The Actor, Image, and Action: Acting and Cognitive Neuroscience (review)

Rhonda Blair’s The Actor, Image, and Action will excite scholars seeking new ways of conceptualizing the American actor’s process. The book provides a fascinating reconsideration of Stanislavsky-based acting, as Blair rereads notions such as “imagination, action, given circumstances, feeling, and memory” (xiii) in light of contemporary research in the field of cognitive neuroscience. Four concise and thought-provoking chapters build a strong argument for the material connection between the actor’s mind and body. Blair shows how current research into the workings of the human brain has discredited any theoretical possibility of a mind/ body split—including Diderot’s infamous paradox. Present scientific evidence thus allows Blair to clearly illuminate outdated knowledge and suggests that conventional American understandings of the actor’s process “can unnecessarily limit an actor’s creativity” (56).

As “a hybrid: director, performer, and academic writer” (1), Blair’s theatrical credibility is high. Throughout the book, she demonstrates the wealth of her multidimensional experience by offering insights for a readership made up of both theoreticians and practitioners; her care in addressing herself directly to her audiences is both appealing and engaging. Blair asserts the book’s intent as critically collaborative in nature, a contribution to “the kind of work begun by Stanislavsky and major Stanislavsky-influenced acting masters” (xiii). Her project—taking the “next step” with the ideas of Stanislavsky et al.—involves “increasing our appreciation for how prescient their work was, while shedding the misapprehensions of their various methods” (xiii). In seeking to refine and synthesize the best practices of the past rather than to negate or dismiss them, Blair’s approach is consciously productive. The moderate tone she intentionally employs successfully invites her readers into the complex terrain of her research.

Blair prepares her readers to examine neurocognitive findings and their application to acting by amply contextualizing acting theory in the twentieth century. In chapter 1, she discusses “significant twentieth-century developments in sciences that have had an impact on how we think about acting” (xiii), succinctly describing discoveries in biology, psychology, pharmacology, technology, and linguistics. Blair acknowledges that the currency of her scientific overview is necessarily somewhat contingent: “the speed of substantial change in the cognitive neurosciences easily outpaces that in our fields, which makes it challenging for individuals within those disciplines to stay current, and even more challenging for those of us using the findings of those disciplines” (6). Even so, Blair’s project aims to bring acting into the current century.

The second chapter extends Blair’s historical examination into the acting theories that have held the most sway in the United States, ideas she categorizes as deriving from Stanislavsky, Meyerhold, and “The Americans”—especially Strasberg, Adler, and Meisner (39). Blair explains the genealogy of American acting clearly and insightfully, citing Joseph Roach’s The Player’s Passion and Sharon Marie Carnicke’s Stanislavsky in Focus. The chapter ends with a brief examination of two contemporary intersections of science and acting, as she explains the significance of international neuroscientist Susana Bloch’s ALBA Emoting technique for actors and Dutch psychologist Elly Konijn’s research into actors’ “task-based” emotions (49). By examining these two systems, Blair furthers our understanding of the physical basis of emotion.

A key finding of Blair’s neurocognitive research is that the physical process of imagining does not differ from that of remembering. Blair cites Joseph LeDoux’s Synaptic Self: How Our Brains Become Who We Are, which asserts that “memories are constructions assembled at the time of retrieval, and the information stored during the initial experience is only one of the items used in its construction” (quoted in Blair, 72). Blair elaborates that, with memory, “[w]e are not, in the purest terms, reliving anything; we are having a new experience in the moment, drawing on experiences of the past, shaped by our current condition and imagination” (74). According to Blair, neuroscience has now demonstrated incontrovertibly the essential connection between mind and body...