University
of Exeter Drama Department
THE CHANGING
BODY:
The
bodymind in contemporary training and performance
Contributors Below is a list of confirmed contributors to the symposium. Several of them have already given presentations during the year-long research series. Scroll down through the page, or click on a names from the list below, to view entries. Pre-symposium
Workshop Leaders Symposium Workshop/Work Demonstration Leaders
Keynote Addresses Multi-disciplinary
Respondents Panel Performer Respondents
Panel Delegate Presentations
Symposium
Organisers Jodie Allinson Where the Performer Meets the Image: Approaches to Training in Multimedia Theatre In this paper I will communicate the results of a practice-as-research project I have recently been undertaking. The project is an investigation into the training and devising processes of the multimedia theatre practitioner. I have been exploring the skills, awareness’s and sensibilities that are utilised or required by a performer working in this field, and developing workshops to explore how these skills etc. can be cultivated in the performer. Central to the research is the notion of a compositional approach to performance, in which several elements (e.g. performer, space, projection) exist in relation to, and in combination with, each other to create meaning in the performance event. In terms of training the performer therefore has to view herself as one of a number of elements (as opposed to a central one around which others revolve), and so learn to explore how she relates to these. In the workshops this has led to an examination of the relationship between the body and light, through the performer investigating her relationship to the projection beam as opposed to the projected image. Cynthia Ashperger East
and West Meet in the Body: The Intercultural Aspects of Michael
Chekhov’s
Technique. Jessica Bockler Grasping the Self: A transpersonal exploration of the actor-character relationship The actor is his own instrument,
with which he creates his art – BUT This paper endeavours to explore the changes, which occur in an actor's sense of self during rehearsal and performance. It attempts to discern the intellectual and emotional relationship, which unfolds between actor and character, focusing in particular on the practice of the techniques of involvement (à la Stanislavski & Strasberg) and self-expression (à la Grotowski) - as described by Konijn (2000). The techniques are discussed and conceptualised with the help of Transpersonal Psychology, a relatively new field of academic psychology, which provides comprehensive models of consciousness, as well as of the human self and of self-development. In this exploration of the actor-character relationship particular emphasis is placed on the works of Carl Gustav Jung, Ken Wilber and Les Lancaster. The paper concludes with
a section on the practical implications of the psychological evaluation.
Transpersonal psychologists such
as Jung and Wilber offer us not only new theoretical insights into
the actor’s craft - but practical opportunities for new developments
in performance and actor training, such as the Integral Actors
Studio (Wilber, 2004), through which actors may enhance their psychological
integration and wellbeing, as well as their performance skills. Wilber, K. (2004). “The Integral Actors Studio: Engaging the Metaphysics of Acting”. Retrieved on 27th December 2004 from www.integralnaked.org Peter Boenisch Decreation Inc. – William Forsythe’s exploration of ‘behaviour without intention’ This contribution will
discuss William Forsythe’s radical
choreographic experiments in his final works for Ballet Frankfurt,
and for his new Forsythe Company. There, the privileging of the body
as a replacement for the rational mind as guarantor of identity and
individuality, which has been the dominant credo of both modern(ist)
and postmodern dance, and is still at least implicitly perpetuated
by most contemporary physical performances, is exposed and rejected.
