Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

Archive

Volume 4 Number 2, July 2003

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The Reflective Actor

By

Per Brask

SOCRATES: You know, Ion, many times I’ve envied you rhapsodes your profession.  Physically, it is always fitting for you in your profession to be dressed up as beautiful as you can; and at the same time it is necessary for you to work with the poets – many fine ones, and with Homer above all, who’s the best poet and the most divine – and you have to learn his thoughts, not just his verses! Now that is something to envy!  I mean, no one would ever get to be a good rhapsode if he didn’t understand what is meant by the poet.  A rhapsode must come to present the poet’s thought to his audience; and he can’t do that beautifully unless he knows what the poet means.  So this all deserves to be envied.

[…] (530 b-c)

ION: […] I look down at them [the audience] every time from the rostrum, and they’re crying and looking terrified, and as the stories are told they are filled with amazement.  You see I must keep my wits and pay close attention to them: if I start them crying, I will laugh as I take their money, but if they laugh, I shall cry at having lost money.” (535 e)

                                             From Plato’s Ion[i]

ABSTRACT:

This essay seeks to develop a theoretical armature for an audience-sensitive acting pedagogy.  (A subsequent essay will be devoted to the proposal of a specific pedagogy, with exercises, etc).  In order to arrive at an understanding of the audience-sensitive actor, the essay takes as its starting point Kierkegaard’s notion of the reflective actor and his concept of Angst and combines his insights with Otto Rank’s psychology of will, as it seems, at key points, to have a close family relationship to Kierkegaard’s central concern with choice.  Rank’s psychology considers, among other things, the tension arising from a person’s (here read as a character’s) dual drives to become at once a specific and unique individual, and to “identify with the cosmic processes,” as Ernest Becker put it. The inherent destabilization of the subject in both Kierkegaard’s and Rank’s psychologies is used to propose the reflective actor as a “choosing awareness” who constructs for the audience an expression that elicits their own reflectivity.  This moment of “constructing for” which awakens the audience’s reflectivity, it will be argued, initiates an ethical situation between actor and audience, which benefits from the inclusion of aspects of Habermas’s communicative ethics.

A CONFESSION:

I must begin by confessing to a degree of Neo-Romanticism.  I am a Romantic in the sense that I agree with Kierkegaard, among others, that the aesthetic object is an object that manifests an idea.  I am Neo in the sense that I do not consider this to be the whole story, that indeed the whole story of the aesthetic object, the art work, cannot be described exhaustively in terms of an idea.  I believe instead that the discursive conceptual terms in which we might discuss an idea are possible only as supplements to the artwork; that is, they do not and cannot exhaustively translate the art work into themselves.  However, I also believe that the well-functioning art work is one which delivers more than the mere encounter of an experience, that it confronts us with a need to attempt to understand it.  We can only attempt this understanding discursively, and this attempt may produce a conversation that will extend over centuries.  The art work which any one cares enough about to enter such a multi-generational conversation is obviously exceptional and demonstrates its power by both demanding our continuing attention and by being inexhaustible of meaning. 

The idea manifested in the artwork may well have emerged as the artist worked with her material; i.e. it evolved not along with this work but through it. The idea does not wholly precede the work, it is the work, in a manner of speaking. 

            Criticism, on the other hand is a conceptual activity whose primary tools are abstract categories. I agree with E.M. Forster’s observation that a spiritual chasm exists between the processes of the creative artist and the critic.  Indeed, the only possible raison d'etre for a critic is the love of art. This love is the only means of parity between the two processes, and the only reason for continuing the conversation for which art creates the need.

The conceptual inexhaustibility of the good, the exceptional, work of art is produced by, as Hegel put it, the universal interacting with the specific.  The dialectic between two such, in themselves, inexhaustible categories, will work like a perpetual motion machine in generating meaning and will thus put us in a perpetual state of interest (as inter esse.)  The unexceptional, common work of art, on the other hand, will not provide such a continuously dynamic relationship. It will be but fleeting in its attraction. 

