills”—impressed itself upon me in youth and has always consoled me when I have witnessed or suffered life’s hardships. This conviction is a perpetual breeder of tolerance, for it does not allow us to take ourselves or others too seriously; it makes rather for a sense of humor.

To ponder interminably over the reason for one’s own existence or the meaning of life in general seems to me, from an objective point of view, to be sheer folly. And yet everyone holds certain ideals by which he guides his aspiration and his judgment. The ideals which have always shone before me and filled me with the joy of living are goodness, beauty, and truth. To make a goal of comfort or happiness has never appealed to me; a system of ethics built on this basis would be sufficient only for a herd of cattle.

Without the sense of collaborating with like-minded beings in the pursuit of the ever unattainable in art and scientific research, my life would have been empty. Ever since childhood I have scorned the commonplace limits so often set upon human ambition. Possessions, outward success, publicity, luxury—to me these have always been contemptible. I believe that a simple and unassuming manner of life is best for everyone, best both for the body and the mind.

My passionate interest in social justice and social responsibility has always stood in curious contrast to a marked lack of desire for direct association with men and women. I am a horse for single harness, not cut out for tandem or team work. I have never belonged wholeheartedly to country or state, to my circle of friends, or even to my own family. These ties have always been accompanied by a vague aloofness, and the wish to withdraw into myself increases with the years.

Such isolation is sometimes bitter, but I do not regret being cut off from the understanding and sympathy of other men. I lose something by it, to be sure, but I am compensated for it in being rendered independent of the customs, opinions, and prejudices of others, and am not tempted to rest my peace of mind upon such shifting foundations.

My political ideal is democracy. Everyone should be respected as an individual, but no one idolized. It is an irony of fate that I should have been showered with so much uncalled for and unmerited admiration and esteem. Perhaps this adulation springs from the unfulfilled wish of the multitude to comprehend the few ideas which I, with my weak powers, have advanced.

Full well do I know that in order to attain any definite goal it is imperative that one person should do the thinking and commanding and carry most of the responsibility. But those who are led should not be driven, and they should be allowed to choose their leader.

It seems to me that the distinctions separating the social classes are false; in the last analysis they rest on force. I am convinced that degeneracy follows every autocratic system of violence, for violence inevitably attracts moral inferiors. Time has proved that illustrious tyrants are succeeded by scoundrels.

For this reason I have always been passionately opposed to such regimes as exist in Russia and Italy today. The thing which has discredited the European forms of democracy is not the basic theory of democracy itself, which some say is at fault, but the instability of our political leadership, as well as the impersonal character of party alignments.

I believe that those in the United States have hit upon the right idea. A President is chosen for a reasonable length of time and enough power is given him to acquit himself properly of his responsibilities. In the German Government, on the other hand, I like the state’s more extensive care of the individual when he is ill or unemployed. What is truly valuable in our bustle of life is not the nation, I should say, but the creative and impressionable individuality, the personality —he who produces the noble and sublime while the common herd remains dull in thought and insensible in feeling.

This subject brings me to that vilest offspring of the herd mind—the odious militia. The man who enjoys marching in line and file to the strains of music falls below my contempt; he received his great brain by mistake—the spinal cord would have been amply sufficient. This heroism at command, this senseless violence, this accursed bombast of patriotism—how intensely I despise them! War is low and despicable, and I had rather be smitten to shreds than participate in such doings.

Such a stain on humanity should be erased without delay. I think well enough of human nature to believe that it would have been wiped out long ago had not the common sense of nations been systematically corrupted through school and press for business and political reasons.

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed. This insight into the mystery of life, coupled though it be with fear, has also given rise to religion. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms— this knowledge, this feeling, is at the center of true religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I belong in the ranks of devoutly religious men.

I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own—a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty. Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death of his body, although feeble souls harbor such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotism.

It is enough for me to contemplate the mystery of conscious life perpetuating itself through all eternity, to reflect upon the marvelous structure of the universe which we can dimly perceive, and to try humbly to comprehend even an infinitesimal part of the intelligence manifested in nature.

De-centering the idea of the originating subject versus the perception of performance as an act of human agency

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J.M. Coetzee

I recognize the potential silliness of thinking about performance texts sustaining their existence as texts by making noise; and that sort of academically “correct” thinking conjures up images for me of texts marching off shelves or committing unmentionable acts on themselves or other texts.  And yet, I recognize that language voices certain cultural predications within the most unique and singular texts, predications that constitute part of the conceptual vocabulary within which an individual text operates.  This recognition prompts me to continue, for the moment, writing sentences that pretend that texts do things, even though that pretense seems increasingly facile and evasive.

