The Actor, Image, and Action

Acting and Cognitive Neuroscience

Rhonda Blair

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781135976231
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Darstellende Kunst

The Actor, Image and Action is a 'new generation' approach to the craft of acting; the first full-length study of actor training using the insights of cognitive neuroscience. In a brilliant reassessment of both the practice and theory of acting, Rhonda Blair examines the physiological relationship between bodily action and emotional experience. In doing so she provides the latest step in Stanislavsky's attempts to help the actor 'reach the unconscious by conscious means'.

Recent developments in scientific thinking about the connections between biology and cognition require new ways of understanding many elements of human activity, including:

• imagination
• emotion
• memory
• physicality
• reason.

The Actor, Image and Action looks at how these are in fact inseparable in the brain's structure and function, and their crucial importance to an actor's engagement with a role. The book vastly improves our understanding of the actor's process and is a must for any actor or student of acting.

Chapter 1
Acting, history, and science

What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculties! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals! And yet to me what is this quintessence of dust?

(Shakespeare, Hamlet, II, ii)

Moreover, and this is of primary importance, the organic bases of the laws of nature on which our art is founded will protect you in the future from going down the wrong path.

(Konstantin Stanislavsky 1936:16, italics in original)

Acting and science: a starting point

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 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.

At least since Diderot’s The Paradox of the Actor, we in the West have been trying to understand what happens when the actor is acting and to learn how to act “better” and more efficaciously. Efforts to talk about acting in a systematic and coherent way exploded in the last century. We study Stanislavsky (in all of his bastardized versions) and those who followed him in one form or another—Strasberg, Meisner, Adler, Lewis, Hagen et al. (again, bastardized or modified, depending on your point of view). We study Michael Chekhov and the psychological gesture. We study Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt and fixing the “not-but” of the actor. We study non-text-centered approaches, among them Meyerhold and biomechanics, Artaud, and LeCoq. We study Grotowski in an effort to achieve communion, Chaikin in an effort to achieve connectedness to impulse, and Suzuki in an effort to tap into particular kinds of power and focus. The passionate arguments amongst followers of these various approaches are sometimes productive and sometimes frustrating, often simultaneously. While these approaches have wildly divergent perspectives and goals, all of them are ultimately focused on the same thing: helping the actor to use and integrate intellect, feelings, voice, and movement more powerfully and consistently. All of these teachers and visionaries work with the same raw material and the same problem: the actor’s body and consciousness. Body and consciousness—or body, mind, and feelings—is a singular thing: everything that comprises consciousness derives from our physical being. A basic truth about what it means to be human is that there is no consciousness without a body. This is also a basic truth for acting: the body and the consciousness that rises out of it are the core materials of the actor’s work.

Current research in cognitive neuroscience provides new insights into how the structures and processes of the brain, which is a part of the body, are related to consciousness, carrying with it the potential to deepen our understanding of acting methods. It in fact confirms some basic principles of acting’s twentieth-century visionaries and master teachers; I would argue this is particularly true for Stanislavsky and his heirs. There have been major advances in understanding brain structure, processes, and consciousness that are relatively recent, occurring largely in the last quarter-century. These have radically altered earlier, long-held views of the interrelationship of mind and body, particularly, to cite neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux, as they relate “perception, attention, memory, and thinking to underlying mechanisms in the brain” (LeDoux 2002:23). Definitions of personhood, reason, and emotion are being rethought in light of new information about brain structure and neurochemical processes, and how these manifest in consciousness and behavior. We are also increasingly able to manipulate these through surgery and by using medications; e.g., the most significant and familiar categories of these today include selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs, the group that includes Prozac and other common antidepressants; levothyroxines, that treat thyroid deficiencies; and hormone replacement therapies, all of which we use to adjust our basic sense of well being, and thereby our sense of self, by modulating chemical and hormonal balances in our body. The increasing ability to manipulate consciousness and our sense of who we are at the point at which mind arises out of the body raises a cluster of questions about what the self is, since the self—held by many to be something essential and relatively unchanging—is increasingly shown to be a manifestation of neural processes and “narrative creation” that can be significantly changed by surgical intervention to control physiological malfunction or by taking drugs to alter neurochemical processes. Aldous Huxley could barely have foreseen current developments in pharmacology and consciousness as he was writing Brave New World in 1932 or The Doors of Perception in 1954.

