Consciousness,
Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume
1 Number 2, July 2000
_______________________________________________________________
Performance as Metamorphosis
by
Aldo
Tassi
I want to set the context for my discussion of theatre and consciousness
by re-examining the central fact about the theatrical performance: namely, the
fact that it is an impersonation. The
earliest discussions we have of theatre theory in the West begin by
acknowledging this fact. For example, in the Republic
Plato describes mimesis as something
that occurs when the poet/rhapsode "delivers a speech as if he were someone
else." [1]
And Aristotle, in his Poetics,
speaks of mimesis as a performance in
which the actor ceases to "speak in his own person" and takes on
"another personality." [2]
But just what is it that we mean when we say that the actor is engaged in
an impersonation? If we listen to
Plato, the situation is one where the actor is pretending to be someone else. On the other hand, if we listen to Aristotle, it is a case of
"another personality" appearing in the guise of the actor.
Depending on what we believe the actor is doing when he or she
impersonates a character onstage we will get two very different notions of what
sort of consciousness is taking place during the theatrical performance.
Accordingly, I want to begin by examining these two meanings that
impersonation can have.
First, there is the popular view which makes no distinction in kind
between the impersonation that children and adults perform in everyday settings
and the impersonation that takes place in the theatre.
According to this view, the performer -- both in and out of the theatre
-- is creating the illusion that he or she is someone else.
In the theatre, however, this illusion is created with a sophistication
that effectively brings about a suspension of disbelief. Perhaps the most compelling, and for our purposes the most
fruitful, discussion of this view is to be found in Diderot's The
Actor's Paradox. [3]
According to Diderot, the actor is someone who has carefully observed the
different ways in which our body produces "the outward symptoms of the
soul."[4]
Her situation, he tells us, is like that of the sculptor who, having
thought through the modèle intérieur he wishes to represent, directs his consciousness
at the block of marble on whose surface the chisel is to perform its function of
depicting the emotions that will communicate this figure to the audience.
For her part, the actor directs her consciousness toward her body seeking
to produce the outward signs of the emotions called for by the modèle
idéal created by the playwright. The
greatest actor is the one "who best knows and best renders, after the best
conceived ideal type, these outward signs."[5]
In many ways, Diderot's idea of the actor's performance was modeled on
his observations of the performance of his painter and sculptor friends.[6]
He noticed that the emotions to be expressed on canvas or in marble had already
been worked out beforehand and that during the execution of the painting or the
sculpture the artist's consciousness is directed exclusively at representing
these emotions. To the degree that the artist, at the time of execution,
underwent the emotion expressed in the painting or in the sculpture, to that
very same degree the work of art was flawed.
This was to become the central argument, which Diderot would repeat again
and again, in his discussion of the actor's performance.
The actor creates the illusion of Hamlet's anguish much the same way as
the illusion of Mary's anguish is created in the Pietà.
If the actor is to succeed onstage, she must not be undergoing the
emotions expressed by the character.
What Diderot is in effect saying is that there are no acts of
consciousness occurring onstage corresponding to the state of affairs we call
anguish. The anguish which is
expressed there is only a depicted anguish.
It is not a genuine emotion presently being undergone by anyone.
It does not exist as a state of consciousness but is instead the object being produced by the act of consciousness.
The act of consciousness which exists onstage and is producing the
emotion witnessed by the audience is the conscious state we call pretending.
In other words, the consciousness that is crossing the threshold of the
body onstage and is coming into the world is the conscious state of pretending
which produces the simulated anguish that the audience sees.
With regard to this anguish, the actor's body is not functioning as a threshold, but
is rather being employed as a referential site on whose surface the act of
consciousness is shaping the appearance of anguish. Diderot is clear. The
actor is someone "who, having learnt the words set down for him by the
author, fools you thoroughly" into believing that these emotions are in
fact being undergone by someone onstage.[7]
In Diderot's description, then, the actor is engaged in an impersonation
in the sense that she is pretending to be someone else, pretending to emotions
which she is in fact not undergoing. Her performance is continuous with what
children and adults do when they impersonate someone.