There’s Foucault’s coercive voice of the sixties and seventies working to disintegrate the fixed point of origin in the consciousness of the writer and removing the idea of a text as significant because of authorship.  In The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault discusses discourse as a sequence of statements that can be spoken by a series of different subjects as these individual voices temporarily occupy that discursive space.  The dissemination or distribution of statements in the world constitutes the authenticity of the text, not its function as the expression of a single subject.  In this sense, the speaker becomes the subject of the text in a process of subjection not as the agent of the text as an instrument or agency to be used by her/him.  For the following reasons that idea of text, agent, agency should be meaningful:

(1) As I [re]produce a text in performance, I do speak it, occupy its space, and am subject to its structure, logic, biases, vocabulary, relational systems even though I am, at the time in which I am involved in production conscious of the text as something I metamorphose.  Like an army of occupation those performing the text are changed by the native populace to whom we are alien.

(2) I recognize that what I consider to be my transformation/ deformation / appropriation / reconfiguration of the text is, in itself, subject to the theatrical and theatrical/cultural systems in which such texts are produced within the theater as an institution–as an “experimental” institution, a commercial institution, an academic institution, etc.  Even when I think that I am “allowing a text to play outside of over-determined interpretation,” I am exercising, consciously or unconsciously, aesthetic strategies that originate both outside of the text and outside of my use of the text.

Despite a skepticism toward the idea of an originating subject and a skepticism toward myself as an originating interpreter of texts for performance (or criticism), I continue to work within a framework that identifies Hamlet with the highly impacted proper noun, Shakespeare, Hedda Gabler with Ibsen, and  Fin de partie with Beckett.  This skepticism prods me to exercise those fashionable circumlocutions in which I shift intention from the “implied” authorship of Beckett, to the “texts of Beckett.”  When I identify predications as the action of a text, I facilely elude the fact that I have elected to address a text made significant by its attribution to a famous subject and I less facilely mask the fact that I am making the predications I pretend to “fall upon”, by chance, in the text.

For me there is an almost erotic appeal of returning to a sense of the presence of human agency within a text. I love thinking of texts as unique, idiosyncratic, solipsistic phenomena whose value derives, at least in part, from their singularity rather than their implication within sign systems that plays upon the absence of an ever receding signified.

Assumptions

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I’ve come to assume the following important historical exchanges between theory and praxis that I find lacking in both the commentary and practice of performance today.

Peter Brook’s King Lear (1971): Alan Webb as Gloucester, Paul Scofield as Lear

(a) New forms of dramatic writing and performance often provide models of perception that criticism re-represents and appropriates within the methodologies that direct its own argument.

(b) Both new modes of writing and performance encourage theatrical and scholarly re-interpretations of “classics” that appropriate analytic structures that developed in response to such avant-garde work.  Yet, such crtiques/interpretations become more fully articulated and valued when applied to documents within the established canon.

(c) Certain modes of experimental performance extend and develop the critical strategies in which they are discussed in a dialogic relationship that informs both a continuation of new writing and a development of theory.

I recognize the inherent difficulties in identifying these interactions within a clear sequential scheme of history.  Each of these activities is subject to conflicting influences and sometimes responds to antithetical stimuli simultaneously.  For example, in the early 1960s productions at the newly re-titled Royal Shakespeare Company used selected visual techniques of Brecht’s epic theater–especially an elegant sparseness of scene in combination with properties that invoked the materialism of the objective world.

At the same time, the company used this simplified aesthetic to develop self-consciously Beckettian images of an isolated subject.  Peter Brook, Peter Hall, and John Bury, for example, responded to both the visual stimuli of the productions of the Berliner Ensemble that arrived in London in the late 1950s and, as well, reacted to a growing interest in both Brechtian and Beckettian dramaturgy stimulated by and reflected in the publication of Martin Esslin’s critical biography, Brecht: A Choice of Evils, (1959), and The Theatre of the Absurd (1961); as well as  the influence of Jan Kott’s conflation of King Lear and Endgame upon Brook’s production and film of the Shakespearean tragedy is emblematized in theater history.  While the absurd and the epic seemed to mark antithetical directions in the contemporary theater, Shakespearean production assimilated aspects of each as the RSC marked out its aesthetic course in the 1960s and 1970s.