Recent advances that provide new pictures and new vocabularies for visualizing ourselves—our “selfs”—have the potential to provide actors with a more precise and personalized guide to engaging the challenges of a role. For almost a century many of us have held as an axiom of Stanislavsky-based approaches to acting, i.e., those focusing on the actor’s engagement with character and story, and conveying a sense of something significant being lived in the present moment in front of an audience, are effective because they grow out of how we work emotionally and intellectually. This is because, among other things, they help us to perceive ourselves as “a self” in relationship to a particular environment and circumstances, and to construct personalized narratives about those relationships. Cognitive neuroscience takes this one step further by exploring more precisely how emotional and intellectual life grows out of our biology. The science is not limited in its application, for it can be used to approach the embodiment of characters in a range of styles and modes including, but extending beyond, psychological realism; this is in the tradition of Stanislavsky, who applied his systems not just to Chekhov and Gorky, but to Shakespeare, Molière, and Mozart. An “acting-targeted” knowledge of how the mind works provides a more concrete vocabulary and set of tools for the actor to use in rehearsal and performance. It also has the potential to feel less “loaded” in personal terms, because its ground is the general process by which all human beings work; among other things, since it doesn’t spotlight the actor’s individual “psyche” or “emotional sensitivity” in isolation, it can provide multiple perspectives on and ways in to acting.

As this project integrates science, acting, and postmodern performance theory, it is not without its complications and the potential for being challenged. These three fields historically have not only resistances, but also antipathies toward each other, even though theatre and performance research models generally follow paradigms of science and culture, and a number of scholars have considered how scientific and technological shifts have affected our understanding of theatre and performance. For example, Philip Auslander addresses the impact of electronic media on our understanding of liveness and authenticity in Liveness, and Jon McKenzie examines the impact of new technologies in a range of fields in Perform or Else. Most pertinent here is Joseph Roach’s invaluable The Player’s Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting, which traces the effect of changing scientific paradigms on how we have understood the actor’s process; he takes us from the time of the Roman Quintilian to the mid-twentieth century, through mechanist, vitalist, biological, and psychological perspectives ranging from the behavioral to the psychoanalytic, each of which held currency in its own time, but which was superseded by the next wave of research. Interestingly, by the time Roach’s work was published, first in 1985 and then in 1993, research was underway in the cognitive and neurosciences that was calling into question basic aspects of consciousness, cognition, and brain function that were going to require us to once again redefine our sense of the actor’s process. Nonetheless, science, acting, and performance theory at times reject fundamental premises of the other two. The problems are similar to those of psychology—a foundational discipline for acting—in which biology and culture intersect. Some postmodern theories see science as being reductive and essentialist, and traditional acting as anti-intellectual and uncomfortably messy in terms of feelings and the body. From these postmodern perspectives, both science and acting lack sufficient cultural contextualization and therefore require rigorous interrogation; interrogation is necessary, but its terms need to be grounded in research. Science can have the same aversion to art’s emphasis on “feeling” rather than reason and evidence, while finding postmodernism disconnected from fact, research, materiality, and utility. Performing arts practitioners can define their focus as experiential and emotional, rather than factual or critical, and resist being analytical or technical. We artists might see the core of our work as being antithetical to theory, failing to acknowledge that theory—an idea about how a thing works or what it means, based on observation or experience—permeates any culture-making activity. Stanislavksy-based actors might resist the application of science when it comes to understanding the subjective components of our work for fear of being too much “in our head” (as if it were possible to function without a head—but more about this later) and killing our inspiration, but this overlooks the fact that Stanislavsky, Meyerhold, and others had explicitly scientific components in their approaches to actor training.