Much contemporary theatre goes under the heading of the theatre of images.  In this theatre, text, the play, and the work of the playwright are often down-played, as it were, because, the party-line goes, the text has in the past wielded a hegemony, and literature has been privileged over the production as an autonomous work of art.  There is some truth to this observation. However, a theatre relying mainly on image runs the risk of being so super-dependent on physical and technical skill that its audience is put into a state of awe and amazement similar to the experience of watching acrobats in a circus.  This type of theatre is devoid of intellectual engagement, and so to my mind also devoid of artistic content.  The presence of artistic content necessitates intellectual conversation.  As Plato maintained, art must engage the soul (reason/desire/will) as a whole, to which I would add the body; art must engage the body. 

SØREN KIERKEGAARD ON ACTING

Søren Kierkegaard was an avid theatre-goer, something we can conclude from the numerous theatrical references and metaphors in his work and in his papers.  Most evident, of course, is his own manner of theatricality - he wrote many of his books under pseudonyms.  Indeed, they were a good deal more than pseudonyms. They were masks put on in order to be able to speak from a certain position, to portray a psychology convincingly so that his readers might see how a certain perception of self and life would play out.  (Incidentally, this must surely be one of the values of dramatic art; to investigate and allow contemplation of how perceptions/values of self and life would play out.) He preferred this indirect mode of communication, he said, because concepts can never truly grasp individual existence, only indirection may hint at it and give the experience of something more.  Given this, his interests in the theatre are not surprising.

In some of his work he directly addressed the theatre.  For example, his most famous work Enten-Eller [Either-Or, 1843] contains a section entitled “First Love, a comedy in one act by Scribe, translated by J.L. Heiberg,” in which he refers to performers at the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen; for instance, the “four-leaf clover”^[ii] of Mrs Heiberg, Frydendahl, Stage and Phister.  In Gjentagelsen [Repetition, 1843], he refers to two German comic actors he saw perform in Berlin,^[iii] and in Stadier paa Livets Vei [Stages on Life's Way, 1845] he dedicates an extensive footnote to Madam Nielsen, another actor at the Royal Theatre.^[iv]  But his longest discussions of performers were both written in 1848. One, an article published in “Fædrelandet” [The Fatherland, a newspaper] in July of that year, focused on Mrs Heiberg as Juliet, “Krisen og en Krise i en Skuespillerindes Liv” [The Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress.]^[v]  The other was completed in December and was probably intended for the same paper but was never submitted. This was “Mr Phister as Captain Scipio.”

As indicated in the extensive research by the Danish scholar Janne Risum,^[vi] Kierkegaard seems only to have been interested in two types of actor.  Both are capable of fine performances.  The immediate, or, perhaps better stated, the intuitive actor and the reflective actor.  Briefly put, one might say that the intuitive actor is the one who, when given a role, filters it through her own life and bends its events and actions to fit herself at a given time.  In other words, she appropriates the role by responding au naturel, from herself, as it were.  The reflective actor, on the other hand, is the one who struggles to find the ideality, the idea, the image in the role and then strives to embody it by working out every action, move, word and gesture in the subtlest detail.  Metamorphosis is this actor's aim, the repetition of ideality in actuality.  Kierkegaard preferred the reflective actor whose dramaturgy may be as interesting as a play's and therefore, whatever the role, as deserving of serious analysis as any distinguished play might be.