Brecht’s Little Joke

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Mysterien eines Friseursalons (Mysteries of a Barbershop), 1923

In a barbershop,
the famous Professor Moras
author of the book
How to Be Attractive
asks the barber to cut his hair and beard
exactly like in the poster in the window.

The barber assistant
accidentally turns the poster around
showing the picture of a bald Chinese man

Meanwhile the Barber’s assistant,
who is attracted to Moras,
is jealous of his Moras’ companion
and treats the woman badly.

The assistants treatment
causes the companion to cry

in the Barber’s waiting room
three clients
read in the newspaper
that a man was cut by a barber
and they become scared.

Professor Moras leaves the barbershop
very upset with his new appearance

he meets an acquaintance in a restaurant,
he uses another patron’s hat
to hide his haircut.

The patron believes
Moras is stealing his hat
So he challenges him
to a duel with sabers.

Before the duel,
the patron goes to the barbershop
the barber gets startled
accidentally beheading the patron.

The barber fixes the head back on
and the patron proceeds on to the duel

during the duel
the barber’s assistant uses
a stick, line and a fish hook
to remove the head
thus saving her beloved Moras.

Brecht did not write
a complete script for
Mysterien eines Friseursalons ,
instead he supplied “notes” and “parts of a manuscript”
for this short, silent film
the intent being
that the actors improvise his scenarios.

Erwin Faber,
who plays Dr. Moras in the film
suggests Brecht intended the film to be
“just a little joke.”

The piece was created
in 1923
during a month-long pause
just prior to Brecht’s beginning rehearsals
for In the Jungle of Cities.

Czech animator Jan Svankmajer’s creative dictums

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Jan Svankmajer: ‘Decalogue’

1. Remember that there is only one ‘poetry’. The opposite of poetry is professional expertise. Before you start making a film, write a poem, paint a picture, create a collage, write a novel, essay etc. Only by cultivating your ability for universal expression will you ensure you produce a good film.

2. Succumb totally to your obsessions. There is nothing better. Obessions are the relics of your childhood. And the most precious treasures come from the depths of childhood. You need to always keep the gate to your childhood open. It is not about specific memories, it’s about feelings. It is not about consciousness, it’s about unconsciousness. Let the inner river flow freely through you. Concentrate on it but at the same time relax completely. When making your film, you need to be 24 hours submerged ‘in it’.  Only then will all your obsessions, your childhood, enter your film,  without you being consciously aware of it. And your film will become a triumph of ‘infantilism’. And that is what it’s all about.

3. Use animation as a magical operation. Animation isn’t about making inanimate objects move, it is about bringing them to life. Before you bring an object to life, try to understand it first. Not its utilitarian function, but its inner life. Objects, especially the old ones, were witnesses to certain happenings, people’s actions, their fortunes, which somehow marked them. People touched them in different situations, while acting under various emotions, and they imprinted onto them these different mental states. If you want to disclose some of these hidden aspects of objects through your camera, you need to listen. Sometimes even for years. First you have to become a collector, and only then a filmmaker. Bringing objects to life through animation has to be a natural process. Life has come from within them, and not from your whim. Never violate objects! Don’t tell through them your own stories, tell theirs.

4. Keep exchanging dreams for reality and vice versa. There are no logical transitions. There is only one tiny physical act that separates dreams from reality: opening or closing your eyes. In daydreaming even that isn’t neccessary.

5. If you are trying to decide what is more important trust the experience of the eye or the experience of the body; always trust the body, because touch is an older sense than sight and its experience is more fundamental. Apart from that, in our contemporary audiovisual civilisation, the eye is rather tired and ‘spoilt’. The experience of the body is more authentic, unencumbered by aestheticisation. But be aware of synaethesis.

6. The deeper you enter into the fantastic story the more realistic you need to be in the detail. At that point you need fully to rely on your experience of dreams. Don’t worry about being ‘boringly descriptive’, pedantically obsessive about an ‘unimportant detail’, documentaristic. You need to convince the viewers that everything they are seeing in your film concerns them, that it is a part of their world too, and they are submerged in it to their ears, without realising it. You need to convince them about that, through all the tricks you possess.

