Toward a Phenomenological Model of the Actor's Embodied Modes of Experience

Abstract

This essay utilizes a post-Merleau-Ponty phenomenology to explore the question of how the contemporary actor’s body and experience in performance might be theorized. Drawing on Drew Leder’s account of corporeal absence, a fourfold model of the actor’s embodied modes of experience is proposed. To Leder’s everyday surface and recessive bodies and their respective modes of absence, two additional extra-daily modes of embodiment (and their absence) are proposed: an aesthetic “inner” bodymind discovered and shaped through long-term, extra-daily modes of practice, and an aesthetic “outer” body constituted by the actions/tasks of a performance score—that body offered for the abstractive gaze of the spectator.

How can the contemporary actor's body and experience in performance be theorized?² What methodological tools are useful in an attempt to better understand the embodied work of the actor? This essay applies one among a set of complimentary methodological tools to this question—a post-Merleau-Ponty phenomenology.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."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, Bruce Wilshire, Alice Rayner, and Stanton Garner 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 event;⁵ however, the focus in this essay is specifically on the actor's modes of embodiment per se. Future publications will address how a phenomenologically informed discussion such as this can be of pragmatic use in the studio, as the model of modes of embodiment developed here is applied to psychophysical training of the actor and to specific dramaturgies.⁶

Merleau-Ponty and the "Problem" of the Body

Beginning in the seventeenth century, Western philosophers came to identify the body as a physical object much like other material objects—as having certain anatomical and functional properties that could be characterized as following certain scientific principles. Among those systematically challenging this understanding of the body during the 1960s, a series of three books by Maurice Merleau-Ponty—Phenomenology of Perception, The Primacy of Perception,and The Visible and the Invisible—marked a paradigmatic shift in Western thinking about the role of the body in the constitution of experience when he raised the fundamental philosophical problem of the body's role (or lack thereof) in constituting experience.⁷ Merleau-Ponty critiqued the hitherto static, objective nature of most representations of the body and experience:

[T]hinking which looks on from above, and thinks of the object-in-general must return to the "there is" which underlies it; to the site, the soil of the sensible and opened world such as it is in our life and for our body—not that possible body which we may legitimately think of as an information machine but that actual body I call mine, this sentinel standing quietly at the command of my words and acts.⁸

Rejecting the exclusive assumption of the natural sciences and modern psychology that treated the physical body (Körper) as a thing, object, instrument, or machine under the command and control of an all-knowing mind, and thereby challenging the Cartesian cogito, Merleau-Ponty (re)claimed the centrality of the lived body (Leib) and embodied experience as the very means and medium through which the world comes into being and is experienced. He demanded an account of the "actual body I call mine," that is, the body as "an experienced phenomenon . . . in the immediacy of its lived concreteness," and "not as a representable object . . . for the abstractive gaze."⁹ He thereby rejected mind-body dualism, and (re)claimed the...