Act as a Feminist

Towards a Critical Acting Pedagogy

Lisa Peck

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781351130493
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Acting & Auditioning

Act as a Feminist maps a female genealogy of UK actor training practices from 1970 to 2020 as an alternative to traditional male lineages. It re-orientates thinking about acting through its intersections with feminisms and positions it as a critical pedagogy, fit for purpose in the twenty-first century.

The book draws attention to the pioneering contributions women have made to actor training, highlights the importance of recognising the political potential of acting, and problematises the inequities for a female majority inspired to work in an industry where they remain a minority. Part One opens up the epistemic scope, shaping a methodology to evaluate the critical potential of pedagogic practice. It argues that feminist approaches offer an alternative affirmative position for training, a via positiva and a way to re-make mimesis. In Part Two, the methodology is applied to the work of UK women practitioners through analysis of the pedagogic exchange in training grounds. Each chapter focuses on how the broad curriculum of acting intersects with gender as technique to produce a hidden curriculum, with case studies on Jane Boston and Nadine George (voice), Niamh Dowling and Vanessa Ewan (movement), Alison Hodge and Kristine Landon-Smith (acting), and Katie Mitchell and Emma Rice (directing). The book concludes with a feminist manifesto for change in acting.

Written for students, actors, directors, teachers of acting, voice, and movement, and anyone with an interest in feminisms and critical pedagogies, Act as a Feminist offers new ways of thinking and approaches to practice.

PART I

Shaping a Methodology

1

FEMINIST UNDERPINNINGS IN ACTING

Re-Making Mimesis

What matters in the matter of acting? This chapter, alongside Chapter 2, constructs a methodology to assess the feminist potential of pedagogic practices in Part Two. Recent studies point to new paradigms for acting that re-conceptualise its epistemic scope and foreground materiality in moving towards a post-psychophysical practice.¹ Responding to these provocations, I consider the epistemologies and ontologies of acting in relation with feminist critical theories since the 1970s, in particular feminist materialisms.² When discourse in training tends to neuter gender and assumes the male ‘I’ it seems vital to position acting, alongside gender as technique. Working from the premise that actors and people identifying as female both experience a minoritarian position within patriarchal structures, being female, a disadvantage in terms of employment, becomes an advantage in approaching acting as a critical practice.

Drawing on a range of feminist critical thinking, from philosophy, education, science and performance studies three central tenets can be plaited together to construct a female genealogy of acting as an alternative to male lineages and frameworks of learning. Here, I reference a Foucauldian genealogy that questions ‘the constitution of knowledges, discourses and domains’.³ In agitating for this change, it is expedient to adopt a ‘strategic essentialism’ and to consider certain ideas around female-ness.⁴ Whilst this is my focus, it’s important to reiterate that the constructs examined here are not exclusive to those identifying as female but speak to any individual in a minoritarian position.⁵ The first strand outlines how the knowledges of acting intersect with feminist epistemologies that challenge hierarchies, and question ways of knowing. Knowledge is not acquired through a linear acquisitive process but is cyclical and repetitive, enabling a knowing how and then a realised knowing, where learning happens through misunderstanding. Dualisms, so dominant in acting discourse (inner/outer, body/mind, self/other, presence/absence, being/seeing), are dismantled to assert non-hierarchical ways of understanding, reflecting Eve Sedgwick’s view that ideas can operate beside each other as opposed to being structured in dualistic narratives.⁶ From this perspective, feminist epistemologies allow us to re-think the ideological foundations of acting and to foreground its personal and social knowledge, which I term ‘the hidden curriculum’.⁷ The second strand re-considers acting as a female ontology, with ways of knowing located in a female domain. I re-think notions of doubling, visuality and vulnerability, well trodden paths in feminist performance theory, in relation to acting knowledges.⁸ The third strand focusses on the recent bio-political turn to consider how new feminist materialisms can sharpen the tool of performativity and broaden our perspectives when thinking through feminist acting pedagogies. Collectively, these three strands underpin the feminist foundations on which to build an architecture for pedagogic interventions in Chapter 2.

Unlearning and the hidden curriculum of acting

There is synergy between feminist epistemologies and acting as both resist Western male theories of knowledge and give value to different ways of coming to learn. ⁹ A feminist position sees knowledge construction as relational and situated, formed within the community as opposed to within the individual struggling for epistemic autonomy.¹⁰ It foregrounds the matter of individual particularity, recognising that gender, race, class, sexuality, culture, age and able-ism affect understanding. It resists the linear ways that history is remembered and critiques the contextual power structures that make meaning and create systems of subordination. Looking at feminist theories of knowledge helps us to understand the anti-pedagogical prejudice in acting outlined in the Introduction to this book.¹¹

