ABSTRACT
Training the body for a particular purpose, whether that purpose be for performance or not, involves the ‘lived’ body of the student passing through disciplining practices which claim to produce useful effects on and for that body. This chapter will examine the nature of these disciplining practices in relation to the physical training of the professional actor and to the discourses through which they operate. Drama schools obviously operate to integrate the student actor into the profession, to make him/her ‘absorbable’. A key question then is the extent to which not just the skills but the values of the industry will also have been received (see Foucault in McKenzie, 2001: 50-51). The chapter will examine the pedagogy of the movement class in terms of its ‘ability to produce codes of signifi cation’ (Meyer in Goodman, 1998: 257). My analysis will draw on the work of Michel Foucault and Judith Butler (Foucault, 1984 & Butler; 1990a, 1993, 1997), Foucault’s later concept of the ‘care of the self’ will also be examined for its potential as an alternative conceptual model for physical training-a model not simply productive of docile and receptive bodies. In a very straightforward sense, clearly the function and purpose of movement training for actors is to ‘produce’ the body of an actor. Power shows itself through its inscription of knowledges on the actor’s body; inscriptions which are not often noticed or considered, which are ‘not clearly available to sight and categorization’ (Melrose, 1994: 210). The two previous chapters have sought to examine the nature of these
‘knowledges’; the aim of this chapter will therefore be to elucidate the nature and effects of these productive powers. Since the late 1960s both the body and the voice have increasingly been seen as important sites for literal and metaphorical resistance to social structures and practices which have been perceived as limiting the rights of individuals to selfexpression (Boston, 1997). An initial reading of twentieth century texts on movement training for actors can suggest an essentialist tendency, a desire to position the body as a source of ‘original’ truth. This chapter, and the subsequent chapter on the ‘unruly’ body, set out to critique such assumptions and examine the extent to which movement training both embodies institutional values and the naturalization of the social order and offers a potential process for their interrogation.
