Embodied Perceptual Practices: Towards an Embrained and Embodied Model of Mind for Use in Actor Training and Rehearsal

Theorizing Practice: The Mind/Body Problem in Performance

Director:

Choose an image that you have been working with and picture it as you move across the floor. Now, locate that image in a particular part of your body.

Actor:

Should I see it with my mind's eye or try to feel it in my body? Should I see myself from the outside or the inside?

Director:

Both; neither. What's your image?

Actor:

A water bug.

Director:

OK. Picture the bug—what does it look like? More importantly, what does it sound like? Move like? Imagine what the bug feels as it crouches near the ground and mimic that position. Now attempt to feel yourself turn into the water bug—starting at the tips of your antennae and moving down through your body. Feel your broad flat back as you move across the room. Feel your jointed legs carry your body. Where is your center of gravity? You exude the smell of a water bug. You see the world around you from the bug's perspective. What do you see?

This example of a conversation during rehearsal represents part of the problem of working with images and the body—although this phrase is already misleading. One is immediately caught in the language of the mind/body split, with its "Cartesian theatre"—Daniel Dennett's term for the model of the theatre in the mind (like the "mind's eye"), which displays mental images in detail. This image-screen of the mind represents a positivist Western metaphysics of mind over matter, brain over body, and intellectual transcendence over crude materiality.¹ Within this model, the images on the screen, or in the mind, can directly affect the body, but rarely are affected by the body.

This parallels a similar problem in actor training since Diderot wrote his Le Paradoxe sur le comedien in 1830,² which theorized a split in the actor's consciousness:

It was Diderot's materialist analysis of the acting of his time which laid bare an essential paradox: that, whilst the actor appeared to be experiencing "real" feelings the opposite was more probably true. The good actor, in his view, was capable of mechanically reproducing these emotions in performance. Diderot suggested a dualistic model of the actor, the inner mind controlling the outer expression of feeling . . .

(Hodge 3-4)

The question of whether the character is created in the mind or in the body parallels the question of whether the image is located in the mind or in the body. The problem of whether the actor's emotion is motivated internally or externally parallels the question of whether the image is inside or out—they are caught in the same bind. Within the Cartesian model of the mind/body split it is nearly impossible to talk about different relationships between image, mind, and body, or to think of images as anything more than visual representations. Thus, in the West we often continue to describe visualization as a kind of mind over matter (Samuels and Samuels).

For example, over the last ten years I have used certain aspects of two contemporary movement forms—Authentic Movement (hereafter referred to as AM) and Butoh—as a way of working with imagery in the development of my own performance work, as well as that of performance art students, visual artists, dancers, and actors.³ When trying to describe the way AM and Butoh each work with imagery, I have often found myself left with unsuitable metaphors and descriptions, such as "let the image emerge from your body rather than your mind," or "insert the image into your body and let the movement come from this place": or, perhaps worse, "become the _____," or "be the _____." Although my goal was to move beyond the mind/body split, my...