7. Imagination is subversive, because it puts the possible against the real. That’s why you should always use your wildest imagination. Imagination is the biggest gift humanity has received. Imagination makes people human, not work. Imagination, imagination, imagination…

8. Always pick themes that you feel ambivalent about. This ambivalence has to be strong (deep) so you can walk on its edge and not fall to either side or even both at the same time. Only by doing that will you be able to avoid the biggest sin: the film á la thèse.

9. Cultivate your creativity as a form of self-therapy. Such an anti-aesthetic attitude brings creativity closer towards the gates of freedom. If there is any purpose at all in creativity it is that it liberates us. No film (painting, poem) can liberate a viewer unless it didn’t liberate its author first. Everything else is a question of “general subjectivity”. Creativity as a process of permanently liberating people.

10. Always put the continuity of your inner vision or psychological automatissm before an idea. An idea, even the greatest one, shouldn’t ever be a sole motivation for wanting to make a film. The creative process doesn’t mean stumbling from one idea to the next. An idea becomes a part of a creative process, not an impulse for suddenly becoming creative. Never work, always improvise. Script is important for a producer, not for you. It’s a non-binding document you should only return to when your imagination lets you down.

Although I have formulated this Decalogue on paper doesn’t  mean I have consciously refer to it. These rules somehow emerged through my work, they didn’t precede it. Anyway, all the rules are there to be broken (not avoided). But there is one rule which, if broken (or even avoided), becomes destructive to the artist: Never subordinate your personal creativity to anything but freedom. exists one more rule which if broken (or circumvented) is devastating for an artist: Never allow your work of art to pass into the service of anything but freedom.

Translated from the Czech by Tereza Stechlíková. Published in Vertigo, 3, 1, Summer 2006, 72.

John Cage Centennial

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Does the foregrounding of indeterminacy in Cage

presuppose a non-random,
non-accidental other;
or,
does it bring to our awareness of the non-difference
between the random and the non-random,
the degree of arbitrariness and accident
within the rational sequence which is debunked
or exposed by the aesthetic viability of the random?

Dream: a future performance space.

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In light of current limits on production funding,
artists struggle to implement conventional,
labor-intensive solutions to production.

Yet at the same time
theater technology,
as all technology,
is evolving rapidly
as the techniques of
visual image production
expand in a digital age.
With a few significant exceptions,
this expanding technology
fails to serve important
theatrical experimentation.

The theatrical avant-garde
often rejects the technological
for two reasons,
its expense,
and a fear of becoming mastered
by the technology itself.
I feel a strong mandate
to work with new technologies
to develop methods
of using digitally produced images
to create environments
not dependent upon extensive labor
aesthetic forms not mastered by the technological
but used in creating new theatrical forms of communication.

I sit here dreaming of developing
or being part of
an Experimental Laboratory Space
a place to play with
new technologies in collaboration with industry.

Thinking of the possibilities
combining theoretical whimsy
with actual practice
developing new forms of image production
serving an aesthetic
rather than merely providing spectacle.

Confronting the Technology of The Actor, part III

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The differences among film, video, and live performance are distinctive peculiarities in the technology of the recording and playback apparatuses. The recording and playback apparatus that the actor constitutes is both more sophisticated and more idiosyncratic than its electronic counterparts.

The recording and playback apparatus of the human actor is more fallible, more vulnerable to error, more subject to variation as the recording process, accomplished in the repetition of rehearsal, works upon the complex psychic and neurological systems of the human body. When theatrical performance incorporates both live performance and technologically generated images of human figures and when the integration of the previously recorded and the presently performed constitutes part of the performance, that combination heightens an awareness that the live performance is subject to the same kind of predetermination as the technologically performed. The interaction of the human actor and the technologically represented actor exposes that both constitute technologies that function to recover artistic material previously generated. The stability of the technologically produced record demands that the actor approximate its predetermined rhythms.

The spectator plays a kind of game, exercising the illusion that the actions of the actor are spontaneously generated, immediate, original (rather than a repetition of the past), but the spectator is almost always self-consciously aware that this performance is one in a serial sequence of performances: it is not an original but a reproduction. This reproductive process, in essence, is the activity the technology of film and video imitates and appropriates. In the theater’s use of various forms of playback, the nature and quality of the transmitting medium is significant. My aesthetic experience is formed by the artifact produced by the technology of the acting or the technology of the film or video. My claim here is that the theatrical artifact is, almost always, an embodiment of the past in a complex process of imperfect recovery. If my assertion is true, the activity of performance uses the presence of the actor as both the site of the recovered past and the instrument of its return, a phenomenon that tends to erase the presence of the actor as a discrete subject with which I share space and time. I need to stop sentimentalizing my notion of the actor in humanistic claims and see that the actor is merely one technological device among others. The significant presence in which performance plays is always the consciousness of the spectator whether the stimulus to that image production is the empirical reality of the actor, video, film, or an interaction among media. I can, of course, celebrate the potential of the technology of acting to excite compelling aesthetic images within the spectator’s imagination–a potentiality that is justification enough to continue supporting the practice of live performance in this age of its mediatized counterparts.

