Signs of Performance

An Introduction to Twentieth-Century Theatre

Colin Counsell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136153327
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Darstellende Kunst

Signs of Performance provides the beginning student with working examples of theatrical analysis. Its range covers the whole of twentieth century theatre, from Stanislavski to Brecht and Samuel Beckett to Robert Wilson. Colin Counsell takes an historical look at theatre as a cultural practice, clearly tracing connections between:
* Key practitioners' ideas about performance
* The theatrical practices prompted by those ideas
* The resulting signs which emerge in performance
* The meanings and political consequences of those signs
It provides an understandable theoretical framework for the study of theatre as a an signifying practice, and offers vivid explanations in clear, direct language. It opens up this fascinating field to a broad audience.

1

STANISLAVSKI'S ‘SYSTEM’

SPIRITUAL REALISM

The term ‘realistic’ is often used as an ordinary adjective, as if the quality it ascribed to the novel, painting and acting performance were unproblematic, purely a matter of their corresponding to reality. Realism is thus seen as the style without a style, simulating what is real without altering it or adding any meaning it does not already possess. This is a misconception. ‘Realism’ more accurately describes a number of artistic movements that arose at particular points in our cultural history, where they paralleled other kinds of discourse, political, scientific and philosophical. Realism is always material – built of words, paint on a canvas or bodies speaking and moving through space – and so is always a fabrication of reality. In any of its historical incarnations, realism reveals a repertoire of themes and images which, far from being neutral, reproduce constructions of the human subject and the world it inhabits. But one thing that all forms of realism share is the misassumption that they demand of their reader/spectator that they merely simulate the real.

Constantin Sergeyevich Alexeyev, known as Stanislavski (1863–1938), is generally considered the founder of modern, realistic acting, not because he was the first to pursue realism on the stage but because he organised his techniques into a coherent, usable system. The international success of his ideas is due in part to their availability in written form. Although his autobiographical work My Life in Art (1924) contained descriptions of his theatrecraft, it was in 1936 that the first book designed specifically to teach his theories, An Actor Prepares, emerged in print. This was followed by two companion volumes, Building a Character (1950) and Creating a Role (1957), both published posthumously. Together these three texts detail the praxis Stanislavski himself termed ‘Spiritual Realism’, but which is generally known simply as ‘The System’.

Much of Stanislavski's own work as a director and actor differed significantly from the techniques detailed in these texts. Indeed, he ultimately found certain of his published ideas obstructive to the process of acting, and his practice underwent a fundamental change (see Coger 1964). Nevertheless it is the principles described in these three books that have historically proved most influential, doing more to shape realistic acting in Europe and America than any other practice, and it is therefore this written System which we shall focus upon.

Champions of the System tend to be fierce in their defence of its neutrality, asserting that it does not lead to a particular style of performance but is simply a practical means of creating characters suitable to any theatrical form. But while it is true that System-atic acting is varied, its variety is not infinite and it does display consistent characteristics. Behavioural detail, ‘plausibility’, a sense of profound psychological depth, a marked linearity or smoothness to the performance as a whole – these are the hallmarks of Stanislavskian work, and if we view them as the signs of ‘good acting’ per se it is largely because the System has been at the heart of orthodox western performance training for a substantial part of the twentieth century. Stanislavski's ideas have become the accepted ‘common sense’ in performance, seeming ‘self-evident’, so that actors not infrequently employ the Russian's basic concepts without knowing that they do so. Thus for examples of this mode of acting we need not look far. Performances of the classics in national institutions almost invariably employ Stanislavskian ideas at a fundamental level, and so provide accessible examples of his techniques in action.