Forsythe resets that merely inverted binary and cuts the direct line
between corporality and subjectivity. In his most thoroughly updated
version of a contemporary Ballet language, performing bodies leave
the baggage of representation behind. They are no longer used as
psycho-physiological entities, as sculpted plastic images, and as
a medium shaped by iconic intentions. They rather explore what Forsythe
calls ‘behaviour without intention’ and ‘indirected
movements’, on kinetic, paralinguistic, and other levels, thus
presenting deviant bodiescapes that rely on their visceral intensity. Mateusz Borowski and Malgorzata Sugiera One of the influences
that the “physical theatre” has
exerted on the mainstream theatre has been observable in the new
wave of the re-interpretations of the canonical dramatic texts. Michael
Thalheimer, a German theatre director who for the last five years
has been gaining both immense popularity among the audiences and
international critical acclaim, returns to the classical texts of
the German canon (Lessing, Goethe, Büchner), but in a way which
is markedly different not only from that of his predecessors, but
also from the currently dominant “post-dramatic” and
performative tendencies in the avant-garde theatre. Although he retains
the function of the text as the generative matrix for the fictional
represented reality, he radically redefines the relationship between
the script and the actor’s/the character’s body. Daniel
Meyer-Dinkgräfe The Body as Consciousness: Concepts and Implications According to Indian philosophy of Vedanta, the basis of all creation is a field of the Absolute, Brahman, without qualities itself, but source of all possible qualities of manifestation. It is infinite, beyond space and time. Paradoxically, however, within this absolute, unexpressed level of creation, diverse and distinct qualities exist, and they interact. These qualities are rishi, devata, and chhandas. Rishi here is not the individual human seer of Vedic literature, but an abstract principle of consciousness: the knower, experiencer, observer, or subject. Devata corresponds to process of knowing, experiencing, observing, or subject-object relationship. Chhandas corresponds to the known, the experienced, the observed, or the object. The three components of unity (Samhita), subject, subject-object relationship and object (rishi, devata and chhandas) interact with the unity and among each other. This interaction process is ultimately responsible for the expression of Brahman into all aspects of creation as we experience, observe, know, and discover it. All aspects of theatre, too, have their origin in this field of Brahman. In the paper I discuss this conceptualisation in detail, demonstrating how the body emerges from consciousness. I proceed to address the implications such an understanding of the body may have for both body and mind of the performer, in relation to both training and performance. Manny Emslie Developing the performer as an intentional, experiential and dynamic ‘physical self’ The focus of the paper will be on the somatic practice of Skinner
Releasing Technique (SRT). The paper initially explores Western preoccupation with concepts of dualism and moves towards discussing how the notion of binary concepts is especially prevalent within the training of dancers. Issues pertaining to the ‘traditional’ method of training a dancer are compared to those in relation to the pedagogical nature of a somatic practice, in this case, SRT. The somatic process of working towards knowing and understanding the self in the world and ways in which this ‘new’ found self can inform the dancer as performer (or actor, singer, musician as performer) is explored. The paper concludes with suggesting some ways forward. Rather than creating another binary concept - traditional/alternative – possibilities and the benefits of inclusive and complementary practice are considered. Eva Maria Gauss To have a body – To be a body. Change it! The paper opens a philosophical
approach to the act of performing. It also asks backwards from
the viewpoint of practical training,
if the theory about human beings stands the experiences of theatre-practice.
The ‘Philosophical Anthropology’ developed terms, which
explain the inscriptions of the body, the presences of the body,
the relation to world and the connection to the ability of making
sense. The theory of Helmuth Plessner (1897-1985), German philosopher,
biologist and sociologist is the starting point. His main question
was the relation of the human being to its body. Duncan Jamieson Between Derrida and Grotowski: an ethics of response and responsibility What possibilities might deconstructive discourse hold for performance
theory and practice? More specifically, what relationship might be
developed between Derrida and Grotowski? Parnrut Kritchanchai “The Puppet-like Movement in Eastern Performance Cultures and the Buddhist Insight Meditation as a Source of Psychophysical Approach to Actor Training” Many Western European
practitioners take an interest in the Oriental traditions of actor
training as a source models, systems and techniques
of acting process. It is noticeable that the individualised training
method, for example by Eugenio Barba and Grotowski, is mainly based
on the idea of body distortions or the use of distorted equilibrium
in Eastern performance cultures. At present time, this explosion
of interest through practicing these distorted puppet-like movement,
such as Hatha Yoga and T’ai Chi Ch’uan, is widely spread
and becomes a trendy new approach to actor training. However, as
this interest is becoming more and trendier, the in-depth study of
the Oriental performance culture and the accurate purpose of those
series of movement are still missing. As the result, most actors
misunderstand the trait of these psychophysical training processes
and treat them only as a point of warm-up exercises. Manujendra Kundu I wish to present a seminar paper on the role of the body and mind as depicted in the Third Theatre by one of the most influential theatre ideologue of post independence India, Badal Sircar. He developed his ideas of Third Theatre during the 1960s and from then on this octogenarian theatre person has been pouring his unique ideas for the development of Third Theatre. Briefly speaking, for the majority of Indians the period of the emergence of Badal Sircar’s plays was an era of disillusionment with Indian independence. Actually, his plays are situated at the juncture of several cacophonous historical discourses. The rupturous situations were pregnant moments of not only this playwright’s creativity but also of several other literary movements in other parts of India. The same period witnessed political tension between India and China, the Vietnam War, the Naxalbari movement and the birth of our neighbouring country, Bangladesh. That is why I think there is still enough scope to discuss Third Theatre at this moment when India is swinging between its policies of foreign disinvestments and communist idealisms, among the growing difference of the rich and the poor. And here we must reflect on the Government of India’s declaration that there are more than 300,000 naxalites and dissidents in India now. To throw light on the (Changing) body (and the mind) in (contemporary training/) performance a variety of features would be taken into consideration: action and actionlessness, conflict between circularity and linearity (the hypothesis of immovability), the story-less story, visual and non-visual language of theatre that ultimately became both the body of theatre revolution and political resistance. This formal or structural attire has its own history. Badal Sircar’s “Third Theatre” revolution was a departure from the regular, capitalistic, naturalistic, bourgeois mode of urban proscenium theatre practice to the non-proscenium community theatre (the interesting thing about it is that no entry fee is charged to have a taste of it and that is really a very important thing in a world of ours). The genre of the ritual of the Adivasis or folk culture was the basic idea behind the “philosophy” of Third Theatre. Rebecca Loukes To follow John Matthews Inscribing the Palimpsest Flesh This paper will investigate the musculature of the training performer.
