The Lamenting Brain: Emotion, Action and the Journey of Feelings in the Actor's Mournful Art

337 Pages·2010·4.36 MB·English

The Lamenting Brain: Emotion, Action and the
Journey of Feelings in the Actor’s Mournful Art

Panagiotis Papageorgopoulos

Department of Drama and Theatre
Royal Holloway College
University of London

Submission for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
2009

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I hereby declare that this submission is my own work and that, to the best of my
knowledge and belief, it contains no material previously published or written by another
person nor material which to a substantial extent has been accepted for the qualification
of any other degree or diploma of a University or other institution of higher learning,
except where due acknowledgment has been made in the text.

1/12/2009

Panagiotis Papageorgopoulos

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ABSTRACT

This thesis is motivated by the question of how and why actors perform and experience
emotion, especially in cases when the emotional demands are as extreme and urgent as in
Greek tragedy. In order to answer this question the thesis embarks on two main tasks: (a)
to reappraise the position, function and technique of emotion in the work of four key
practitioners of twentieth century Western acting (Stanislavski, Meyerhold, Brecht and
Grotowski) from the point of view of contemporary neuroscience, and (b) to trace their
original paradigm in the professional mourners’ psychotechnique of emotion, as found in
ancient and modern Greek ritual lamentation for the dead.
The first part of the thesis attempts to reread and reframe twentieth century
western acting’s technique of emotion by adopting the radically new neuroscientific
paradigm of emotion, which reappraises emotion as a catalytic faculty in the formation of
motivation, decision-making, reasoning, action and social interaction. It appears that the
general shift of emphasis of twentieth century acting theory from emotion to action, as
epitomised in the Stanislavskian Method of Physical Actions, was in reality a shift from feeling
to emotion. The second part of the thesis investigates how Greek professional mourners
(aoidoi) manage to generate feelings in their audience, by simulating the symptoms of grief,
while also motivated by a naturalistic stance towards the community, life and death. By
juxtaposing neuroscientific, theatrical and anthropological data, the thesis concludes that
both actors and lamenters function as psychagogoi and share a common basic emotional
psychotechnique, which relies on building and delivering a score of emotional action that
combines physiological knowledge with memory, imagination and real pain. The findings
are tested for their efficiency and limitations through documentation of the rehearsal
process of Euripides’ Trojan Women.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank my supervisor, Professor David Wiles, for his exemplary patience,
wisdom and caring throughout this difficult journey. I am grateful for having worked
under his flawless supervision. I also need to thank the Greek Scholarship Foundation
(IKY) for their financial support during the first years of this long research. I would like
to thank my teachers at GITIS who stimulated my need for embarking on this research. I
am indebted to Paul Ekman and Miranda Terzopoulou for communicating their inspiring
and profoundly holistic views of emotion and lament to me. I need to express my
gratitude to Professors Joseph LeDoux, Antonio Damasio, Dick McCaw and Alison
Hodge for the input on various aspects of my research and writing. I would also like to
thank my friends, students and family who inspired my task, consciously or not, and
tolerated my disappearance over these years. Finally, I am profoundly indebted and
grateful to the Kodikas group, who worked with such dedication and selflessness, and
whose ethos fine-tuned and gave perspective to my research.