I have noted that directors and acting teachers become uncomfortable with the idea of their practice being categorised, as this pins down a creative process, which they would rather view as organic and evolutionary. This reflects an orientation in the field towards knowing that as opposed to knowing how and a concern to avoid generic descriptions of practice.¹² Acting pedagogy resists the modes of value and educational structures that have come to define how knowledge can be measured. Similarly, a feminist paradigm locates the rational structures of scientific or objective knowledge in the masculine hegemony of universal truth. Feminist readings of the Enlightenment identify woman with the fall from grace, therefore inherently unstable and man with logic, reason and stability. Binary opposites (nature/reason, rational/irrational, subject/object, mind/body, masculine/feminine) produce what Luce Irigaray terms the ‘Logic of the Same’, and have come to define phallocentricism.¹³ The actor trainers in Prior’s study Teaching Actors: Knowledge Transfer in Actor Training can be seen to take a feminist position in their resistance to structures which attempt to rationalise ways of learning in acting, which are somatic, non-linear, at times chaotic, processual and transitory.¹⁴ The desire for order, stability and empirical outcomes can be seen as a more cerebral position, whilst the actor’s learning is embodied, accessing the irrational such as: emotion, instinct, instability, vulnerability and impulse. From this perspective, it is not unreasonable to suggest that the knowledge of acting is located within a female domain and that resistance to articulating pedagogies may indicate an unwillingness to impose structures or linear processes onto learning, which is intangible and unpredictable.

Feminist epistemologies are built on the gaps and distortions of knowledge that challenge constructs of ‘ownership’ to focus on the experiential and notions of difference.¹⁵ It’s important to note that Western ‘difference’ is often reduced to one difference (gender, sexuality, class, race, age, ableism), where difference is marked against its antithesis or lack. I conceptualise difference as polyvalence – difference within as well as between – maintaining a positive economy, where differences can be mined for their potential. In mapping an alternative female genealogy of training, these gaps, spaces between and differences offer alternatives to the dualistic frameworks that dominate acting discourse. Actors use notions of inside/outside, individual/ensemble, external/internal, objective/subjective, self/other, representing/presenting to make sense of the double nature of the experience of acting. Feminist epistemologies of difference invite us to think in the gaps between. Sedgwick’s ‘beside thinking’, which allows for flux and possibility, supports my thinking throughout this book.¹⁶ These alternative topographies draw attention to the knowledges of acting that develop beside, in between and through technique or skill. This ‘hidden curriculum’ facilitates a critical practice that enables the actor to act as a feminist.

Educationalist Vic Kelley explains the hidden curriculum as learning that is not explicitly identified in the examined curricula, which can include attitudes or qualities.¹⁷ In acting, the task of nurturing the personal and social consciousness of the actor is acknowledged by trainers in Prior’s study. He explains personal and social knowledge as ‘ethics, interpersonal skills, community responsibility and environmental awareness’.¹⁸ The actor trainers viewed this knowledge as politically productive in its potential to ‘produce better human beings’ who ‘understand humanity not judge it’.¹⁹ This type of knowledge, which has been described as ‘dispositional attitudes’,²⁰ ‘transferable skills’²¹ and ‘the invisible dimension’²² is key to politicising acting pedagogies. It enables relational understanding and the reflexive space of meta-learning to develop beside each other, producing a heutagogy, where the actor learns to become her/his/their own teacher.²³ Whilst these knowledges are foundational, they can remain tacit within the curriculum and side-lined in the discourse of training.

Turning to educational theory, we can see how subjugated knowledge, overlooked or hidden in the value economy of a field, can be the unseen pivot on which an oppressive learning practice balances. Paulo Freire developed a critical ‘pedagogy of the oppressed’, where individuals from predominantly marginalised groups were empowered to take control in the processes of their learning.²⁴ Developing this approach, Henry Giroux drew attention to what he termed ‘naïve knowledges, located low down in the hierarchy’, but which functioned as a politically empowered pedagogy for marginal groups.²⁵ Camilleri, referencing Calvin Taylor, picks up this idea when he points to the difference between material and immaterial labour in relation to acting knowledge; immaterial labour includes techniques of collaboration, interaction and creative embodiment.²⁶ In addition, and recognising that this list is not exhaustive, I identify the transferable skills of the actor as: imagination, emotional intelligence, being-in-the-moment, impulse, intuition, flow, emotional availability, trust, respect, generosity, inner listening, bodily care, polyphonic awareness, empathy, altruism, collaboration, reflection, reflexivity, learning through mistakes, playfulness, knowing the value of fear, self-discipline and resilience. I am particularly concerned with knowledge that enables the actor to critically reconsider her/himself in the world: generosity, empathy, altruism, reflexivity, collaboration, respect. Capturing how these subjectively experienced knowledges are produced through the interaction between learner and teacher/director is hard to describe and almost impossible to quantify but, in order to develop a better understanding of the political potential of acting pedagogy, it seems vital. Such knowledges do not fit into any easily structured or measurable system of learning. However, this hidden curriculum equips actors to manage the complex challenges of acting, to operate in a state of ‘habitual vulnerability’ and to enable heutagogy.²⁷

Feminist approaches to knowledge construction embrace the knowledges of the hidden curriculum. As an embodied practice, acting immediately takes its reference from a bodily knowledge and a ‘felt sense’, which operates beyond the limits of cerebral reasoning. Hence the trope, ‘Get out of your head!’ might be explained as a rejection of hegemony, which shuts d...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I: Shaping a Methodology
• Part II: Considering Practice
• Conclusion
• Index