THE PSYCHO-TECHNIQUE

Near the beginning of his first teaching text, An Actor Prepares, Stanislavski describes the other modes of acting then employed on the Russian stage. ‘Mechanical Acting’, for instance, uses an existing repertoire of conventional stage gestures, which Stanislavski calls ‘stencils’ or ‘rubber stamps’: ‘spreading your hand over your heart to express love … shaking one's fist in revenge’ (Stanislavski 1980: 24). In contrast, another mode, the ‘Art of Representation’, entails the painstaking reconstruction of the character's external qualities (posture, voice, movement, dress) with detailed research followed by long and repetitious rehearsal. Stanislavski is quick to dismiss both modes, but also rejects what he calls ‘Naturalistic’ acting, described by one chronicler of his work as the ‘indiscriminate reproduction of the surface of life’ (Benedetti 1982: 11). For Stanislavski these three very different forms all prove inadequate not because they fail to simulate real life convincingly, but because they concentrate on appearance. The characters created by these methods are all surface, drafted and executed for gratuitous effect, and so offer ‘prettiness in place of beauty, theatrical effect in place of expressiveness’ (Stanislavski 1980: 26).

Stanislavski's rejection of these styles is not simply a matter of aesthetic preference, it reflects the humanist assumptions that inform his work. Although humanism is a broad church, all its variants hold to an essentialist vision of the human subject; humankind, it asserts, is characterised by a fundamental core, a transcendent ‘human nature’ common to all individuals, which links them more profoundly than any differences may separate them. Thus the function of art for humanism is to express what is universal, meaningful to all people regardless of cultural, social or historical differences, so prompting for the viewer a recognition of our shared humanity It is on this basis that Stanislavski rejects all acting that concentrates on exteriors. ‘Realism’ in Stanislavski's sense is the form which expresses what is typically human – not the stereotypical, but that which is representative of humankind per se, its essence. Thus to be counted a ‘true art’, he asserts, acting must go beyond the superficial, external self and focus upon what is profound and universal, the character's ‘inner life’. Stanislavski tells the actor,

To play truly means to be right, logical, coherent, to think, strive, feel and act in unison with your role … we call that living the part…. You must live it by actually experiencing feelings that are analogous to it, each and every time you repeat the process of creating it.

(Stanislavski 1980: 14)

Stanislavski's goal, then, is first of all an internal realism, and internal preparation is the basis of the System as it appears in his teaching texts. Thus actors are forbidden to use a mirror when creating their characters because ‘it teaches an actor to watch the outside rather than the inside of his soul’ (Stanislavski 1980: 36). Unlike the Art of Representation or Naturalism, System-atic Acting aims not to simulate real behaviour but in a sense to re-produce it, to conjure within the actor's mind the thoughts and feelings which cause observable, physical behaviour to occur. Thus Stanislavski tells his actors that they must never aim for ‘results’, never attempt to portray sadness or jealousy per se, but to evoke those internal forces which motivate one to behave in that way.

The ultimate aim of such practices is to build a complete hypothetical consciousness for the character, to stage in the actor's mind a stream of thoughts and feelings that correspond to the character's own ‘experiences’. This stream must above all be continuous. For Stanislavski the self is not a static thing but a process, consisting of what he terms an ‘unbroken line’ of mental operations and sensations. The key term he uses to describe this is ‘action’. On one level ‘action’ refers to the individual words and deeds (and thoughts; ‘action’ need not be physical) the actor undertakes in performance. But these are parts of that larger ‘action’ which is the individual's, and so the realistic character's, unceasing inner life. To create a viable character the actor must reproduce this mental continuum: ‘On the stage you must always be enacting something; action, motion, is the basis of the art followed by the actor’ (Stanislavski 1980: 36).

But not all mental states can be evoked at will. Much of our daily life occurs at a level which Stanislavski calls ‘subconscious’; we walk, talk, gesture without planning these activities, and feel emotions in a similarly unpremeditated way. While the ‘inspired’ actor may be able to induce emotions, most performers can only approach a role at a conscious level, where emotions, among the most important causes for behaviour, remain inaccessible. This for Stanislavski is the central predicament of all acting: ‘we are supposed to create under inspiration; only our subconscious gives us inspiration; yet we apparently can only use this subconscious through our consciousness, which kills it’ (Stanislavski 1980: 13).