Like them, she is using her body to refer
the spectator to someone else. Except
that in the case of the actor it is done with preparation, care and consummate
skill.
I have no wish to deny that an actor's performance can be, and often is,
a case of successful pretense, and that for many -- no doubt a majority of
theatre-goers -- this is the common sense of the matter.
What I want to challenge, however, is the notion that what is distinctive
about the theatrical performance is the level of competence with which the
pretense is performed. Let us remember that there is another view regarding the
nature of the impersonation which takes place in theatre. This view conceives of theatre as a distinctive art, an art
which traces its origins back to the Dionysian rituals which took place on the
hillside in Greece. The
performances contained in these rituals were directed at making the god present.
Their purpose, in essence, was to achieve a metamorphosis: a bringing
someone else to presence in the body of the performer.
With the displacement of these rituals from the hillside
to the city, the Greek theatre was born and supplied a new context for these
ancient performances. The actor in
the theatre continued to find himself involved in an extraordinary activity.
That is to say, his function continued to be, in the words of Aristotle,
to take on "another personality."
The idea that the actor was pretending to be someone else had not yet
entered into the West's understanding of theatre.
The audience came to the theatre expecting to bear witness to a
metamorphosis: they came to the theatron, the "place for seeing," expecting to see someone
else -- just as the initiates on the hillside expected to see Dionysos.
The activity which in its ordinary everyday setting
"personates" the actor (that is to say, brings to presence the person
of the actor) in the special setting of the theatre was expected to
"personate," or bring to presence the person of, someone else: the
character in the play. This is the
distinctive meaning that impersonation has in the theatre.
It is an idea that lies at the heart of Stanislavski's obsessive search
for a "method": a method which would enable the actor to partake of
such a metamorphosis during the performance.
Stanislavski exploited the difference between ritual and trance and the
actor's performance. In the case of
the former, the "actor" remained unaware of the "other
personality," whereas, in the case of theatre, the actor would be aware of
this someone else. Hence the
possibility of a process he called a "science" whose outcome was
belief.
It is important to remember that Stanislavski did not
call into question the legitimacy of the acting method embodying the principles
that are found in Diderot's treatise. The
actor trained in such a method "also lives his part."
But he does so "as a preparation for perfecting an external form.
Once that is determined to his satisfaction [during rehearsal] he
reproduces that form through the aid of mechanically trained muscles."[8]
The metamorphosis which comes under the guise of inspiration is not
something which the actor can control. If,
as is often the case, it fails to come, the actor who has prepared in accordance
with Diderot's directives can be relied on to give a good performance.
The fault with such a method of acting, in the eyes
Stanislavski, lay in the fact that it fails to recognize that the actor's
calling requires him to remain open to inspiration. "In our art you must live the part every moment that you
are playing it, and every time."[9]
Consider what happens when an external occurrence "injects a bit of
real life into the theatre." Diderot's
actor "steps out of his part, disposes of the accidental intrusion, and
then goes back to the convention of the theatre and takes up his interrupted
action." Stanislavski's actor,
on the other hand, "includes such accidental moments of reality ... fitting
them into the pattern of his part."[10]
The fact that the theatrical performance is a live
performance lies at the core of what he is doing.
There is an interesting letter written by David Garrick
to Helfreich Peter Stutz which re-enforces the distinction between
Stanislavski's and Diderot's methods. What
makes the letter especially pertinent is the fact that Garrick is commenting on
the acting of Claire-Joseph Clairon who, along with himself, was one of the two
actors Diderot singled out as exemplars of the acting method he put forward in The
Actor's Paradox. Garrick
concedes that Clairon is a good actor. She
is at all times in total control of her stage presence, achieving exactly the
effects she sets out to achieve. In
a word, her performance realizes what has already been achieved in rehearsal:
namely, the ideal model. Her
performance, however, accomplishes nothing more.