Some of the difficulties of working in an integrated way with acting, performance theory, and science grow out of common and mistaken artificial binaries such as science vs. art, thinking vs. feeling, and reason vs. emotion. The roots of mind–body dualism go back to Plato, and these constructs became particularly significant for modern Western acting with seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophies, especially that of Descartes, that split mind from matter and reason from feeling. There are also other disciplinarily-related anxieties that trouble an integrated engagement with science, art, and theory. These possibly include a particular kind of antiscience bias, or what Elizabeth Wilson calls the “anti-essentialist essentialism,” of some postmodern theories that reject science because it must de facto be insufficiently socially theorized and uncritically dependent on uncontextualized material observation—a reverse of some scientists’ critiques of other disciplines that concentrate on the theoretical or abstract in contradiction to material evidence (Wilson 1998:15–18). There are anxieties about loss of authority, loss of status, insecurities about realizing that we don’t know what we thought we knew, concerns that our interpretations of given events or situations might need to be rethought, sometimes radically, based on new information. Perhaps a major anxiety has to do with the challenges that brain and cognitive sciences present to definitions of identity and self; these are perhaps based on the gross misunderstanding that the science is inevitably leading us to an increasingly hypermaterialistic, overdetermined definition of the human, i.e., there will eventually be not only an explanation, but a formula, to explain and ultimately control our every feeling, thought, and action, taking away our individuality and freedom, because we are no more than physiological and electrochemical processes. The fear is that the science will take away the part of us that has choice, that makes art, that makes democracy possible. This is possibly the point at which anxieties about the end of theatre—and maybe even humanity, for want of a better way of putting it—arise. Interestingly, I am convinced the reverse is true. The science, through discovering more about material functions that support consciousness, increasingly confirms the complexity and contingency of emotional, cognitive, and behavioral processes; these can vary considerably based upon the specific individual and her situation. The science does not take away “the human,” and, hence, theatre and performance; rather, it provides tools to engage these more closely. Scientists disagree about their work at least as intensely as we do about ours; as in our fields, there is research, there is argument, there is more research, there is more argument, and things change. I could also argue that the speed of substantial change in the cognitive neurosciences easily outpaces that in our fields, which makes it challenging for individuals within those disciplines to stay current, and even more challenging for those of us using the findings of those disciplines. Further, both science and performance theory can be abused, e.g., by politicians who distort the findings of scientific research for political ends or who use the tools of rhetoric and performance to manipulate the citizenry; however, this denies neither the uses of science and performance theory, nor the fact that performance and scientific memes, paradigms, and hard and soft knowledge inform, frame, and sometimes limit how we think. The older fragmented and compartmentalized perspectives are increasingly being replaced, even in the mainstream, by ones that acknowledge the dynamic interplay among biology, environment—which, of course, includes culture—, and psychological phenomena.

We work freely and enthusiastically with the body when it comes to issues related to the actor’s basic health and to vocal and movement training. All reputable training programs follow the principle that the more we know about things such as the vocal mechanism, kinesiology, careful practice in stage combat, diet, hydration, conditioning, and rest, the better off we are as performers and the more skillful and safe we can be in our work. But some are reluctant to deal with intellectual and feeling aspects of the actor’s work with the same kind of technical rigor. However, just as good vocal and physical technique—good bio-science, if you will—liberates us as actors, so too can a more accurate technique for other aspects of the actor’s craft. Though there is a material ground—the brain—for memory, feeling, and imagery, and for our sense of authenticity, our understanding of these more subjective or interpretive aspects of our craft can tend to stop at impressions or received theories. Some of this no doubt has to do with our Cartesian and Freudian heritages. But another major factor is that until recently we simply haven’t known enough to proceed further; the neuroscience has only in recent decades reached the stage at which we can begin to look at these things in a materially meaningful way. We are finally beginning to know enough about how the thing that gives rise to impressions and theories—the brain itself, in the body—works.

“Who am I?” and “Where am I?” are not only questions we ask ourselves every day in one way or another, as people and as actors, but they are also the basic ongoing concerns of any organism, which is always asking itself these questions, both consciously and unconsciously, as it negotiates its environment. These are the questions by which the organism tries to address its state of being, in order better to survive. So, in an effort to locate ourselves historically and culturally—to address for the actor a “Where am I?” of our particular moment—, what follows is a brief overview of some major developments in science and culture in the last century and a half. Its purp...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Chapter 1 Acting, history, and science
• Chapter 2 The twentieth-century heritage
• Chapter 3 A way of thinking about acting
• Chapter 4 Applications
• Afterword
• Appendix Translation
• Works consulted
• Index