This musculature is a site which inscribes and is inscribed; a prophetic
flesh which in/by its anatomy forecasts performance, and a contemporaneous
flesh which documents the past. The training performers musculature
is a chronotopic node connecting performance to training by being
both a surface and a tool for inscription, an effaceable Rosetta
whose surface translates training into performance and performance
into training. As such the training performer is a figure who freely
crosses the otherwise impermeable membrane of time. Jen Mitas ‘The Matter (and Meta-theatrics) of Method-Produced Emotion’ Here I will consider the discourse Stanislavski and Strasberg used to explicate emotion memory technique, a tool by which an actor ‘triggered authentic emotion on command’ through sense-based memory of her own experience. In both Strasberg and Stanislavski’s discourses the body/self is defined in terms of intersecting paradigms- material and immaterial, which suggests a conflict about what constitutes the authentic. While Stanislavski deployed Behaviorist principles in his technical schemas, in the classroom he defines the actor’s (artist) self in terms of a mysterious ‘nature’, while in Strasberg both the immaterial and material become bound up with technologies of the self (Freudian and Watsonian) in circulation in American therapeutic culture. Aside from conflicting notions of self, there is a complex meta-theatrics proposed at the level of the actor’s internal engagement with the technique, which in the case of Stanislavski grounds the actor’s memory in public life and empathy, while Strasberg emphasizes individual domestic trauma and the actor’s internalization of subject, object relations based on coercion. My particular framing of technique treats the ‘space’ of pedagogical discourse as ‘a stage’, which Hollis Huston proposes might be best considered the actor’s instrument (rather than the body). Huston writes, ‘A stage…is a model of consciousness, of a way in which phenomenon are allowed to appear’. In this notion of ‘stage’ I am primarily concerned with the multifarious ways that the body/self is conceived of as an instrument for the production of emotion, how this connects to industrial/socio-economic/cultural imperatives in/outside the studio, and ways that the actor-performer might make these discourses explicit in performance. Bella
Merlin In spring 2003, Bella Merlin was one of nine actors employed by Max Stafford-Clark in collaboration with the National Theatre to undertake research for David Hare's THE PERMANENT WAY, concerning the privatisation of the British railways in the 1990s. Actors interviewed those involved - from the men-in-suits in the Treasury to the victims and bereaved of the four major train crashes which followed. In this paper, Merlin examines the challenges faced by an actor embodying a living person, the artistic 'responsibility' and the juxtaposition of Stafford-Clark's essentially cerebral 'actioning' technique with Merlin's own more psycho-physical approach to incarnating a role. April Nunes The You in Me: Practical Discoveries Towards the Intersubjectivities in Performance This paper looks to the medium of contemporary dance to illustrate the experience of intersubjectivity and intercorporeality in primarily a dance performance context. However, the practical investigations described in the paper are applicable to performance as a whole. Issues concerning the problems of language used to describe intersubjectivity as experienced by the human beings who participate in a performance event (i.e. the choreographer/maker, the dancer/performer and the audience member/observer) are examined. The connection between body and mind is re-visited from a non-dualist perspective, where body and mind are not dissoluble and the embodied thoughts of the dancer are evident within movement. The pathways of investigation into the experience of intersubjectivities in dance that are presented in this document are not fixed and are not finite. The majority of the paper offers a personal account of practice-based research aiming to illuminate possibilities towards choreographing contemporary dance that reveals the intersubjective relationships between maker, performer and observer. The investigation is a creative one and in keeping with the belief that language is an inadequate medium for the articulation of experience, there are changes of ‘voice’ in the paper. I shift between a third person theoretical analysis with the use of academic language and a first person who shares the process of movement discovery. The mix of these ‘voices’ aims to provoke new thought and practically illustrate my phenomenological approach to this study. It is my hope that this format will engage you, offering the opportunity to both critically analyse and enjoy through a sense of movement imagination. Panos Papageorgopoulos Performing Emotion in Twentieth Century Western Acting: The Tragedy of Change as a Method of Action? Emotion has been a central
issue in acting theory and technique since Athenian tragedy and
Plato’s Ion, and the actor’s
paradox has been stated there long time before Diderot. The claim
