The Case for Embodied Actor Training (Part I - What is Embodiment?)
“…(embodied training) is not about discipline or chaos but something that can create an open space of reflection and choice where the trainee can rely on her own creativity where the space for freedom widens...”
The field of embodiment has exploded over the last seven to eight years. A number of studies involve the intersectionality and integration of embodied methodologies across a diverse spectrum of academic fields. In David J. Nguyen and Jay B. Larson’s article “Don’t Forget About the Body: Exploring the Curricular Possibilities of Embodied Pedagogy,” they write about embodiment’s role in fields such as mathematics, cognitive psychology, social psychology and neuroscience. In fact, embodiment has been a part of music and dance fields for decades. So, why has it taken theatre so long to catch up? And what exactly is embodiment?
The Oxford Living Dictionary defines embodiment as the tangible or visible form of an idea, quality, or feeling (Oxford). With regards to this particular definition, anything an actor feels or experiences psychologically must be visibly expressed through the body. Thus, character is created. Methods such as the psychological gesture created by Michael Chekov and Stanislavski’s physical actions explore how to bring the inside, out. However, a post-structuralist approach to acting, in a way, gives the ‘outside’ precedence over the ‘in’.
In her article, “Is Race a Trope: Anna Deavere Smith and the Question of Racial Performativity,” Debby Thompson states, “Smith, by contrast, is determined to encourage ‘other-oriented’ rather than ‘self-based’ approaches to acting (Fires xxvii). Instead of ‘finding the character within ourselves’ (as Uta Hagen puts it), actors should look for the character outside of themselves… Smith is developing ‘a technique that would begin with the other and come to the self” (Thompson, 130). In Deavere Smith’s process, the tangible outer work informs and affects the unseen inner being. The body goes first, then the mind. Through the process the two, body and mind, hopefully begin to work in harmony to effectively depict the story.
Embodiment suggests that psychological investigation actually gets in the way of the actor. Working from an already thinking body and, perhaps, a less-knowing mind could get an actor closer to character than the other way around. The use of the physical body would immediately clarify embodiment of the character without the entanglements of “How do I think right now?” or “What should I do?” Instead, the actor begins with actions while thinking and psychology follow. However, in more recent years, even beyond Deavere Smith’s discoveries, the mind and body do not just work one in front of the other, but in tandem. Thus, popular acting idioms like “Get out of your head” or “Stay in your body” are outdated and even harmful to actor training. (Blair, 11) These directives continue to reinforce the separation of the mind and body instead of working towards their integration.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty is mostly credited for the initial research in the field of embodiment. His book, The Phenomenology of Perception, was published in 1962 leaving many years between the creation of valuable research on the body/mind relationship and its arrival onto the acting scene. Phenomenology, the study of engagement in lived experience (Tuisku, 42) grounds Merleau-Ponty’s argument that people perceive and conceptualize everything bodily. Merleau-Ponty goes on to discuss how consciousness is embodied and there is no separation between the mind or body, whichever order you place them in. In “The Embodiment of Performance,” David Michael Levin recalls Edmund Husserl’s version of phenomenology as being “…designed to reverse the alienation and decadence of meaning and return to us our natural signifying capacities.” (Levin, 126) In short, he urges the artist to return to the innate method that ‘thinks’ without thinking – the body.
Nguyen and Larson describe a similar concept when they write, “Bresler (2004) defined embodiment as ‘integration of the physical and biological body and the phenomenological or experiential body’ indicating ‘a seamless, though often elusive matrix of body/mind worlds, a web that integrates thinking, being, doing, and interacting within worlds.’” (Nguyen and Larson, 333) Thus, to embrace embodiment as pedagogy, you must embrace the whole person - who an actor is, what they bring to their work, and their world - in and out of the classroom. Even in pedagogy, the mind, body, and being cannot be separated.
Nevertheless, it is Hannu Tuisku’s definition of embodiment in his work, Developing embodied pedagogies of acting for youth theatre education: Psychophysical actor training as a source for new openings, that provides the most life and breadth to what embodied training can and should be. He writes, “By ‘embodied pedagogy of acting’ I mean an approach to acting and training actors that, based mainly on the traditions of psychophysical actor training, emphasizes the centrality of the actor’s sentient body in the theatrical event, the notion of a human being as a comprehensive body-mind entity, and the diversity and complexity of subjective experience that ultimately remain beyond reach of verbal definitions, necessitating consideration of a non-representational aspect in training.” (Tuisku, 17) Thus, an awareness and collaboration with phenomenological and corporeal dramaturgy perspectives are necessary aspects for any pedagogue wishing to apply embodied methods into their classroom. There must be a ‘letting go’ of conventional methods of connecting with students and the artform from the start.
Tuisku expands later with a broadened, student focused perspective writing, “…(embodied training) is not about discipline or chaos but something that can create an open space of reflection and choice where the trainee can rely on her own creativity where the space for freedom widens... the trainee has a larger scale to operate than that perceived by conventional text-analysis, and she can move beyond the categories prescribed by language.” (Tuisku, 64) Once again, the embodied classroom does not descend into chaos, as many teachers would assume, but elevates the ethics of the classroom and the student/teacher relationship to provide a safer, freer, and wider space for artistic creativity for both the student and the teacher. This type of classroom lives in the grey area and necessitates a balance of teaching, learning, and being.
Sources
Blair, Rhonda. “Acting, Embodiment, and Text: Hedda Gabler and Possible Uses of Cognitive Science.” John Hopkins University Press, Theatre Topics Volume 20, Number 1, March 2010.
Levin, David Michael. “The Embodiment of Performance.” Skidmore College. Salmagundi, No. 31/32, 10th Anniversary Issue (Fall 1975-Winter 1976) pp. 120-142.
Nguyen, David J. and Larson, Jay B. “Don’t Forget About the Body: Exploring the Curricular Possibilities of Embodied Pedagogy.” Springer Science & Business Media, New York, NY. February 1, 2015.
Oxford Living Dictionary. https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/embodiment.
Thompson, Debby. “Is Race a Trope: Anna Deavere Smith and the Question of Racial Performativity.” African American Review Vol. 37, No. 1 Spring, 2003, pp. 127-138.
Tuisku, Hannu. Developing embodied pedagogies of acting for youth theatre education: Psychophysical actor training as a source for new openings. University of the Arts, Helsinki, Theatre Academy, Performing Arts Research Centre, Helsinki, 2017.