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CONTENTS
ABSTRACT 3
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 4
LIST OF FIGURES, PLATES AND TABLES 11
ABBREVIATIONS 12
Introduction 13
Chapter 1 Influential Theories of Emotion in the West 19
1.1. Aristotle 19
1.2. René Descartes 24
1.3. Charles Darwin 27
1.4. The James-Lange theory 33
1.5. The Cannon-Bard theory 36
1.6. Behaviourism and emotion 38
1.7. The Schachter-Singer theory 40
1.8. The social sciences on emotion 41
1.9. Conclusions 43
Chapter 2 Emotion in Twentieth Century Western Acting 46
2.1. Konstantin Stanislavski 46
2.1.1. The theatre of experience goes beyond style 47
2.1.2. The Psychotechnique 51
2.2. Vsevolod Meyerhold 56
2.2.1. Burn with the spirit of the times 56
2.2.2. The audience-stage relationship = the modern director 58
2.2.3. The modern theatrical actor 62
2.3. Bertolt Brecht 65
2.3.1. Petroleum resists the five-act form 65
2.3.2. Acting 68
2.3.2.1. Creating a character: Verfremdungseffekt and Gestus 68
2.3.2.2. Performing the Gestus 70
2.4. Jerzy Grotowski 72
2.4.1. Theatre as ritual 72
2.4.2. The art of the total gift 73
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2.5. Clichés about the place of emotion in the actor’s art 77
2.5.1. Russia 77
2.5.2. Europe 79
2.5.3. From the US back to Russia and Europe 80
Chapter 3 Evolutionary Neuroscience of Emotion 83
3.1. The framework 83
3.1.1. Emotion, homeostasis and the tree of life 85
3.1.2. The emotional brain 86
3.2. Evaluation 90
3.2.1. Minimum cognitive requirements 90
3.2.2. Emotionally competent stimuli (ECS) 90
3.2.3. Autoappraisers and core relational themes 91
3.2.4. The High and Low roads of the amygdala 92
3.2.5. Induction-Triggering 94
3.3. Expression and action 96
3.3.1. Execution in the brain: opening the lock 96
3.3.2. Autonomic patterning and basic emotions: the wisdom of the ages 96
3.3.3. Basic emotions and secondary variations 99
3.3.4. The endocrine and peptide cooperation 101
3.3.5. Somatic nervous system activation 102
3.3.5.1. Universality in facial expressions of emotion and display rules 102
3.3.5.2. Posture 105
3.3.6. Emotion, motivation and action 106
3.3.6.1. Emotion as motivation 106
3.3.6.2. Emotion as action and as action tendency 107
3.3.7. Before Feelings 110
3.4. Experience 111
3.4.1. Feeling an emotion 111
3.4.2. Knowing an emotion is felt 114
3.5. The social emotion 116
3.5.1. Emotion and decision making: the somatic marker hypothesis 116
3.5.2. Emotion regulation and the agency of culture 119
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3.6. Conclusions 123
Chapter 4 Twentieth century Method of Emotion in Acting 124
4.1. Aesthetics of ‘affecting’ the audience: empathy 125
4.1.1. Brecht versus Aristotelian drama 125
4.1.2. Empathy and mirror neurons: internalising the ‘other’ 126
4.1.3. Empathy as inevitable 129
4.1.4. Empathy as necessary 130
4.1.5. Emotion in the audience= Verfremdungseffekt + empathy 131
4.2. Performing Emotion: the twentieth century’s actor’s task as taboo 134
4.2.1. ‘Detachment’= ‘identification’ + super-task 134
4.2.2. Emotional patterning and the application of the James-Lange
theory of emotion 139
4.2.2.1. Meyerhold 139
4.2.2.2. Alba-Emoting 141
4.2.3. Stanislavski: Method of Physical Actions or Active Analysis? 143
4.3. Twentieth Century Method of Emotion; and of feeling 147
4.3.1. Updating terminology 148
4.3.1.1. Psychophysical Action= emotion=Gestus 149
4.3.1.2. Perception of character and plot by the audience 151
4.3.1.3. Facts, events and emotionally competent stimuli (ECS) 152
4.3.1.4. Bit and core relational theme (CRT) 152
4.3.1.5. Task and motivation 153
4.3.1.6. Action and emotional impulse: basic and complex 153
4.3.1.7. Counter-action, obstacles and emotion regulation 154
4.3.1.8. Physical action and behaviour 154
4.3.2. The rehearsal as Method of Emotion 155