In Kierkegaard=s analysis of Mr Phister as Captain Scipio, in the comic opera Ludovic by J.H. Vernoy de Saint-Georges, he especially applauds Phister for his diligence, his Astudy, thoughtfulness, reflection=s care for every single detail.@^[vii]

  Studying the role and reflection are key to Mr. Phister=s fortitude as an actor for Kierkegaard.  AHe can make good use of long periods of study, but even the shortest time he uses with such intense thoughtfulness that his performance becomes a study.@  Kierkegaard’s analysis of Phister’s performance focuses to a large extent on Captain Scipio’s stance, his gait, when drunk and when attempting sobriety, etc., that is, on the physical expression of character.  This way, Phister=s performance becomes Aa thoroughly reflected totality.@^[viii]

   For Kierkegaard a performance constructed with such care also requires and, indeed, elicits reflection on the part of the audience. AAdmiration of reflection must be expressed in the language of reflection, not the language of immediacy.  Reflection is this: Why? - Because; why is all constructed thus? - Because; why is that line there? - it is there because, and so on.  Everything is made conscious.@^[ix] That is, everything is made conscious for reflection.  In other words, the aim of the reflective actor is to make it possible for the audience to understand and reflect on how and why what they are seeing was constructed.  To achieve this the reflective actor naturally employs intuitive strategies in the process of creation, but the process continues beyond making these hurried insights merely performance-ready.

OTTO RANK AND THE TENSION:

In Begrebet Angest [The Concept of Dread (or Angst)] Kierkegaard addresses the human paradox as one of the relationships between our creatureliness and our self-consciousness, in his terms: our spirit (Aand).  Says he, “The concept of Dread is rarely discussed in Psychology and I must therefore emphasize that it is something entirely different from fear and similar concepts which always relate to something specific, while dread is in itself freedom’s reality as the possible is to possibility itself.  For this reason dread is not found among animals because they, in their naturalness, are not defined as spiritual.”[x]  In other words, only a spiritual being, Kierkegaard’s term for a self-conscious being, can be free.  Dread arrives with the (self)awareness that one does not know and consequently that one cannot have realized one’s inner possibilities; a knowledge made possible only in and through self-awareness; a knowledge of absence which produces a kind of guilt, a feeling of dread.  This is an attribute not available to animals.  For Kierkegaard the human is both body and soul and it is our awareness of this relation that produces our angst.  If we were fully one or the other we would not (could not) experience dread. “The human being is a synthesis of the soulish and the bodily.  In a state of innocence the human is not merely an animal, if ever he could be, for if even for a moment of his life he were merely animal he would never become human.”[xi]  The exploration of the human as caught between creatureliness and self-consciousness fascinated Otto Rank.  

Otto Rank (1884-1939) was for some time the favoured member of the inner circle around Freud, in the years from 1906 to around 1924.  He lost this position when, after the publication of The Trauma of Birth in 1924, it became increasingly clear that he was moving away from seeing the oedipal conflict as foundational in the development of personality.  Eventually Rank was to formulate a psychology of will and it is his work in this area that seems to me useful when considering the art of the actor.

One of Rank=s translators, students, colleagues and biographers, Jessie Taft, stated that, AWill for Rank, is the integrated personality as original creative force, that which acts, not merely reacts, upon the environment. [...] The will of the individual, as Rank conceives it, is in itself a first cause and produces something new. [...] Will is not merely the drive of a predominant instinct or combination of instincts, it is that central integration of the forces of the individual which exceeds the sum of the parts, a unity which can inhibit as well as carry through to realization the instinctual urges.@^[xii]  In other words, the will is that which allows for choice.  This is the reason that I believe Rank=s insights are pertinent to a consideration of acting and why I believe they may fruitfully be combined with or incorporated into Kierkegaard=s notion of the reflective actor.  Kierkegaard, too, understood that individuals had drives, but like Rank he considered the will, in the sense of the mechanism which makes choices, central to what defines a personality.

     In a lecture at the University of Pennsylvania School of Social Work in the fall of 1927, Rank had this to say about the relationship between projection and identification:

“The richer - that is, the more varied and complete - the individual’s emotional life, the less he is driven to projection, and the more he is inclined to identification.  His outlet and satisfaction comes from identifying himself with the emotions of the other.  On the other hand, the narrower and more restricted the individual’s emotional life, the more intense will be his fewer emotions, the less will he be inclined to, and capable of, identification - the lack of which he has to compensate for by projection.  Projection thus proves to be a compensatory mechanism that adjusts for an inner lack.  Identification, on the other hand, is an expression of abundance, of desire for union, of alliance, for sharing.”^[xiii]

Though most people undoubtedly live in a pendulum movement between identification and projection, I don’t think that there can be much doubt that the individual whose emotional life is more inclined towards identification has the better chance of becoming a good actor.  It is precisely such an inclination that allows a good actor to transfer observations of life to the construction of fictional characters.

