(toward) a phenomenology of acting

Phillip Zarrilli

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000682335
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Arts du spectacle

In (toward) a phenomenology of acting, Phillip Zarrilli considers acting as a 'question' to be explored in the studio and then reflected upon.

This book is a vital response to Jerzy Grotowski's essential question: "How does the actor 'touch that which is untouchable?'" Phenomenology invites us to listen to "the things themselves", to be attentive to how we sensorially, kinesthetically, and affectively engage with acting as a phenomenon and process. Using detailed first-person accounts of acting across a variety of dramaturgies and performances from Beckett to newly co-created performances to realism, it provides an account of how we 'do' or practice phenomenology when training, performing, directing, or teaching. Zarrilli brings a wealth of international and intercultural experience as a director, performer, and teacher to this major new contribution both to the practices of acting and to how we can reflect in depth on those practices.

An advanced study for actors, directors, and teachers of acting that is ideal for both the training/rehearsal studio and research, (toward) a phenomenology of acting is an exciting move forward in the philosophical understanding of acting as an embodied practice.

Chapter 1

First-person accounts of embodied practice

Sensing as ‘living communication’

Long-term engagement in and repetition of skill-based embodied practices such as surgery, martial arts, massage, Pilates, training ‘the Nose’ to become a perfumer, and acting/performing provide opportunities for individuals to gradually attune themselves to and elaborate a certain complexity or ‘thickness of sensing’ that constitutes the ‘living world’ we share, as well as the living world(s) unique to each specific embodied practice. Merleau-Ponty explained how “Sensing is this living communication with the world that makes it present to us as the familiar place of our life” (Merleau-Ponty 2012:53).¹ Over time and with appropriate training, guidance, and experience an individual training in any of the above practices optimally undergoes a process of embodied/kinesthetic/sensorial awakening and attunement as one learns to direct and focus one’s attention, as well as ‘energy’² as appropriate to that specific practice. Processes of training and performing gradually reveal the subtleties of ‘what it is like’ to inhabit or ‘live within’ and respond to the specific life-world structured by that practice or type of performance. The type and quality of energy, attention, as well as the ‘thickness of sensing’ opened and experienced during a specific exercise, type of training, or when performing are shaped by the structure and style of that practice or performance as well as the environment within which practices and performances take place.³

As a prelude to the four specific accounts of actor training and acting that are the focus of this chapter, I begin this exploration of ‘sensing … as living communication’ with an account of the embodied practice of surgery, and open up the question of how embodied practices become virtuosic. Each specific account of training or acting will begin with an overview of the context, and then focus on how ‘sensing’ is opened up as a mode of ‘living communication’ in and through that practice.

Prelude 1: structuring and shaping attention and sensory awareness in embodied practices and performance

Let us briefly consider the embodied practice of becoming a surgeon. Surgeons must acquire comprehensive knowledge in all areas relevant to their specific specialist practices including (1) general medicine (physiology, anatomy, etc.); (2) mastery of the practical kinesthetic/motor skills necessary for surgery in their specialist field, such as heart surgery; (3) learning how to listen to the heart through auscultation – stethoscopic listening in order to understand “the acoustic traces” of the heart (Rice 2010:39); (4) the ability to respond under pressures of time to emergencies in the operating theatre as and when they arise; and (5) the interpersonal skills for working with colleagues, patients, and their families in life-threatening situations. Proper diagnosis of heart disease begins with cardiac auscultation – the fundamental beginning point of cardiac examination. As Tom Rice explains, “auscultation requires a carefully trained sense of hearing and an acute sensitivity to sound” (2010:40). ‘Learning to listen’ is a process of both dampening down the dominant visual mode of awareness and simultaneously attuning one’s auditory perception so that specific sounds that mark various types of heart disease can be recognized and properly diagnosed.

Heart (cardiac/cardiovascular) surgeons must also learn a wide variety of types of surgical procedures in order to repair heart and blood vessels when injured, damaged, or diseased. Major procedures include coronary artery bypass, transplants, and heart-valve replacements. Ancillary procedures include such intricate processes as threading thin catheters through veins and arteries, tying suture knots, etc. Both require the surgeon to remain focused, attentive, and calm. All these major and minor surgical procedures require a finely attuned tactile coordination of the small muscles of the hands while negotiating the intricate anatomy of the chest cavity.

Based on extensive ethnographic observation in operating theatres, medical schools, and anatomy labs, in her recent ethnography of the training of surgeons, Bodies in Formation, Rachel Prentice places embodied practice at the centre of how surgeons learn to incorporate and integrate the unique ways of perceiving, acting, and being necessary to perform the kind of virtuosic surgical practices mentioned above (2012). Prentice describes how surgeons develop affective technical skills – sometimes called a form of ‘surgical sight’ – where perception and action are integrally related in the virtuosic moment of surgical practice (2012:172). Surgeons need to possess an embodied knowledge of their specialist practice which simultaneously engages their sensory, perceptual, and cognitive faculties as necessary in the moment. Prentice disabuses her readers of the notion that ‘surgical sight’ is a synthesis of the “visual and mental” (2012:172); rather, she describes how through many years of training and practice master surgeons come to possess “embodied skills” as they bring together and deploy their intimate “knowledge” of anatomy with a mastery touch and gesture (2012:193). As David Linden explains in his book-length study Touch: The Science of Hand, Heart, and Mind, for surgeons and others engaged in virtuosic embodied practices,

all touch sensation (or sensation of any kind) is ultimately in the service of action. Our touch circuits are not built to be faithful reporters of the outside world but are constructed to make inferences about the tactile world based upon expectations – expectations derived from both the historical experience of our human ancestors and from our own individual experiences.