for emotive and/or emoting acting was all but abandoned in twentieth
century acting techniques, which allegedly offered radically different
and incompatible methods and tasks for their actors. This tendency
to treat these techniques as irreconcilable is based on philosophical
and scientific limitations and trends of each system’s era
and is coming all the way from late antiquity, but is still with
us today, encouraging us to reiterate infertile oppositions and clichés
such as ‘inside out’ or ‘outside in’ acting, ‘becoming
the character’, ‘non-emotional acting’ etc. Jonathan
Pitches Towards a Platonic Paradigm of Performer Training: Michael Chekhov and Anatoly Vasiliev Expanding on research undertaken for my last book, Science and the Stanislavsky Tradition of Acting (Routledge, 2005), this paper will seek to locate both Michael Chekhov's practice and the work of the Contemporary Muscovite director, Anatoly Vasiliev, in an alternative paradigm of actor training, drawing on Romantic Science and on the Theories of Plato. Whilst both practitioners owe a clear debt to Stanislavsky - indeed Vasiliev considers his own work to be a necessary reconstruction of the System - Vasiliev and Chekhov's work is drawing on more ancient philosophical models than the Aristotelian worldview so commonly associated with Stanislavsky through his focus on action or dran - the thing done. Juxtaposing Chekhov and Vasiliev allows one to examine two very different manifestations of a Platonic model of actor training emerging from one key source, Stanislavsky's colleague and Vasiliev's teacher, Maria Knebel. The paper will endeavour to pinpoint these differences and embed them in a practical analysis of the Chekhov technique and of Vasiliev's 'ludo' theatre, drawing, in the latter case, on practical sources from one of Vasiliev's Masterclasses. Implicit in much of the discussion will be the contention that Chekhov's interconnected Technique positions him in an alternative paradigm from his colleagues at the First Studio, including Boleslavsky, and from the prevailing materialism of the early Revolutionary period in the Soviet Union. To what extent that alternative position informs the Russian acting laboratories of today will be a necessary concern of the paper's conclusion. Victor
Ramirez Ladron de Guevara Embodying Translation: Metaphors as a Medium of Exchange
and Communication ‘All Scars are nice and clean’, my most recent performance, is used as a case study to exemplify and test the argument presented in this paper. In that performance the murders of women in the Mexican city of Juarez were explored by contrasting them with the racist attacks of foreigners in Egham, England. From those two different cultural milieus, two phrases (which I propose, work as metaphorical constructions) were selected. From Mexico: ‘Por eso las matan’ (‘That is why they kill them’); a “joke” which is used when a woman does something that annoys a man and by extension when she disturbs the normal behaviour of the society in which she is located. From England: ‘We can’t fit them all’; used as the ‘common sense’ explanation to justify the policies and attitudes towards immigrants and immigration in general. I argue that those two metaphorical constructions work as aporias, unearthing a complex net of attitudes, behaviour and significations within the British and Mexican cultures. Those aporias are hence used as the medium of exchange and communication and tested by the use of the ideology and aesthetic resources of both cultures. Translating the Mexican ‘Por eso las matan’ into the English ‘We can’t fit them all’ supposes a rejection of the sense-for-sense translation mode (which is in fact, an appropriation strategy) and substitutes it with a non-literal hibridized translation strategy by connecting the two fractures of the selected cultures I am working with. It is precisely this vortex between cultures what is intended to work as an effective channel by which a heightened mode of intercultural communication may be attained. It is however, in the embodiment of the connotations and contradictions implied by those phrases that the process of translation is fully achieved. Sandra Reeve The Next Step: Eco–Somatics and Performance. How can we apply a new ecological paradigm to ways in which we somatically educate children, students, performers or clients? What skills in movement practice might be appropriate both in terms of the tools of practice and the context within which they are taught? How does the physical environment influence the learning process? How can practices of embodiment be applied in such a way that they support a move away from the mechanistic worldview which still informs the day to day life of most individuals as reality: separate beings, matter as basically inert and moved by spirit and that we exist independent of our context. Initially I shall glance at various surfaces and leaves of the ecological debate within Western Europe and North America: new science paradigms, deep ecology, eco-psychology and eco-feminist discourses in order to formulate the kinds of practices of embodiment that might be necessary to achieve a fundamental shift in our perception and in our hearts/ minds. Then I shall consider how an ecological view of movement training might influence notions of embodiment and priorities for performance. What kinds of performances might emerge from a physical practice that consciously strives to place itself in the reality of quantum physics, relativity and chaos theories without abandoning itself to the attractive abstraction and potential disembodiment of cybernetics and systems theories? I shall offer examples and thoughts from my recent experience of co-directing ‘Being in Between’, a movement-based durational piece created at Bristol Zoo (October 2005) with Baz Kershaw, which we offered as ’performance for the ecological era.’ It is my hypothesis that this kind of trans-formation of ecological principles into somatic practice may serve to support a sensual change of perception in our personal and cultural worldviews which would include a greater self-reflexivity and to a greater degree stand the chance of avoiding disassociative ideologies This paper will draw on a lineage of work stimulated by Suprapto Suryodarmo, Javanese movement artist, from the Padepokan Lemah Putih, Solo,Java. Dr George Rodosthenous Conducting the body: sounds and bodies in a production of George Rodosthenous’ adaptation of Alcestis This paper will discuss the concept of the 'body in performance' and its relation to the text, genre and mise-en-scene. It will also include a discussion of the following quote by Richard Dyer: “How we are seen determines in part how we are treated. How we treat others is based on how we see them; such seeing comes from representation”. A production of George Rodosthenous' adaptation of Alcestis will be used as a case study to portray the ideas, workings and suggestions of the author in relation to the use of sounds and bodies within a theatrical framework. Key issues of temporality, improvisation and re-action processes will be discussed in detail to explore the concept of live performance and in specific:
Kathryn Syssoyeva Beyond Meyerhold: Contemporary Russian Approaches to Mind-Body Training In considering the Russian contribution to the training of the actor’s physicality, European (non-Russian) and North American practitioners tend to look toward the past – to Meyerhold above all, and, to a lesser extent, Vakhtangov, Michael Chekhov, and Stanislavsky (the Method of Physical Actions). This concern with the past has overshadowed three-quarters of a century of subsequent pedagogical development. My paper will examine current methodologies of mind-body training in three Russian theatre schools: contemporary practice of Biomechanics at GITIS; rhythmics, partnering, and neutral and transformed object work at the Shukinskaya (Vakhtangov) Institute; expressivity and partnering at the St. Petersburg Academy for Dramatic Art. These practices will be contextualized in /compared to their historical antecedents, with an examination of the evolution of Russian mind-body work from “theatricalist” methodologies of the 1920’s, through the techniques of Kokh and Nemirovsky (the dominant influences in Russian movement training in the 1960’s and ‘70s), to the methods of such contemporary teachers as Nikolai Karpov (former director of the movement division at GITIS), Galina Kondrashova (St. Petersburg Academy), and Andrei Droznin (Shukinskaya). They will be considered too, in relation to contemporary developments in mise-en-scene by which they are informed and to which they give form, as characterized in recent work of such directors as Lev Dodin (Play without a Name), Kama Ginkas (Lady with a Lapdog), and Yuri Liubimov (Marat/Sade). This presentation will include excerpts from faculty and student interviews, and video and photographs of classroom practices. Martin Welton The Bodymind Problem in the Theatrical Environment Contemporary (Western) theory of acting is increasingly one in which the paradigm of embodiment has come to dominate. This often involves the rejection of a ‘Cartesian’ mind-body dualism in favour of a holism which, if not exactly seeking the eradication of these categories, aims, nevertheless at their more satisfactory union, although ‘body’ and ‘mind’ still seem to carry phenomenological weight as discrete modes of experience in the contemporary neologisms of ‘the bodymind’ and ‘the psychophysical actor’. However, as Thomas Csordas suggests, even for Descartes, the mind-body split was as much a methodological necessity as it was an existential imperative; it is perhaps more necessary therefore, to ask questions of Cartesian methodology than of its phenomenology per se. With regards to embodiment though, methodological questions regarding acting may be less concerned with the incommensurability of body and mind than with the relationship of control to affect. However, we do not necessarily need to consider the two concerns as being either irreconcilable or unconnected if we do not subscribe to the atomism of experience which such categorisation imposes, and attend more directly to the conditions of the practice in which they arise: to its ecology. This paper will consider acting as a system of environmentally-relative embodiment in terms of what Bourdieu call ‘sens’. It will describe the preparation for, and performance of a short solo performance, Monologue by Harold Pinter, a process which was itself informed by comparative practice-based research in another ‘psychophysical’ discipline – the South-Indian martial art kalarippayattu. I will discuss the performance in ecological terms; of the properties of the relations of the actor in and to a theatrical environment in terms of sens. Jeungsook