Confronting The Technology of The Actor, part II

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Contemporary performance often integrates live performance and media.  When film or video segments display the image of the actor, the projection–as a manifestation of a moment prior to performance–qualifies the work of the live actor interacting with it.  I recognize that the actor’s interaction with the video has been pre-determined and reenacts material generated prior to the moment of performance.  The live actor may play the game of being in the same time frame as the video, in a time frame that I, as a spectator, know is prior to the performance, and the performance then vacillate or oscillate between here and then.  Also the clarity of the status of the projection as image suggests that the live actor interacting with it also functions in the performance space as image

This phenomenon of making reference to the past may be even more intricate than I had hoped. The film or tape may be the product of a series of rehearsals in which someone eventually declares that the preparation is finished and a performance segment is ready to be recorded on some media.  I must work backwards from the manifestation of the work–the film or performance–to an idea of its source in the imagination and the labor of the director/creator.   I must recognize that it recovers moments that were created in a previous collaboration of actor and director.  As well, technology has developed to the point at which an edited medium may also collate a series of performances and may then manipulate them digitally or otherwise to make reference to an original that is itself a fiction because these recorded moments never existed as a sequential whole in time.

The recorded image makes reference in my mind to the following:

  • first to those specific moments performed before the camera;
  • second to a series of moments of rehearsal preceding that performance that established the work recorded;
  • and third to the creative period of editing that creates this record of an non-existent “original” performance.

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I could not with any certainty fix the references to all of those preceding moments but I can relate the recorded segment to a notion of an original (existing as the work performed before the camera) that is itself a recovery of the labor of earlier moments.  The consequence of this way of thinking, of course, builds an idea of a series of receding moments that have difficulty coming to rest in any specific reference to the past.   Even though I recognize that the work embodies the labor of the past in the present display.

My realization that the ontological presence of the actor is inaccessible is intensified by my understanding of the performative nature of human presence itself.  My awareness that any human figure that shares my space and time may be manifested to me through a kind of performance.  I realize the degree to which many of those categories by which I identify the human figure–ethnicity, gender, class, for example–may be performances and, at some level, as Judith Butler reminds us, are always as performative as ontological.   Presence is always, to some degree, an enactment undertaken to stimulate the construction of an image in the consciousness of the beholder.  When human beings are self-consciously the object of another’s viewing or listening, the observed almost inevitably shapes the signs of this presence to project the image of the figure they desire to be perceived.

The display of one human figure to another or a group of others certainly becomes even more complicated when that display is aesthetic, when the behavior of the observed is acting.  Here observed figures self-consciously set out to build illusions, to project some character different from their own, to lie as an aesthetic act. Illusion and lie are, however, inexact terms for what I am discussing, as both actor and spectator know from the outset that deception will not be one of the consequences of the performance.   However, the spectator evaluates the actor on some criteria that help to determine how well the actor’s lie mimics the literal truth, and the spectator may also make judgments about the truthfulness of the performance on some allegorical level.  In any case, the aesthetic frame of performance transforms what, in other circumstances, would be deception into the ludic, the playful.

In many instances, whoever is in charge of the aesthetic event chooses a performer whose body, voice, and mannerisms correspond as closely as possible to the fictional figure to be performed.  At the other extreme, there are performers (such as Anna Deavere Smith) who deliberately perform against the categories by which they would ordinarily be identified and perform a wide range of figures with extreme social, racial, and generic differences.  In this case, part of our aesthetic pleasure comes from our awareness of the performer’s virtuosity, the technical skill through which the fundamental image created by the performer’s physical presence is transformed to accommodate these differences.  In the process of perceiving the human actor in an aesthetic event I subordinate my sense of the actor as human being to my sense of the actor as human being functioning as image or stimulus to the formation of an image in my consciousness that combines in a intricate way my awareness of the presence of the actor and the actor’s presence as a theatrical entity.