And this is the fault that Garrick finds with it.
It leaves no room for "the greatest strokes of Genius ... [which
occur] unknown to the Actor himself 'till Circumstances and the warmth of the
Scene has sprung the Mine as it were, as much to his own Surprise, as that of
the Audience."[11]
Knowing how to create the illusion of an emotion is all well and good and
invariably gives pleasure to the audience.
But, in the final analysis, to achieve a truly great performance, to
accomplish what theatre and theatre alone can accomplish, the actor must remain
open in his performance to the actual realization of the emotion. In other words, the live performance onstage must strive to
enact the "live" performance which take place in life.
In his An Actor
Prepares, Stanislavski/Tortsov speaks of the spontaneity which happens
onstage when the emotions break through the scaffolding of pretense.
"The very best thing that can happen," he tells us, "is to
have the actor completely carried away by the play.
Then regardless of his own will he lives the part, not noticing how
he feels, not thinking about what he
does, and it all moves of its own accord, subconsciously and intuitively."[12]
When this happens, the theatrical performance ceases to be an impersonation
wherein the actor pretends to emotions which he does not undergo.
The performance has become an enactment of life and, as in the case of
life, what comes to pass moves of its own accord.
Feelings are no longer the object of the actor's consciousness: something
which he produces or depicts onstage the way a painter produces or depicts
feelings on a canvas. They are now
genuine, spontaneous: that is to say, they are feelings that are being undergone
as states of consciousness. As
such, they belong to the live
performance that constitutes the life of a person: the person onstage being, of
course, the character.
William James, in his Principles of Psychology, points out that every experience or state
of consciousness enters the world as the present of a stream of consciousness
which is presencing a self.[13]
This stream is the life of consciousness and comes to pass of its own
accord. So when Stanislavski refers
to the actor as being "completely carried away," what he is saying is
that the actor has somehow managed to establish a present which is the present
of a stream of consciousness. And
that the feelings in question have shifted from being objects of consciousness
to being states of consciousness. In
their capacity as states of consciousness, these feelings weave themselves into
the fabric which constitutes the reality of a person, a someone with whom the
actor is identifying herself: the character in the play.
What has happened is the "mine," that Garrick
speaks of, has detonated and the actor, being "transported beyond
himself," has become someone else. Actors
speak of this phenomenon as "living in the scene."
It is the moment which their preparation has prepared them for: when, in
the words of Stanislavski, "the creative artist feels his own life in the
life of his part, and the life of his part identical with his personal life ...
A miraculous metamorphosis."[14]
But what can we say about the consciousness which is
taking place during this metamorphosis? The
feelings, as we have seen, have shifted from being objects of consciousness to
being states of consciousness. As states of consciousness, they are directed toward the
scene much like the states of consciousness that arise in life are directed
toward the world.[15]
The body in life functions as a matrix of states of consciousness which
establish it (the body) as a threshold across which someone -- the one
who undergoes these states of consciousness -- comes to presence.
The energy by which nature constitutes a living, shaping force has become
a conscious force in the human body and its shaping function is a
"personating" activity.[16]
The art of the actor consists in reconstructing this state of affairs on the
theatrical stage. The body in the
life of the scene continues to function as matrix and threshold.
Like the world, the scene elicits spontaneous corporeal behavior that
gives rise to states of consciousness which establish the presence of someone
--the character -- onstage.
These states of consciousness, however, and the stream to
which they belong, and the person who comes to presence as undergoing them, as
they occur in the theatre are enactments.
They are not the originary state of affairs we have in life in the world.
The character who appears onstage and the feelings that appear as being
undergone by him exist insofar as there is an appropriation of a body whose
feelings are originarily someone else's: namely, the actor's.
In one sense, it must still be the actor's body since it continues to
function as the matrix of acts of consciousness.
In another sense, it can no longer be the actor's body since it functions
as a threshold across which someone else is coming to presence.