Yoo A Psychophysical Acting Approach in Performing The Bald Soprano - finding ‘active-passiveness’ through the notion and practice of ki In this essay I reflect on the acting process in the performance of The Bald Soprano directed by Phillip Zarrilli in January 2004 in relation to Asian psychophysical training and its principles. It is an exploration of the range and mechanism of the influence of the psychophysical disciplines on an actor’s creative process in the particular dramaturgy. For this, I analyze the phenomena observed while practicing Asian psychophysical disciplines: yoga, kalarippayattu, t’aichi ch’uan, and DahnHak (Korean meditation), and acting. Ki from DahnHak is a crucial term both in experiencing training and acting and in analyzing the experience. ‘Active-passiveness’ as a principle underlying the phenomena is revealed in two aspects: ‘active-passive relationship,’ and ‘active-passive state.’ First, the ‘active-passive relationship’ is an extra-daily way of perception and an optimal way in creating acting score, making a relationship with the score, and communicating with outer stimuli including fellow actors and audience. Second, this relationship evolves into ‘active-passive state’ in which the separation between subject and object, I and space dissolves. This is observed as an ideal state for the performance of both Asian psychophysical disciplines and acting. The ‘active-passiveness’ is based on the concept of bodymind monism which is understood and experienced as Sim-Ki-Hyul-Jung (mind-ki-blood-body) monism, one of DahnHak’s principles as bodymind awareness is expanded. The influence of the Asian bodymind disciplines as an actor’s training method is found by understanding the psychophysical nature of acting. Principles learned by experiencing training and acting are interchangeable because it is the principles of bodymind which is a common denominator for both of them. "The Actor Imagines with His Body" This quote from Michael Chekhov's To the Actor, which makes such a categorical claim for the existence of a profound symbiosis between the actor's body and his or her imagination, is as intriguing today as it was when it was first written over fifty years ago. The sentence that follows it is no less intriguing: "He cannot avoid gesturing or moving without responding to his own internal images." (Emphasis mine) And yet, while this concept is the basis for much of the work being done by a rapidly growing number of practitioners and trainers in the Chekhov Technique around the world, the issue of workings of the Imagination><Body connection is either taken for granted or not referred to as a separate issue at all. What is more, the symbiosis that Chekhov makes such a clear claim for has not been researched as such in any systematic way. Consequently, in most training manuals for actors, either in the Chekhov Technique or in other training strategies, the connections that may exist between the Body and the Imagination are regarded as givens, and little attention is focused on the actual training of the imagination/body connections, or on the training of the performer's sensitivity to the workings of his or her imagination and their relation to his or her physical expression in the everyday practice of their training and their art. Chekhov's statement, together with other references in his writings to this integral connection between the performer's body and his or her imagination, raise a number of issues that will be the focal point of this paper: 1. Is there any real proof of the validity of Chekhov's claim for such a clear-cut and immediate connection between the body and the imagination? Is this connection a universal – and indeed, as Chekhov claims, an "unavoidable" – aspect of the actor's craft, whether the actor is aware of it or not? 2. Assuming that proof can be found for both the questions above, how does the Body/Imagination tandem work in practice? What is the creative "loop" in this reciprocal relationship? How do the performer's body and imagination inform and influence each other in the performance space? 3. What conditions – if any – are necessary for this connection to work effectively in training and/or performance? 4. Most importantly, is the actual mechanism of the Body/Imagination symbiosis susceptible at all to research and a practical understanding so that it can be rendered into exercises or a systematic training as a readily available tool for training and performance? These are the fundamental questions that will be dealt with in this paper in the hope of indicating a way into understanding one of the most potent aspects of the actor's work. |