4.3.2.1. Creating the impulse for the score of physical action 156
4.3.2.1.1. Simulation of the emotion 158
4.3.2.1.1.1. Logic and sequence of physical action 158
4.3.2.1.1.2. Tempo-rhythm and the MPA 160
4.3.2.1.2. Emotional memory and imagination: imaginative
memory 164
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4.3.2.1.3. Psychotechnique in Active Analysis: a very gradual and
indirect emotional recall 167
4.3.2.2. Reviving the impulse for performance 172
4.4. Conclusions 173
Chapter 5 Patterns of Behaviour in Greek Ritual Lamentation for the Dead 174
5. 1. Death, emotion and ritual 176
5.1.1. Attitudes towards death: dissociating emotion from behaviour 176
5.1.2. Death rituals 177
5.1.2.1. Anthropological approaches to death rituals 177
5.1.2.2. Sociobiology and ritual 178
5.1.2.3. The function of death rituals 178
5.1.3. Universality of grief in the context of death 181
5.2. Ritual lamentation for the dead 184
5.2.1. A methodological premise 184
5.2.2. Lament cross-culturally 185
5.2.3. Lament in the Euro-Mediterranean 186
5.2.4. The antiphony in Greek lament 188
5.3. The Greek funeral 191
5.3.1. Prothesis 192
5.3.2. Ekphora 194
5.3.3. Taphe 196
Chapter 6 The Physiological Basis of Ritual Lamentation Behaviours 197
6.1. Score of physical actions in ritual lament 198
6.1.1. Self-injury: parasympathetic arousal via sympathetic acceleration 198
6.1.1.1. Anger and protest 198
6.1.1.2. Affect regulation and the endorphin hypothesis 200
6.1.1.3. Laceration 203
6.1.1.4 Chest-beating and the thymus 205
6.1.2. Grief, meditation and direct parasympathetic arousal 210
6.1.2.1. Rocking of the body and sleep 210
6.1.2.2. Low level muscular tension and the sadness muscular pattern 211
6.1.2.3. Focusing of attention 212
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6.1.3. The waves of emotion and the Vagus nerve 213
6.2. The score of vocal actions in lament 216
6.2.1. Mode and metre of lament 216
6.2.2. Voice, affective prosody, music and the human brain 217
6.2.3. Grief and crying behaviour 220
6.2.3.1. Icons of crying 221
6.2.3.1.1. The cry break 221
6.2.3.1.2. The voiced inhalation 222
6.2.3.1.3. The creaky voice 222
6.2.3.1.4. The falsetto vowel 223
6.2.3.2. Grief and the waves of crying 223
6.3. Conclusions 226
Chapter 7 Psychagogia: Lament, Acting and the Journey of Feelings 227
7.1. Aoidoi: artists in grief 228
7.1.1. A brief history of the profession 228
7.1.2. Professional mourners in Greece: relation and criteria of skill 231
7.1.2.1. Payment 231
7.1.2.2. Community, degrees of relation and ritual status 232
7.1.2.3. Witnessing death 233
7.1.2.4. Experiencing death 236
7.2. The score of linguistic actions in ritual lament 239
7.2.1. Improvisation in acting and lament 239
7.2.2. Order in lament 242
7.2.3. Adaptation in lament 247
7.3 The function of lament: Psychagogia 253
7.3.1. Irony and the emergence of impersonation in lament 253
7.3.2. Pleasure, empathy and the function of grief 259
7.3.3. Afterlife and the motivation of lament 263
7.3.4. Lament and acting: Psychagogia 265
7.4. Conclusions 268
Chapter 8 Rehearsing the Trojan Women 269
8.1 Interpretation 271
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8.2. Instructing actors 274
8.2.1. Surrounding 275
8.2.2. Incorporating lament 277
8.2.3. Acting the play 280
8.2.3.1. Metre 280
8.2.3.2. Given circumstances, as if, action and Distanzierung 282
8.2.3.3. A methodological dead-end 284
8.3. A break-through 286
8.3.1. The Sisyphus fragment 286
8.3.2. Action as emotion 287
8.3.3. Working from emotion as total action 289
8.4. Conclusions 292
APPENDICES 294
A. Stanislavski, K., ‘A plan of work’ 295
B. Hecuba’s goos 297
C. The Sisyphus fragment 298
D. The Trojan Trilogy 299
BIBLIOGRAPHY 300
A. PRINTED SOURCES 300
B. ELECTRONIC SOURCES 335

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