ABSTRACT
How can the contemporary actor’s body and experience in performance be theorized?2 What methodological tools are most useful in an attempt to better understand the embodied work and sensory experience of the actor? What are the implications for actor training and practice of such (re)considerations of the embodied experience of the actor? What techniques and approaches to training, rehearsal, and performance allow the actor to more fully inhabit one’s body-mind and experience when rendering the “white spaces” and “silences” that constitute theatrical form, thereby creating the possibility of experience and meaning for an audience? Drawing on the work of post-Merleau-Ponty phenomenologists, this essay explores one model of the actor’s embodied modes of experience and then elaborates a few of the practical implications of the model for training and performance.3 Like all accounts of embodiment and experience, this one is necessarily limited by “our propositional modes of representation,” since it is extremely difficult “to express the full meaning of our experience” (Johnson 1987: 4). In spite of such limitations, this essay is intended to contribute to phenomenological studies of embodiment by extending their focus from exclusive concern with the everyday to such non-everyday practices as acting, and to build on the earlier uses of phenomenology in the analysis of theatre. Previous studies by Bert O. States (1971), Bruce Wilshire (1982), Alice Rayner (1994), and Stanton Garner (1994) have contributed much to our understanding of the theatrical event and redressed the critical disappearance of the (lived) body and embodiment in the creation of meaning and experience within the theatrical event4; however, the focus is this essay is specifically on the actor’s modes of embodiment per se.