In addition to suggesting a deep connection between will and choice, Rank clearly sees a kind of force in his notion of will. He says, “Not only is the individual ego naturally the carrier of higher goals, even when they are built on external identifications, it is also the temporal representative of the cosmic primal force no matter whether one calls it sexuality, libido, or id.  The ego accordingly is strong just in the degree to which it is the representative of this primal force and the strength of this force represented in the individual we call the will.”[xiv]  Later, “[…] consciousness originally is itself a will phenomenon; that is, consciousness was an instrument for the fulfilment of will before it advanced to the will controlling power of self-consciousness […].”[xv] 

   That I bring in Rank=s psychology of will here should not be read as a wholesale buy-in to the notion of a stable self.  In fact, I don=t think Rank=s psychology is subtended by such a notion and Kierkegaard=s is certainly not. 

    Indeed, Kierkegaard=s concept of angst may be understood as alluding to the sensation that the AI@ of the self is radically unstable, a sensation which comes along with the reflecting self-awareness.  In addition to his meticulous self-analysis, Kierkegaard may well have learned this insight from his neighbour and idol Poul Martin Møller to whom he dedicated The Concept of Dread.  In Møller’s novella, AEn dansk Students Eventyr@ [The Adventures of a Danish Student] (1824),^[xvi] appears a philosophically minded student who becomes utterly paralyzed from the vertigo entailed in keeping track of all his AI@s.  This existential experience may lead to the conclusion that there is no solid self of any kind in the human psyche.  That there is an awareness that negotiates and chooses under given circumstances to promote the survival of the organism from a singular and relative perspective, is clear, or experience would not be possible. 

       Bringing this together with Rank=s notion of will as described above by Jessie Taft, I would suggest that there may not be a self in the sense of a storied Ame.@   Or at least, that such a storied “me” can only be seen in a rearview mirror, as it were.  There may Aonly@ be a choosing self-awareness, a relative perspective, located in a specific body. 

       What an actor does then, in order to create a role, is to suggest a choosing self-awareness, and its body, that is, a will which operates convincingly as a fictional construction, embodied in detail, intended to be observed by and to communicate to others.

          One of Rank’s finest interpreters, Ernest Becker, has described the human as living in a paradox, a tension, between twin motives.  “On the one hand,” he says, “the creature is impelled by a powerful desire to identify with the cosmic process, to merge himself with the rest of nature.  On the other hand he wants to be unique, to stand out as something different and apart.”[xvii]

          An actor might want to put herself imaginatively into the tension that could arguably be experienced by a person in the position of this particular character.  It is in this tension, which necessitates choice, that performance energy may be found, and it is as a result of choice that a specific action is formed and embodied, as the actor finds the physical expression of the tension.

          For a performance to be created out of the sequence of choices intuitively, imaginatively and reflectively experienced by the actor an additional element must be added to the dynamic, namely the audience and the communicative interaction being established in the creation of a particular theatrical event.

          This element, the audience, is often considered irrelevant in mainstream acting pedagogy.  Acting students are taught to keep their attention on the stage-side of a fourth wall.  I believe this is unfortunate because a really good stage actor plays as much for the audience as to her partners on stage, or at least she is aware that what she and her partners are doing are for the benefit of the audience - and she makes choices based on this awareness.  (Indeed in chapter 14 of An Actor Prepares Stanislavski does acknowledge the role of the audience in the creation of a performance, albeit in a rather limited way, when he says, “A theatre full of people is a splendid sounding board for us.  For every moment of real feeling on the stage there is a response, thousands of invisible currents of sympathy and interest, streaming back to us.”[xviii])   The role of the audience, the role in which the production casts the audience must become part of the actor=s work in order to create the effect that Phister had on Kierkegaard.  The reflective actor, thus keeps a parallel set of choices that intermingle and inform one another; choices related to executing the actions of the character (experienced imaginatively and reflectively in the tension between the twin ontological motives), and choices related to how she wishes to affect the audience.  For this reason the reflective actor works critically, intellectually as well as artistically and emotionally and often does so simultaneously.