Thus for Stanislavski what is required is some way to tap the actor's subconscious, and this is provided by what he terms the ‘Psycho-Technique’. This Psycho-Technique is at the heart of a variety of practices, of which the ‘Magic If’ is the simplest. The Magic If describes the ordinary human ability to place oneself in a fictional situation and extrapolate the consequences. During an exercise in which his pupils are to imagine themselves as trees, Stanislavski asks, ‘I am I; but if I were an old oak … what would I do?’ (Stanislavski 1980: 65). A similar approach is to be used in preparing for a role. In a scene from a Shakespearean drama, for example, where a character visits the court of the king, the actor might imagine a whole series of sensory details (the time of day and year, the weather. What does the court look like? What happened on the journey there? Does the king inspire fear, love, mistrust?). In doing so the actor provides himself/herself with a set of ‘inner circumstances’ in the absence of real, external ones.

This very crude example nevertheless serves to illustrate the principle at work. By imagining a series of ‘inner circumstances’ that correspond to the role, Stanislavski asserts, the actor provides baits to ‘lure’ out their subconscious. The imaginary details are to act as ‘challenges to action’, stimuli which provoke genuine responses. At the same time the actor's concentration on these imaginary ‘facts’ is to focus attention away from emotion itself, so that it is not drawn into conscious consideration and remains automatic, ‘subconscious’. In effect, the actor must recreate something resembling the conditions of everyday life, wherein thoughts and emotions are born non-consciously in response to situations, so that the Psycho-Technique seeks what amounts to a reproduction of behaviour onstage. By creating an ‘unbroken line’ of such imaginary details, the basis for a System-atic character's inner life is established.

The ultimate goal of the Psycho-Technique in all its many forms is to gain access to the actor's ‘Emotion Memory’, a concept Stanislavski adapted from the work of the early psychologist, Théodule Ribot (1839–1916). According to Ribot, individuals retain a subconscious record of emotional experiences accumulated over the span of their lives. These are not stored in isolation, however, but are always associated with the physical and sensory circumstances that accompanied their first occurrence. In Stanislavski's view, by re-evoking those circumstances imaginatively with the Psycho-Technique the actor is able to summon the associated feelings. Using techniques such as the Magic If, the actor simply finds a moment in their life when the required emotion was experienced and imagines the occasion in detail, thus summoning the feelings associated with it.

An important consequence of this is that the character's hypothetical psyche will always be based on the actor's, since it is the actor's emotions, experiences and responses that provide the bricks out of which a role is built. This does not invalidate the performance in Stanislavski's view. The humanistic System aims to evoke what is universal to humankind, seeks to depict those facets of existence which, he asserts, are common to all. Thus a character's emotions are equally well represented by the actor's and, rather than try to imitate a character's external life, Stanislavski instructs actors ‘always [to] act in your own person’. By the same logic, the actor's own psyche is to be the benchmark by which the character is judged true or false. ‘Nature’, in the form of the actor's mind, should prevent him or her from ‘going down the wrong path’ (Stanislavski 1980: 16), and if the general shape of the character's psyche accords with the actor's, the creation will be ‘true’.

Once the right internal states have been established, Stanislavski maintains, these will shape the physical performance automatically; just as in everyday life our thoughts and feelings automatically appear as words and actions, so the ‘physical materialisation of a character to be created emerges of its own accord once the right inner values have been established’ (Stanislavski 1968: 5). In fact Stanislavski does have an ideal of voice and movement in mind: actors must stand with erect spines, must correct any unpleasing body shapes, and so on. But these, he asserts, are simply a means of honing the actor's bodily ‘instrument’ to allow internal states a clearer expression. The raw signifying material of the performance is provided by thoughts, emotions and imaginary ‘facts’, none of which will require codification but will surface on the physical body (as intonation, gesture, facial expression and so on) in a form which is, Stanislavski assumes, innately understandable.

As we have seen, the model of the psyche underlying Stanislavski's techhniques is in part drawn from Ribot. However, at least as great an impact was effected by the school of psychology known as Behaviourism, for Stanislavski read the work of its most important Russian theorist, Ivan Pavlov (1849–1936), extensively. Pavlov maintained that behaviour is in large part built of ‘conditioned reflexes’, responses to stimuli already imprinted into the nervous system by previous experiences. In his famous experiments with dogs, a bell was rung each time they were to be fed. Eventually the dogs came to associate the bell with food and would salivate at the sound of it, even when no food was forthcoming. Pavlov thus postulated a general explanation of behaviour as produced in the movement External Stimulus → Conditioned Reflex → Physical Response, with the external world triggering actions via the nervous system directly, without intervention from the will.

