ABSTRACT
This chapter embodies an actor’s attempt to befriend Sisyphus, by following him closely as he pushes his stone uphill and watches it roll back down, while simultaneously considering an age-old question of acting: truthfulness versus mechanical repetition. Listening in to the echoes between how an actor engages with and repeats an action, score, choreography, blocking or performance, and how Sisyphus performs his action, task, torture or gift, the chapter visits key acting tropes such as Stanislavski’s emotion memory and Grotowski’s discipline and spontaneity, as well as philosophical interlocutors such as Deleuze’s repetition and difference and archetypal psychology’s specificity and unknown.
