ABSTRACT
All the actor has is herself. Her self. As constituted by her body, intellect, feeling, and history. The actor’s process is, at its core, subjective and idiosyncratic, involving the negotiation of fleeting impulses and mysteriously rising instincts and intuitions, grounded (one hopes) in solid preparatory work with the text and staging. There are crucial areas of technical mastery in voice, movement, and text work to be addressed by the actor, but the heart of the work must be a deeply private engagement with the material. The languages of acting that have been developed over the last century reflect this idiosyncrasy and difficulty. Some approaches are effective, some are rife with mystification and a lack of specificity, and it isn’t unusual for an approach to have elements of both. The problem of the subjective nature of the actor’s process is compounded by the personal, poetic, and sometimes pseudo-scientific or pseudo-psychological nature of the vocabularies and techniques
3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10111 11 2 3222 4 5 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 522 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
we use. Because of the difficulties of speaking about this subjectivity, views of acting can erroneously split body from mind and feeling, or impulse and instinct from intellect. An issue that one might initially define as vaguely psychological or affective-“this actor is emotionally blocked”—may in fact have a primarily physiological basis-“this actor needs a yoga class, a better diet, more rest, etc.” —, or the reverse may be the case. I believe this problem can sometimes derive from a limited or flawed sense of how the different facets of ourselves are interconnected and in fact are inseparable from each other. While subjectivity must always be an element in the actor’s process and in the languages of acting-what we do, after all, is an art, not a science-, it is possible to understand and engage private aspects of the actor’s work in more accurate and consistent ways.
