ABSTRACT
Historically, dominant knowledges of the body have sought to prioritize and universalize certain functions of the actor’s body, typically functions that are considered to participate in producing effects (arousal, intrigue, desire, amazement or terror) upon the spectator. Such knowledges validate, and are in turn validated by, the socio-economic structures of the theatre industry, which prioritize such effects as productive and profi table. Actors’ bodies have then been trained (and hired) in direct relation to their ability to fulfi ll these functions. Nobility, grace, beauty, sensuousness, agility, vitality, athleticism, and poise have all been valued for certain roles; likewise robustness, coarseness, plainness, ugliness, fatness, aggression, hesitancy and clumsiness have been (more selectively) valued for others. The former set of attributes has generally been dominant in setting the norm of the actor’s body in twentieth century theatre. Against this norm, all actors’ physical attributes are subsequently positioned in a clear socio-cultural and economic hierarchy. Actors, for example, are generally expected to be ablebodied in order to perform in the major companies and play the major parts. Thus the actor understandably desires a body ready for work, able to generate varied, multiple and fl uid meanings, in effect a body which within the parameters of theatrical taste at any particular time, can perform as ‘natural’ and able to engage in an uninhibited manner with their environment so as to create the illusion of ‘naturalness’. In this sense, the Occidental actor desires a body that is understood in theatrical terms as ‘neutral’. For the actor then, the ‘neutral’ body is a body ‘ready to work’ (Morris, 1999) and also a body shaped by the cultural history and the cultural economics of the ‘natural’ body.