Whereas Ribot provided the principle of Emotion Memory, it is Behaviourism that underpins the actual practice of the Psycho-Technique, and the parallels are not difficult to discern. Just as Behaviourism asserts that stimuli can evoke physical responses directly via the nervous system, without wilful choice, so the Psycho-Technique is presumed to enable emotions to find physical expression not consciously but precisely by bypassing consciousness. Moreover, emotions are to be evoked using a false stimulus. Pavlov's dogs were made to salivate by a bell, and Stanislavski's actors are similarly supposed to induce physical responses to emotion using imaginary ‘inner circumstances’. The main difference is that there is no place for will or intention in Pavlov's account, for both the initial external regime and the stimuli were provided for his dogs by their keepers. In contrast, Stanislavski's actors must provide their own trick stimuli, consciously fabricate lures for their unconscious selves in order to induce emotional responses – as Stanislavski states: ‘our cardinal principle; Through conscious means we reach the subconscious’ (Stanislavski 1980: 176).

The techniques described so far may appear to be neutral, merely practical. But when one examines the precepts on which those choices are based it becomes apparent that these obliquely determine the nature of the System-atic performance. In doing so they also dictate what meanings it is possible to proffer in this style of acting.

As we have seen, Stanislavskian actors model and judge their characters' psyches on their own – or rather, on what they deem their own to be. This is a crucial distinction. In the Introduction we noted that, from an Althusserian viewpoint, subjectivity is composed of a number of positions offered the social subject in discourse. The subject is actually fragmented, consisting of a variety of different discursive placements. We rarely experience this fragmentation because, in order to operate as a competent social individual, it is necessary to adopt the posture of a coherent, unified subjectivity, albeit that this is illusory Actors too are social subjects and view themselves as such a coherency. By definition, then, they base their characters' psyches on an inaccurate model.

The consequences of this only become apparent when we see how it interacts with another of the System's assumptions. As we noted, Stanislavski sees behaviour as innately understandable, as a transcultural mode of communication that does not require any ‘language’. Thoughts and feelings, he assumes, are not read, simply recognised in the actor's behaviour, but this is not so. Just as human beings are ‘hailed’ by a variety of discourses, they are born into a world of existing behavioural codes, and part of the process of socialisation, of becoming a social subject, is learning how to behave in given situations. This is not to say there is only one way to behave. Rather, in a given culture any one situation will have a limited range of codes appropriate to it: postures, ways of moving, gesturing, types of eye contact, ways of speaking and kinds of discourse. Other situations will have different ranges, so that one might act in a certain way in the presence of one's peers but quite differently with one's parents, a lover or a High Court judge. What we regard as politeness or decorum is actually our negotiation of given social structures by the adoption of appropriate behavioural personae.

These behavioural practices are not merely functional, they signify. Socio-political relations provide perhaps the most obvious example. As we noted in the Introduction, when in the presence of someone with greater authority than oneself, greater social power, a whole set of codes come into play regarding proximity, stance, tone of voice and so on, all of which constitute signs and are eminently ‘readable’ to both parties. This becomes evident when one refuses the established codes; throw your arm around a judge and tell a joke, and the judge will immediately be able to read your implicit rejection of his or her superior status. Sociality signifies, and behavioural codes are legible to all who are competent in their use.

Stanislavskian actors, then, do not ‘express’ their psyches in a universal language. They select from the available codes, albeit in a non-conscious way, choosing elements of behaviour from the existing cultur...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Stanislavski's ‘System’
• 2 Strasberg's ‘Method’
• 3 Brecht and Epic Theatre
• 4 Beckett and the Avant-Garde
• 5 Peter Brook And Ritual Theatre
• 6 Robert Wilson and the Theatre of Visions
• 7 Postmodernism and Performance Art
• Bibliography
• Index