AN EXCURSION:

“IVANOV: Once an intelligent, educated, healthy man begins feeling sorry for himself for no obvious reason and starts rolling down the slippery slope, he rolls on and on without stopping and nothing can save him.”[xix]

The problem for Anton Chekhov’s eponymous character, Ivanov, is that he has become aware of his creatureliness and become so overwhelmed by this sensation that his project of becoming a unique personality, his heroic project, his immortalization project, which had led him to an exciting life with Sarah (now Anna), a life which was outside the horizon set by the expectations of his (and her) cultural environment, has become utterly defeated.  He is no longer able to fight his awareness of death, no longer able to deny death and creatureliness in a culture which in its boredom exudes death.  Unable to participate in a larger cultural project he feels alone and that his own person is insignificant.   His sense of the value of his own personality diminishes to the extent that he unhooks from the greater unique cause that used to sustain him.  Says Ivanov,

“I believed in different things from other people, married a different sort of wife, got excited, took risks, squandered money left right and centre, and was happier and unhappier than anyone else in the country.  These things were my sacks, I heaved a load on my back and it cracked.  At twenty we’re all heroes, tackle anything, nothing’s too much for us, but by thirty we’re tired and useless.  How, how can you explain this fatigue?  Anyway, that’s probably not at all the point.  Now off you go, Paul, and good luck to you.  I’m boring you.

LEBEDEV: (eagerly.)  You know what?  Your environment’s got you down.

IVANOV:  That’s silly, and it’s been said before.  Off with you.”[xx]  

          It seems to me that Ivanov’s self-diagnosis is spot on.  He has cracked his back, his spine, morally speaking.  Lebedev’s seemingly flippant reaction, inadvertently, hits the nail on the head: there is nothing to sustain Ivanov’s previous project or any new one, for that matter in this environment.  His environment is simply too bored and boring to be much concerned with his search for difference.  Nor are his neighbours likely to sustain a project whereby he could join them in their cultural torpor.  (Only Sasha seems to care and perhaps that is simply because she sees Ivanov as a project for herself.)  Indeed, as far as his environment is concerned Ivanov is only getting what is coming to him due to his transgressions, especially the transgression of having married Sarah. Since Ivanov is financially indebted to the people who define his culture, his sense of burden is so much the greater.  This sense of being burdened, on legs too weak for the load, too thin, perhaps, for the load of a heavy torso supporting a large head with its wide forehead, an actor and a costume designer might well find an appropriate physical expression for, with due subtlety and sensitivity to the communicative possibilities of such a tension between the upper and lower parts of Ivanov’s body.

          Since Ivanov’s earlier project collapsed “for no obvious reason,” he has been beset by a sense of guilt, a burden which torments him throughout the play.  For this reason the playable choices for an actor imaginatively entering the ontological paradox may usefully operate in the area of Ivanov’s attempt throughout to rid himself of guilt, to alleviate his burden.

          In act four, when, after Sarah’s death, Ivanov agrees to marry Sasha in an attempt to connect with his former passion, he finally recognizes the futility of this action as well as its cruelty, in view of his treatment of Sarah. “I can rant and fret to my hearts content, but I’ve no right to destroy anyone else.  I poisoned the last year of my wife’s life with my snivelling.  Since we’ve been engaged you’ve forgotten how to laugh and you look five years older.”[xxi]

In the end, given that he is aware of the deep effects of his actions on others, first on Sarah and now on Sasha, Ivanov’s sense of guilt cancels out any possible prospect of redemption and he commits suicide to stop having these effects, which from his perspective can only get worse and evermore devastating.  Nature has won over culture, creatureliness over the immortal struggle for individuality, the poles which set the parameters of his choices throughout the play.

