The Case for Embodied Actor Training (Part II - What it is Not)
Embodied practices for actors does have its limitations.
First and foremost, not everyone is talented.
The culmination of embodied techniques in the acting classroom does not guarantee that an actor will be more talented or even good at acting. Nor does it ensure that a bad professor will become a better professor. Embodied acting techniques will only take what is already there and make it better.
I was once on vacation at the beach with some family and friends. One of our family friends asked, “Can you really teach people how to act?” I immediately replied, “No. I can only give them the tools to maybe learn how to act.” I explained how I teach techniques and tangible aspects of the craft but cannot by pedagogy alone make anyone an actor. Some people just are. Others learn. And some never will get the gist because maybe they are meant to do something else. None of that is up to me. My job is to simply teach. I cannot work miracles and neither can embodiment.
However, if a student is not equipped to be an actor, at least in the serious pursuit of acting as an artform, the investigations of methods surrounding corporeal dramaturgy could help that student become more comfortable with themselves and who they are in the world. Tuisku mentions that personal growth is a side benefit to the approach. However, no matter how you explain it, acting is a mystical and magical profession. Richard Kemp suggests, embodiment only helps the magic to seem even more so. He writes, “When I began researching the material that I’ve described, I feared that cognitive science would remove the magic from theatre. But now, I think that it will enable theatre practitioners to be better magicians.” (Kemp, 190) We cannot make magicians, but at best, we can continue to encourage those who are not to discover where they can bring their own magic to the world.
Another limitation of embodied practice is the potential for stereotyping and oversimplification of characterization.
As a fan of investigative theatre, a lot of the techniques that generate authentic representations in this genre can easily be misconstrued. Similarly, embodied techniques rely on streamlined exercises and tools (like clenching a jaw) to transform the way a character is physically interpreted. The silent improv is often used to loosen the actors and the action on the stage. Unfortunately, without proper guidance and context, these tools can be misinterpreted and rendered shallowly.
I worked on a project during my graduate studies where I designed a curriculum or a class called Performing Ethnicity. The class was designed with many of the embodied techniques that I address in my thesis. However, similar pitfalls to performing characters of a differing identify than one’s own prove to have analogous challenges that embodied techniques could encounter in a more traditional acting classroom. The danger of minstrelsy or caricatured performances can easily be created instead of embodied representations of unique individuals or beings. Through their representation/performance of recently discovered natives, Guillermo Gomez-Pena and Coco Fusco spectacularly proved how stereotypes can be misinterpreted as an accurate depiction of culture and identity by the audience. In Diana Taylor’s “Couple in a Cage,” she purports that, “There was no more interiority to their performance of the stereotype than in the stereotype itself and nothing to know, it seemed, that was not readily available to the viewing eye.” (Taylor, 164) So, although the effort of discarding psychology in promotion of physical representation was successful in effectively portraying their ‘subjects’, Gomez-Pena and Fusco’s lack of authentic portrayals was undetectable to much of their viewing audience. Consequently, stereotypes about savages were purposefully perpetuated and not challenged by their performance (albeit to prove a point in their case). However, student actors and unenthusiastic professors of embodied approaches could easily have an analogous outcome.
One of the final and most important limitations to discuss with regards to embodiment is temperament. Embodiment is not for everyone. In the same token, embodiment is not for all professors.
There are acting teachers who like to wield power over students and enjoy the oppressive, authoritarian atmosphere they create. It is what I call an ‘old’ school approach but an approach that nonetheless continues to exist in acting classrooms today. The idea that a student must be ‘broken down’ and built up again is still common among teachers of the craft who learned similar methods in their training. Embodiment is not for these people. Even if this type of teacher wanted to integrate embodied approaches into their classroom, the desire to maintain control over every aspect of acting outcomes, training, student perception, and synthesis of the material would get in the way of the teaching practice, if not damage the student/teacher relationship all together. To be fair, I have seen teachers who structure the students’ learning in a traditional style achieve success. However, after observing talented students under their tutelage, their success in integrating their training is often short lived. They are not able to repeat or even articulate the process that they were taught. Once again, embodiment would not be a good fit for such teachers. Despite the limitation, I believe the possibilities to embodied performative pedagogy are endless.
Sources:
1) Kemp, Rick. Embodied Acting: Cognitive Foundations of Performance. UMI. University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 2010.
2) Taylor, Diana. “A Savage Performance: Guillermo Gomez-Pena and coco Fusco’s ‘Couple in a Cage’.” The MIT Press. TDR, Volume 42, No. 2 (summer, 1998), pp. 160-175.
3) 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.