Gesture and Actor Training

 

Phillip Zarrilli (1995a; 1995b; 1997; 2004) has written extensively about actor training and acting processes from a phenomenological perspective. Emphasising that there is no one Euro-American actor training and that any actor training system will impact on its embodied practices through discourses (1995a, 72), Zarrilli is still able to locate the principal ‘work’ of western actor trainings as being psychophysiological (p. 81). Through considering the experiential and lived dimensions of performing, Zarrilli (2004) directs fundamental concepts of acting away from objectifying and reifying actors’ processes, a particularly pertinent position at a time when semiotics has recast the experiencing agent, the performer, in terms of subject positions that have been discursively constituted. Through considering the embodiment of performance, Zarrilli (2004) offers four modes of actors’ bodily engagement in their ‘lived worlds’. These he terms, ‘The Ecstatic Surface Body’, ‘The Recessive Visceral Body’, ‘The Aesthetic Inner Bodymind’ and ‘The Aesthetic Outer Body’. It is from Zarrilli’s ‘Ecstatic Surface Body’ that imagistic and analog gestures emanate and through which, on a daily basis, an unawareness of these gestures remain, as the body constitutes ‘a null point in our perceptual field, we experience from the body, and the sensory world’ (Zarrilli, 2004, 658).

 

In other words, whilst the sensory perceptions of the body are directed outwards towards its environment there becomes little awareness of the perceiving body itself. Whilst ‘The Recessive Visceral Body’ constitutes the awareness of visceral sensations often vague and unspecific as it pertains to the inner workings of bodies, the two latter modes of ‘The Aesthetic Inner Bodymind’ and ‘The Aesthetic Outer Body’ are awareness developed through specific psychophysical practices. The former directs subtle attention to dialectical inter-linkages between mind and body whilst the latter constitutes the performer’s awareness of being under observation and thus awareness of being simultaneously both a personal as well as a representational entity.

 

It is through the development of these kinds of awareness in actor training, where trainee actors are led to an experience of the primacy and subtleties of the actors’ lived bodies that an in-depth understanding of gesturing can emerge. Through Zarrilli’s ‘Aesthetic Inner Bodymind’ actors can be engaged both in their intentional and imagistic directions and also aware of their emergent gestures, forming an integrated experience of ‘the gestalt body-as-a-whole’ (Zarrilli 2004, 664). Often little attention is given to performer’s bodily experiences in actor trainings or at times bodily experiences may be negated. Krause (2002, 270) bemoans the fact that whilst Brecht’s epic theatre searches for sophisticated expressions of gestus, modern ‘method’ acting ‘downplay[s the] complexities and contradictions’ of performed action, as if all that is needed is complete empathy with any character for gestures by seeming osmosis to emerge from the actor. Kathy Leahy (1996) indicates that even in the selection of actors for Australian acting schools gestures, vocal tones, appearance and demeanour are used to select a narrow cultural class, rather than being used to explore ‘emotional connectedness or imagination’.

 

For the student actor without grounding in an awareness of her or his unique lived bodily experience, performance can become an arena for constructed actions with little connection to the actor’s felt meaning. It is not uncommon to see in theatre and performance courses frozen bodies on stage, bodies with minimal movements, bodies locked in painful self-awareness of their lack of ‘naturalness’.