How is this possible?
What is the actor doing when he effaces himself?
We could say that the energy which in the life of nature reveals itself
in the persona of the actor has been channeled by means of artifice into
revealing itself in the persona of the character.
Eugenio Barba, in his work on theatre anthropology, describes the actor's
work on her body as one that seeks to compose a "pattern of actions which
form the banks ... through which energy flows, transforming the natural bios
into scenic bios and bringing it to
view."[17]
The daily body has in effect been transformed into an extra-daily, or scenic,
body: that is to say, a body in which the actor's person has been temporarily
"put out of play."
But in what sense can we say the actor is out of play?
He has certainly not been rendered unconscious.
If this were the case, the states of consciousness that presence the
character would have no means of entering the world.
In being "completely carried away" and "transported beyond
himself," the actor has not fallen into a state of senselessness.
In other words, he has not lost that self-awareness which establishes his
body as a matrix of acts that engage the world in conscious terms.
Beneath our every conscious activity and functioning as their ontological
support, so to speak, there is our awareness of the body's
"situatedness." Again, it
is William James who calls our attention to this primitive self which he
describes as the perennial awareness our body has of itself.[18]
This awareness continues onstage, where the body engages the scene in
conscious terms and as it does so functions as a threshold across which a self
is presenced in the world -- this time in the world of the play.
In a very important sense, the actor is not in the world
of the play. Her body is.
But it is someone else who is coming to presence across that body.
Although the body continues to be hers during the theatrical performance,
this is not because it is bringing the person with whom she identifies herself
to presence. It continues to be
hers by virtue of the fact that it is the same body which "nature
uses" to bring her to presence. But
during the theatrical performance, the actor is "imitating" nature.
She is using this body, her body, to bring a character to presence.
As matrix and threshold, the body (which nature uses) has
a pre-personal existence: that is to say, James' primitive self is a
pre-personal subject that is at work "underneath," so to speak, the
personal subject. Philosophers,
especially those who have been influenced by phenomenology, speak of an
"impersonal one," that is to say, of a body-subject whose
"prehistory" is taken up in all our personal dealings with the world.[19]
It is for the purpose of reaching this stratum of his body that the actor works
on his body. Charles Marowitz has
described the actor as "someone who remembers."
Remembers not only his lines, or the emotions that humans experience, or
even the "primordial impulses that inhabited his body before he was
`civilized' and `educated'." At
the end of it all, the actor is someone who "remembers the world before it
became his world and himself before he became his self."[20]
It is when the actor has retrieved this self "before it becomes his
self" that he is in a position to "build a character" which
enables him to "feel his own life in the life of his part" during the
performance.
All of the actor's exercises and preparations, then, are
directed at reaching the body at that point where it functions as matrix and
threshold. The objective is to
"re-code" the body, as it were, so that when it behaves in the context
of the scene it will presence the character in the play and not the actor.
The actor's training, according to Barba, teaches her how to separate
herself from what her body shows. The
effacement that lies at the heart of the theatre metamorphosis is achieved when
a new form is instituted which functions as the soul
"of a living but re-invented body ... [giving rise to] a behaviour which
has been separated from the behaviour of every day, a naturalness which is the
fruit of artificiality."[21]
I am using the word "soul" in the way that
Aristotle uses in his De Anima where
he identifies it with form (which is the word Barba uses) and describes it as
the "first grade of actuality" -- that is to say, the actuality which
establishes the horizon within which the body is "prepared" to act.[22]
According to Aristotle, the fact that the body is besouled accounts for why its
movements are "behaviour." And when this behaviour is a conscious behaviour directed at
an horizon of meanings, the body becomes the site of a personality.
The soul, to paraphrase Wittgenstein, is something the body shows.
And, in the theatre performance, the body shows "another
personality."
During the performance, the actor's primitive
self-awareness remains intact, as the recoded body functions in its capacity as
matrix and threshold. The states of
consciousness that enter the world during the performance will have the actor's
self-awareness as their ontological support.