CONNECTING:

Art in general may not, in the first instance, be about communication, but it is certainly an important aspect of the dramatic theatre.  And to enter a communicative situation, a discourse, implies an ethical dimension, as every communicative situation does according to Jürgen Habermas.22 Such an ethic must, apart from the natural condition of being entered voluntarily - i.e. audience members must be able to say yes or no to participating - include the right to expect that the communication is understandable and discernable, that it is possible - at whatever high or low level of penetration - to tell what happened even if the interpretations of these events may differ substantially.

It may sound as if I were developing a defence of realism.  And I must confess that like A.S. Byatt I feel a certain attraction towards its aesthetic and like her, “not because I believe that it has any privileged relationship to truth, social or psychological, but because it leaves space for thinking minds as well as feeling bodies.”23 And like her, I am afraid of solipsism and find it frustrating to encounter in a work of art. However, it is not the form of realism which excites me, it is that in realism the audience has the right to expect that actions and sequences of actions will be portrayed persuasively, that is with a high degree of recognition, as if setting the concrete conditions for whatever else may be experienced.  

The philosopher Kai Sørlander states that, “Art is essential as it puts our situation into a larger perspective - and in this way it may participate in deepening our understanding of what it means to be a person.”  And in reference to drama, the novel and film, he says that, “By describing how certain people act and react to each other's actions, an art work also describes how they function in situations of ethical choice. These situations may be more or less serious but they are implied in the manner in which the characters interact with one another.  In this way these works of art portray situations of ethical choice as objects intended for experience.”24

The dramatic theatre attempts indirectly to get at personhood and its implications, much as Kierkegaard found it necessary to use fictional constructs in order to communicate existential states.  This indirectness allows the theatre (and other art) to suggest, to hint at existential states which when stated in conceptual language sound like oxymorons and are therefore easily deconstructed.  States such as “feeling like a stranger in my own life,” “choosing myself” and others clearly indicate a situation where conceptual language breaks down in its usefulness and other indirect means must be used in recognition of the fact that conceptual language cannot “capture” existence.

CONCLUSION:

A dramatic theatre in which a reflective actor plied her art would include an open and inclusive communicative ethic. It would be a theatre that focussed on the audience-actor relationship, a theatre in which actors attempted to construct performances that delivered sudden unorthodox insights into human behaviour and motivation, exerting their wills by making persuasive choices.

 A reflective actor struggles to find the ideality, the idea, the image, the tension between the drives in a role and then strives to embody it in as complete and complex a manner as possible. That is, she tries to serve the idea of the role so fully that even accidents appear as if on purpose.

Finding the role's metaphor, its exemplification of the tension between the twin ontological drives and the consequent choices, finding its body, naturally takes a good deal of personal investigation and reflection on the play and its circumstances. To be a reflective actor does not mean to be an actor who coldly intellectualizes or conceptualizes the work. It means to be an actor who makes purposeful choices in order to communicate with her audience.

Having developed this theoretical armature for an audience-sensitive actor via Kierkegaard, Rank and Habermas, the next step, the proposal of an actual pedagogy, will require the addition of Alexander Lowen’s Bioenergetics (though I am aware that there may be many other ways of satisfying the requirements discussed above).  It is in his work (and in aspects of Michael Chekhov’s Psychological Gesture) that we will find the tools for reading (and constructing) expressions in the body that are as evocative as those Kierkegaard revealed in his analysis of Mr. Phister’s performance. 

This, however, will be the subject of a subsequent essay, based on classroom work with acting students.

Acknowledgement

I am grateful to Professor J.R. Muir, Department of Philosophy at the University of Winnipeg, for his invaluable comments on an early draft of this essay.

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NOTES: