The Philosophical Actor: A Practical Meditation for Practicing Theatre Artists

234 Pages·2010·1.19 MB·English

by  Donna Soto-Morettini

S
THE o
t
o
‐
M
PHILOSOPHICAL
o
r THE
e
t
ACTOR ti
n
i
PHILOSOPHICAL
A
Practical
Meditation
for

Practicing
Theatre
Artists
ACTOR
There
have
been
many
books
published
on
acting,

T A
Practical
Meditation
for

actor
training,
and
practical
theories
for
preparing
 H Practicing
Theatre
Artists
for
a
role,
but
none
of
these
books
have
ever
looked

E
philosophically
at
the
language
and
the
concepts
that

P
we
use
when
we
talk
about
acting.
The
Philosophical

H
Actor
is
the
’irst
attempt
to
grapple
with

the
 fundamental
 questions
 of
 truth,
 I
L
art,
and
human
nature
unexamined
in

O
past
treatments,
from
the
’irst
great

S
essay
 by
 Diderot
 to
 the
 exhaustive

O
system
described
by
Stanislavski.
With

P
wide
 appeal
 to
 actors,
 directors,
 acting

H
students,
acting
teachers,
and
trainers,
Donna

I
Soto‐Morettini
looks
at
acting
theory
in
light
of

C
the
‘cognitive
revolution’
and
draws
from
recent

A
advances
in
cognitive
science,
philosophy
and

L
psychology
 to
 introduce
 innovative
 ways
 of


thinking
about
acting. A
C
Donna
 Soto‐Morettini
 has
 served
 as
 Director
 of
 T
Drama
for
the
Royal
Scottish
Academy
of
Music
and

O
Drama,
Head
of
Acting
for
Liverpool
Institute
for

R
Performing
Arts,
and
Head
of
Acting
at
the
Central

School
of
Speech
and
Drama.
She
is
currently
Casting

Director
and
Performance
Coach
for
Andrew
Lloyd

Webber
and
the
BBC.
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By
Donna
Soto‐Morettini
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The Philosophical Actor
‘…[some] actors…believe that any conscious factor in creativeness is only a nuisance. They
find it easier to be an actor by the grace of God.’
Constantin Stanislavski
‘There are almost no good books on acting’
Sydney Pollack
The Philosophical Actor
A Practical Meditation for Practicing Theatre Artists
Donna Soto-Morettini
intellect Bristol, UK / Chicago, USA
First published in the UK in 2010 by
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2010 by
Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,
Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright © 2010 Intellect Ltd
Image on page 86 - TM & © 2010 CBS Studios Inc. STAR TREK and
related marks are trademarks of CBS Studios Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by
any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or
otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the
British Library.
Cover designer: Holly Rose
Copy-editor: Rebecca Vaughan-Williams
Typesetting: Mac Style, Beverley, E. Yorkshire
ISBN 978-1-84150-326-4 / EISBN 978-1-84150-390-5
Printed and bound by Gutenberg Press, Malta.
Contents
Acknowledgements 7
Introduction 9
Playing philosophy 12
The discontents of the acting studio 13
Chapter 1: Am I ACTING? 25
True for who(m)? 30
Beyond boring relativism 33
What is acting? 35
The ‘working’ actor 41
Art and craft 47
That abstract thing beyond technique 52
The beautiful actor 55
Summary 56
Chapter 2: What Was I Thinking? 61
‘Conscious’ performance 65
The actor and the ‘swing thought’ 75
Who am I anyway? 84
Monkeys, mirrors, peanuts… 104
Getting the trope/thought right 106
Summary 108
Chapter 3: How Am I Feeling? 113
The neutral walk 124
Emotion and imagination 129
Like the town of Brigadoon… 132
Duse was a woman 139
‘Mindblindness’ 145
The Philosophical Actor
From ‘embodied thinking’ to ‘display’ 147
From primary to social 152
Summary 153
Chapter 4: What Were YOU Thinking? 159
Getting out of our heads… 161
The psychological toy box 173
So many psychologies 178
Where do we start? 184
Psychology and survival 186
Rational actors 193
Summary 195
Chapter 5: Where Am I? 199
Actors are not green 201
So you want to be a selective quasi-amnesiac? 205
The Orient(al) Express(iveness) 208
Conclusion 215
Bibliography 219
Index 225
6
Acknowledgements
My heartfelt thanks go to Lise Olson for her careful reading of an early draft, to
Theresa Larkin for reading and working through the ideas with graduate students
at Cal State Los Angeles, and to David Grindrod, Suzy Lamb and Mel Balac for
(somewhat unintentionally!) providing the funding for this book.
Thanks, also, to the staff at Intellect for their support and patience, and to the Bodleian
and the Langson Libraries for all their help. This book is result of many years of working
with wonderful students at Central, LIPA and the RSAMD – my thanks go to all of them for
their patience and their perseverance.
This book is dedicated to the memory of my mother, Beverly Lee Soto.

Introduction
It’s hard to look out at the sea of books on acting – ranging from the ambitious and
the inspiring to the more workaday guides on technique – without feeling, well…
philosophical. What does the study of this particular art/craft mean? How, given its
significant difference from all the other arts (a difference based on the fact that the actor
has no external media or instruments to master and no fixed physical/technical criteria to
meet) can one set about training without running immediately into the limitations of the
subjective or the personal? Why – when we all know that there are successful actors who
never trained formally – bother at all? What is the point of writing books about a subject so
practical in its nature?
And, of course, philosophy (or indeed, for that matter, meditation!) would seem to be
a pursuit that excludes practical action. It is this common conception of philosophy being
inert and intellectual that made Karl Marx’s dictum about philosophy so startling in its time
(Marx, of course, famously wrote that ‘philosophers have merely interpreted the world in
various ways; the point, however, is to change it’). Certainly no acting teacher or director
would deny that a great majority of their time is spent encouraging their actors to think in
deeper, more rigorous ways and they encourage this intellectual activity not only in terms
of something that the actor has to go away and do as part of preparation for rehearsal and
performance. That thinking is also something the actor has to do while actively engaged in
the process of rehearsal and performance.
No doubt we hope that the deeper, more rigorous thinking we encourage our actors to do
outside of rehearsal will result in what looks like spontaneous brilliance in playing the role –
because we’re generally suspicious about any actor looking as if they’re ‘thinking too much’ or
‘over-intellectualizing’ as they perform. As directors and teachers we know that there is a kind
of dialogue that occurs between director/actor, teacher/student, actor/actor that continually
broadens and deepens our understanding of the things that we’re working on practically both
in and out of rehearsal, and we recognize our own patterns in terms of preparation, analysis
and articulation in a rehearsal process. And while we know that this thinking, analysing,
verbalizing and sharing of ideas is a substantial part of any rehearsal, there is often little time
spent on considering exactly how the language of all that intellectual activity translates into the
practice of playing a role for the actor without being too detectable in the playing.