The director relies upon the psychic and kinesthetic memory of the actor to record behavior generated in rehearsal.  In rehearsal persistent repetition writes a sequence of movement and vocal patterns in the actor’s memory that performance plays back almost automatically.  Later performances attempt to recover or to regenerate the details of the previous performances in a serial repetition.  Changes occur, often in an attempt to realize an idealized and unattainable notion of perfection; but the actor’s work remains one of recuperation, recovery, repetition, the reenactment of the work of the past in the labor of the present, the production of the performance that is a re-production of earlier work.

The actor’s body constitutes the primary technological instrument of the live theater, and I struggle to think clearly about performance I think it is helpful to conceptualize acting as a technology that functions to reproduce voice and gesture recorded earlier.  Performance always depends upon the function of systems of memory.  One could make the distinction between live performance as the reenactment of the past and the medium of either film or video as the record of the past.  This difference would take into consideration the distinction between the self-generated use of memory of the actor to reembody the work of rehearsal and the recording of images on some medium.  However, the point I am emphasizing is that the actor’s body is, indeed, imprinted with material by extensive repetition to respond in performance as closely as possible to some predetermined, previously generated sequences of behavior.  Whereas we celebrate the immediacy of live performance, we also return to performances of music, drama, and dance to experience the satisfaction of a repetition, the reoccurrence of formal patterns that have, in some way, been inscribed into our memory as well as the actor’s.  The pleasure of these aesthetic experiences derives, at least in part, from the anticipation and satisfaction of experiencing the fulfillment of a familiar formal structure.  Freud’s theories of repetition may be useful but not wholly necessary to understand this enjoyment.

 

Confronting the Technology of The Actor, part I

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I’m interested in the relationship between two kinds of presence:  the presence of the live actor and the presence generated by a video or film image of the actor.   Can the actor be viewed as a technological instrument, with the capability of recording speech and action through rehearsal, then playing this behavior back in performance?

Wooster Group, Hamlet (2006). Photo Paula Court

Performance invariably references the past work of actor and director and attempts to recover that work within the game of the representation of immediate action.  I have the idea of an “arrest” from film theory to identify two aspects of time:  first, the extended period of rehearsal in which the actor’s memory is imprinted, and secondly, the moment in which the actor is filmed or videotaped.  The interaction of live actor and technologically represented actor encourages the spectator to address both as images, or as agents that stimulate image production in the imagination.

The question of what constitutes presence in the theater or, perhaps, more accurately, what presence in the theater constitutes formulates the critical issue I am struggling with.  I consider the actor’s presence as it relates to and differs from the technologically produced image of the actor.  The components of the phenomenon I address are the following:

  • first, the body and the voice of the actor used to construct an image of a dramatic figure; second, the dramatic figure produced by the actor’s work ;
  • and finally the image produced in the spectator’s consciousness that mediates the perception of the body of the actor as actor and the body of the actor as fictional persona.

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As I do not confuse the concrete materiality of pigment with the object represented in a still life painting, I am aware that the corporeal presence of the actor is the medium of the representation of the fictional persona and not identical with it even though I perceive both actor and character simultaneously.   I both conflate and differentiate the body of the actor and the body of the character because I see the body of the actor as the body of the character and yet I know that one is not the other.

The technologically produced image functions as a sign of a corporeal body that was present to the camera at the moment of filming.  The projection of that film or video in performance seems to metamorphose the lens of the camera into the eye of the spectator even though the filming occurred  prior to the event of performance.  Metz writes:  “…[the] primary identification with the camera has the effect of transforming it into a retroactive delegate of the spectator to come.”   When spectators see the technologically produced image of an actor, they believe that the camera “saw” an actual human body that was present to it at that moment and that their present seeing reproduces the perception of an actual body.  Metz’s discussion exposes the temporal complexity of this identification with the imagined eye of the camera.

While the actual body of the actor–its tangibility as corporeal presence–may give the empirical reality of the live actor a special privilege, the persona of the actor will always remain, in some sense, inaccessible because it is masked by the performance and because the fictive persona will always be more accessible, more comprehensible than the actual.  Some theorists locate special value in the human actor in live performance because this presence is ephemeral.   Peggy Phelan writes:  “Performance’s only life is in the present. Performance  cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations: once it does so, it becomes something other than performance.”  In this argument, film and video operate as strategies to arrest the inevitable disappearance of human presence.   The empirical reality of the human actor, which may appear to us as more substantial in performance because palpably there in its corporeality, becomes, in the retrospective moment of theorizing, the more fragile in contrast to the greater recoverability and stability of the recorded image of the actor.

