Abstract
Oscillating between being ‘within’ and ‘without’ a performative experience, Phillip Zarrilli’s chapter details the ways in which performance, as necessarily embodied and perceived, makes manifest some of the better-known tenets of phenomenological thinking. In particular, he illuminates the way in which a performance event underscores the prevalence of the bodymind (as per Merleau-Ponty), and even more explicitly (through his key example of Beckett’s Act Without Words I), a Heideggerian ‘thrownness’. The chapter further touches upon many of the key phenomenological tropes that are highlighted early and often in the book, especially a desire to be precise and rigorous in terms of articulating what phenomenology is and what it does, specifically with respect to the study of theatre and performance.
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Notes
- 1.
This essay is edited and based on materials that are part of my forthcoming book, (toward) a phenomenology of acting, to be published by Routledge Press. See also Zarrilli (2015a, b) for other essays focusing specifically on phenomenology and actor training/performance. For an additional of a non-verbal performance which further explores the nature of inhabiting the pre-articulate present, see my account of Ōta Shōgo’s (1939–2006) remarkable, highly poetic score of The Water Station (2009, 144–173) and the expanded discussion that will appear in (toward) a phenomenology of acting. The two main premises guiding Ōta and his company’s development of the performance score included ‘acting in silence, and to make that silence living human time, acting at a very slow tempo’ (Ōta Shōgo 1990, 150). The artistic process that crystallised for Ōta while working on The Water Station has been described by Mari Boyd as one of ‘divestiture’ (2006, passim), i.e. the discarding or paring away of anything unnecessary from the performance score and theatrical environment so that actors and audience alike are taken out of their everyday world and focus on the irreducible elements of our shared existence—what Ōta calls ‘the “unparaphrasable realm of experience”’ (1990, 151). See also Zarrilli (2012) with its phenomenological account about work on Told by the Wind.
- 2.
An actor’s performance score is that structure or sequence of actions determined in part or in full by conventional performance techniques, and/or through rehearsal processes (often responding to and embodying a dramatic text), and/or through devising/making processes. The score provides the actor with a repeatable template or map guiding her embodiment, senses and experience of that score within live performance. Eugenio Barba and Julia Varley define the actor’s sub-score, respectively, as the actor’s own aesthetic logic and set of images, associations, sensations, etc. that usually remain ‘hidden’ and are not publicly revealed (Barba 2010, 24; Varley 2011, 79). See also Zarrilli (2013, 12–18).
- 3.
The original French version included music by John Beckett—cousin of Samuel Beckett (Beckett 1984, 42).
- 4.
For our 2012 performances on invitation of The Malta Festival, Andy Crook took over playing the protagonist, and I performed the attendant. For a full discussion of The Beckett Project and how we staged Act Without Words I, see Zarrilli (2009, 115–143).
- 5.
I elaborate on the nature and importance of the role of temporality and repetition in this process of ‘thickening’ in my concluding analysis and discussion.
- 6.
The material/physical body (Körper) is usually thought of as the body of ‘substances’ or as an ‘entity’ (Blackman 2008, 1), such as the dead body or cadaver dissected by medical students. In contrast to Körper, Leib is the living/breathing/sensorially/experiencing ‘being’ that responds to and within the ‘world’ or ‘environment’ I encounter, including the theatrical present. Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1962) rejected the 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 challenged the Cartesian cogito. Merleau-Ponty reclaimed the centrality of the lived/living body (Leib) and embodied experience as the means/medium through which the world comes into being and is experience. I choose to mark Leib with the compound bodymind to emphasise the underlying non-duality of lived/living experience. There is always a ‘cognitive’ element available in embodied experience per se.
- 7.
In a footnote about their translation of Befindlichkeit as ‘state of mind’ in Heidegger’s Being and Time, Macquarrie and Robinson note that ‘Our translation, “state-of-mind”, comes fairly close to what is meant, but it should be made clear that the ‘of-mind’ belongs to English idiom, has no literal counterpart in the structure of the German word, and fails to bring out the important connotation of finding oneself’ (in Heidegger1962, 172 fn. emphasis added). From my perspective, for the work of the actorBefindlichkeit is best translated literally, keeping the original sense of ‘finding’ or ‘attuning’ oneself in the present moment.
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Zarrilli, P.B. (2019). Acting Without ‘Meaning’ or ‘Motivation’: A First-Person Account of Acting in the Pre-articulate World of Immediate Lived/Living Experience. In: Grant, S., McNeilly-Renaudie, J., Wagner, M. (eds) Performance Phenomenology. Performance Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98059-1_14
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