ABSTRACT
In this chapter, Danielle I. Szlawieniec-Haw examines the first of three core themes that were identified in her revolutionary study into professional actors’ lived experiences of representing dolesse. This theme in question is that representing dolesse is a paradoxical process based in interwoven realities. To begin, Szlawieniec-Haw lays out the way everyday life has been viewed as real, while representation has been positioned as fiction. Using phenomenology and her own study, she demonstrates not only how representation entwines the real and the fictional, but she also challenges the nature of the dichotomy established between them. Inspired by Merleau-Ponty’s scholarship, Szlawieniec-Haw proposes a new way of seeing representation. The chapter then concludes with a series of paradoxes that emerge from representation’s interwoven realities.