(2015:196)

Neurosurgeon Paul Kalanithi provides a precise and compelling account of his performance of a temporal lobectomy – a procedure to remove the hippocampus in order to cure epilepsy. For Kalanithi and other highly experienced and skilled surgeons, their experience of time when in the operating theatre is completely altered in that “two hours could feel like a minute” and therefore “you have no sense of [time] passing” (2016:104). A temporal lobectomy is a highly complex procedure,

requiring gentle dissection of the hippocampus off the pia, the delicate transparent covering of the brain, right near the brain stem … The patient was intubated, the attending and I were scrubbed and ready to begin. I picked up the scalpel and incised the skin just above the ear, proceeding slowly, trying to make sure I forgot nothing and made no mistakes. With electrocautery, I deepened the incision to the bone, then elevated the skin flap with hooks. Everything felt familiar, muscle memory kicking in. I took the drill and made three holes in the skull. The attending squirted water to keep the drill cool as I worked. Switching to the craniotome, a sideways-cutting drill bit, I connected the holes, freeing up a large piece of bone. With a drack, I pried it off. There lay the slivery dura. Happily, I hadn’t damaged it with the drill … I used a sharp knife to open the dura without injuring the brain. Success again … I tacked back the dura with small stitches to keep it out of the way of the main surgery. The brain gently pulsed and glistened. The huge Sylvian veins ran across the top of the temporal lobe, pristine. The familiar peach convolutions of the brain beckoned.

(2016:152–154)

Obviously lives depend on a surgeon’s virtuosic ability to achieve sensing as a mode of ‘living communion’ through the development of tactile and auditory awareness. For performers, auditory awareness and deep listening, as well as touch and sensation of all kinds, are optimally developed in one’s training process and then placed in the service of action, doing, and being on stage as shaped by a specific dramaturgy and aesthetic. Later in this chapter and throughout this book, we will return to both auditory awareness and ‘touch’ as two of the primary and too often neglected modes of sensory awareness available for the actor through training and in performance. We will also return to how practitioners absorbed in a practice like surgery experience time in a not dissimilar way to the actor’s experience of time on stage. What should be clear from the example of cardiac surgeons is the necessity of developing the specific authority/kinesthetic/tactile skills and modes of sensory awareness to practice their specialty to a point where that awareness is intuitively deployed in both diagnosis and the practice of surgery.⁴

Similar structures and lengthy periods of specialist kinesthetic/sensory training and experience are necessary to become a virtuosic practitioner of many practices: taiqiquan, massage therapy, Pilates, violin, ballet, a perfumer, or wine taster. With time and with the guidance of a master teacher, practitioners are able to awaken and attune as appropriate one’s energy, attention, and/or sensory awareness within a specific practice. A practitioner is gradually attuned to and moves toward an optimal, ideal, virtuosic level of attention, awareness, and deployment and channeling of energy necessary for that specific practice. Like surgeons, violinists and massage therapists ideally develop hand/finger/tactile virtuosity; but violinists must also develop their auditory awareness to a point where they are ‘pitch perfect’. Like a surgeon, a good one-on-one Pilates teacher/coach must have expertise in anatomy and physiology, must have kinesthetically mastered her own practice of all dimensions of Pilates practice so that she can fully embody/demonstrate all exercises, and be able to communicate simply and clearly as the teacher/practitioner guides her clients through each exercise in a session. The Pilates teacher optimally is able to guide the individual through a process that engages specific muscle groups, coordinates inhalation or exhalation as required for each exercise, and utilizes specific modes of visualization to gradually enhance the relationship to and efficacy of an exercise. Each practitioner is engaged in making “enactive adjustment(s)” as they engage the specific ‘world’ of their practice (Gallagher 2017:19).

Ballet dancers, concert violinists, or actor-dancers trained in ‘traditional’ modes of performance such as Kerala, India’s kutiyattam or Japanese nō all undergo repetitious kinesthetic forms of technical attunement and training that shapes their embodied practice, consciousness, imagination, and experience toward virtuosity in that practice.⁵ In contrast, for the vast majority of contemporary actor/performers there is no single, specialist kinesthetic/motor repertoire that must be mastered in order to perform.⁶ But nevertheless, actors should ideally come to possess specific types of embodied knowledge which simultaneously engage their sensory, perceptual, and cognitive faculties as necessary in the moment of performance. Performers must also learn “to be affected” (Latour 2004:205–206), i.e., they optimally learn how to appropriately open both affective and sensory awareness within/to the tasks/actions at hand. The lack of a single specific technique or skill-set focus for training contemporary actors is both a dilemma and an opportunity.⁷ It raises several important questions regarding the training of contemporary actors:

• 1 What type(s) of foundational training(s) explore embodied consciousness, ‘open’ and attune an a...