But the threshold they cross is one that, thanks to the actor's artistry,
presences someone else. The actor
undergoes the emotions which take place onstage; but he does so as their
support. It is the character who,
in the final analysis, undergoes these emotions in the mode of being
constituted, or brought into the world, by them.
The double consciousness which actors say takes place
during the performance is a split which takes place within the actor's consciousness and is not a case of there being
two states of consciousness. The
actor is exploiting a split which is already delineated in his ordinary life
where there is, on the one hand, his awareness of his body, and, on the other
hand, his awareness of the one who is being presenced by this body and with whom
he identifies himself. It is the
latter awareness which is the locus of the "surprise" Garrick speaks
of. The actor finds himself
identifying with someone he is not originarily.
Unlike the child who tells his mother that no matter who he pretends to
be he always end up being himself, the actor finds himself becoming someone
else. Be this as it may, however,
it is in the awareness he has of his body that he continues to find the
assurance, pace Diderot, that come
what may he will be adequate to the task of supporting the life which the
performance is bringing forth.
What is more, it is a surprise in which we, the audience
who are bearing witness to what has happened, share. We have from the beginning of our existence been
"with" others. The
phenomenon called intersubjectivity speaks to the primitive situation that
exists between us before we learn how to observe one another.
We find ourselves partaking, as it were, each of the other.
This, I believe, is the deeper meaning of Aristotle's notion that we are
born with the instinct to imitate. How
else are we to explain the fact that we naturally recognize persons despite the
fact that this would appear to be entirely gratuitous if we were to stay
exclusively with the data we receive when we observe someone's body?
To be "with" others, to recognize someone (the one who is
coming to presence across a body) is connatural to us: that is to say, we are
born that way. We can, and do,
learn to be with other in other ways. But
it is this primitive way that theatre exploits.
The actor is not alone in recognizing this someone else who is coming to
presence across her body. We the
audience also recognize her.[23]
This is what stands behind the seemingly innocent notion
of "suspension of disbelief." Stanislavski's
insistence that the actor believe in the character was rooted in the fact that
only in this way would it be possible to engage the audience's belief.[24]
It is misleading to think of this as a chronological sequence: a going from
actor to audience. It can also go
the other way: from audience to actor. Actor's
speak of "feeding" on the audience.
The fact of the matter is: the two happen together or not at all.
The actor's artistry consists in taping into the intersubjective bond
between himself and the audience and the suspension of disbelief, whatever that
may ultimately be, is something that happens both onstage and in the audience.[25]
What the actor does, then, when she impersonates someone
is to create someone else out of herself. She
brings this someone else forth from her own body.
It is not a case of pretending to be someone else.
It is a matter of becoming this someone else.
In a word, the impersonation which takes place in the theatre is a
metamorphosis.
__________________________________________________________________
1. Plato, Republic, iii, 393c. For
an important alternative approach, the reader is referred to Daniel Meyer-Dinkfräfe's
Consciousness and the Actor: A
Reassessment of Western and Indian Approaches to the Actor's Emotional
Involvement from the Perspective of Vedic Psychology (Frankfurt am Main,
1996) which explores the question of consciousness and the theatre in the light
of Vedic psychology's model of consciousness.
A discussion of this work is beyond the purview of this present paper
which remains exclusively within the Western tradition.
2. Aristotle, Poetics, iii, 1448a 21-22.
3. It is not my intention to revisit Diderot's classic work in order to
give (still another?) interpretation. Suffice
it to say that Diderot's discussion -- the very terms in which he has
set forth the actor's problem --
places him squarely at the center of the
first meaning of impersonation. From
this perspective, the "duplicity"
which Diderot discerns at the heart of great acting illustrates Plato's worst fears concerning mimesis.
4. Dennis Diderot, The Paradox of
Acting, trans. by W.H. Pollock (1883) in The
Paradox of Acting and Masks or Faces, intro. by Lee Strasberg (New York,
1957) p. 53.