While the prerecorded video representation of the human figure, like the picture on film, signifies primarily as a reference to an event in the past, we also realize that this process does not wholly recover the prior event but merely marks a moment that has been lost.   In Roland Barthes’ now familiar essay on the rhetoric of the image, the French theorist claims that when we study a photograph, we do not see a presence “being there,” but rather a presence that “has been there.”  Barthes identifies a peculiar conflation or “illogical connection of here and then.”  Because we recognize that the photograph displays what is not really here, the still photograph has no projective power.  According to Barthes, because the projective cinema employs narration, fiction, the audience identifies the film not as the experience of what “has been there,” but, rather, responds to the experience as “There it is.”

The uses of the technologically produced image

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It seems to me
that one of the more interesting aspects
the process of displacing the human figure or puppet
into different media can accomplish
is to make it difficult to determine
what image is prior.

While I can posit the existence of the performer
before the image that is filmed or video-ed,
I also recognize that the demands of technology
require that the image I see is prior to the figure
as he/she/it now is present;
but that assurance can be shattered by revealing
that the video is image
is being produced by the operation of the video camera
at this very moment,
although it would be possible to construct
an image that appeared to be broadcast simultaneously
with the present image
then reveal itself
as prior to the present.

The Acting Problem

by

I don’t think it would be truthful to make a claim that acting has not changed in the past twenty years. However, I do think I can argue that the transformations in the ways in which we think about texts for performance have accelerated more rapidly than the ways in which we approach acting.


I find two fundamental systems of theorizing human behavior inform my assumptions of acting: the idea of the individual psychological subject reified by the actor’s assimilation of the character of the drama into her or his on subjectivity and the idea of the group as defined by Gestalt psychology that demands that the students explore the dynamics of the here and now constituted by the group itself.

In terms of the ways in which schools or programs structure the sequence of an acting curriculum, the focus upon the training of the actor’s body and imagination in the context of work functions as an introductory material. The notion of building a “text-based” character constitutes a later stage in the sequence.


In terms of pedagogy and directing practice, the improvistory exercise often introduces the work with the text although the sequence may proceed from the determination of an emotional scenario, to the improvisation of a moment from that scenario, to the rehearsal of that moment with text.
This use of improvisation often builds upon techniques gained in the introductory or fundamental courses, but this use of improvisation differs from the theater games system in which the actor responds from the coordinates of his or her own persona or an invention drawn from his/her own imagination, not from a text.

This last statement needs some qualification since the situations, emotions, characterizations that actors tend to draw upon in her or his invention tend to come less from the creativity of the actor and more from an increasing stock of situations, conventionalized displays of emotion, and universalized characters that the experience of group work builds. This repertory operates as a kind of backlog of texts to the degree that it functions as a library of representations. As the group develops, they become increasingly more facile in accessing and varying these texts.

One of the issues that I want to confront is the fact that a very significant theoretical apparatus that drives most approaches to acting (I’m thinking specifically in regards to the United States) is the notion that the aesthetic work of the theater is the representation of the real. That assumption becomes extremely problematic when I recognize that I exercise it unselfconsciously.

I assume, for example, that I can recognize when theatrical behavior is real, truthful, grounded in an authentic emotion and, in that sense, natural.

I celebrate the actor’s behavior when I can identify its naturalness. What I don’t always recognize is that what I perceive as natural is not based upon a correlation between the world of my experience and the actor’s behavior but, rather, upon the actor’s implementation (by craft or accident) of a series of conventions that I read as natural.

I also identify as style that which departs from that convention of naturalness: the extended vowel, the sharply articulated consonant, the self-conscious posture, the turning of the leg, any one of a series of artifices that I implement to historicize or distance a performance from the natural.

I recognize, but rarely discuss, the fact that the shorter distance between actor and auditor in film has exposed certain theatrical artifices that I previously read as natural and requires a mode of behavior that was less extended vocally and physically.

I recognize that this shift in the perception of what is natural in film has influenced my reading of stage behavior. The stage actor, now, is perceived as natural when her or his behavior approximates more closely the behavior of the film or video actor. The style reinforced by the dominant media of film and video certainly influences the style of the less popular medium of live performance.