5. Ibid. See, James Creech, Diderot:
Thresholds of Representation (Columbus, Ohio, 1986), chapter five.
6. For a discussion of the influence his contact with painters and
sculptors (beginning in 1759) had on Diderot's theory of acting, see Joseph
R.Roach, The Player's Passion: Studies in
the Science of Acting (Newark, Delaware, 1985), chapter four; and Sarah
Kofman, Mélancolie de l'art (Paris,
1985), pp. 37-70.
7. The Paradox of Acting, p. 37.
8. Constantin Stanislavski, An
Actor Prepares, trans. Elizabeth Reynolds Hapgood (New York, 1944) p. 18.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid., p. 270. Stanislavski
remarks that "such occurrences often act as a kind of tuning fork, they
strike a living note and oblige us to turn from falseness and artificiality back
to truth. Just one such moment can
give direction to all the rest of the role." (Ibid.)
11. David Garrick, "Letter to Helfrich Peter Sturz, 3 Jan.
1769" in The Letters of David Garrick,
eds. David M. Little and George M. Kahrl (Cambridge, 1963) no. 528.
12. An Actor Prepares, p. 13.
13. See William James, The
Principles of Psychology, vol 1 (Dover Publications, 1950) pp.330-342.
See also his chapter on "The Stream of Consciousness."
14. An Actor Prepares, p. 269.
15. See Principles of Psychology, pp. 271-290.
16. A person, or self, is the one in reference to whom things
exhibit meanings. Human
actions are directed toward things in terms
of the meanings they display. The
body is a "human body" when it behaves-in-the-world as a threshold
across which someone is presenced in the world.
As such, it functions, in the language of
phenomenology, as an "incarnate intentionality."
17. Eugenio Barba, The Paper Canoe:
A Guide to Theatre Anthropology, trans. by Richard Fowler (London: 1995) pp.
54-55.
18. See Principles of Psychology, pp. 292-329. See also the notion of a body-subject in Maurice
Merleau-Ponty, The Structure of Behavior,
trans. by Alden L. Fisher (Boston, 1963) pp. 189-224;
246-249.
19. See Maurice Merleau-Ponty's discussion of perception which he
describes as embedded in the body-subject -- that primitive self at the center
of an incarnate intentionality -- in his Phenomenology
of Perception, trans. by Colin Smith (New York: 1962) p. 240:
"Perception is always in the mode of the impersonal `One'.
It is not a personal act enabling me to give a fresh significance to my
life. The person who, in sensory
exploration, gives a past to the present and directs it toward a future, is not
myself as an
autonomous
subject, but myself in so far as I have a body and am
able
to `look'. Rather than a genuine
history, perception ratifies and renews in us a prehistory."
20. Charles Marowitz, The Act of
Being: Toward a Theory of Acting (New York, 1978) pp.26-27.
21. The Paper Canoe, p. 104.
22. See Aristotle, De Anima,
Book II, chapter 1. Barba's work
suggests a familiarity with Aristotle. For
a discussion of
the
notions of soul and form, and their relation to metamorphosis,
see
my "Person as the Mask of Being," Philosophy
Today 37
(Summer,1993),
201-210.
23. For a discussion of the way in which the actor-audience bond is
affected by the metamorphosis, see Dunbar H. Ogden's excellent article "The
Mimetic Impulse or the Doppelgänger Effect," in Theatre
and Television, ed. Robert L. Erenstein (Amsterdam, 1988), 21-49.
24. The talk about belief, in the context of theatre, serves to point us
to that "place" where we are still "with" one another, where
the distance effectuated by observation (and knowledge) has not yet arisen.
25. What I am suggesting is that to suspend one's disbelief is to move
oneself outside of the observational mode and to "return" to a more
primitive mode. In other words, the advice often given to actors that they
"reach down inside themselves," etc. is something that the audience in
its own way must do.