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Under the influence of post-structuralist studies, the notion of characters as real people and a play as an actual event also came under review. This naturalization process the hiding of both the discourse and the means of production within the play is taken for granted by bourgeois art. Other theories of acting, however, have provided us with a wide range of alternatives. There is Jacques Copeau who compelled each actor to start from zero, to become a complete tabula rasa before entering a character. There is Antonin Artaud who went a little further and prodded his players till they achieved trancelike performances. And there is Vsevolod Meyerhold, who forced his company to perform a variety of jerky acrobatics throughout a play. As for Bertolt Brecht, he not only revolutionized the technique of acting, he also questioned the role and function of the actor on the stage. In short, compared to traditional or method acting styles whose efforts are directed toward making the characters and the actuality of a situation come alive, these other models all suggested different purposes for a play and a distinct conditioning or motivating force for the actors.
Without going into the details, one could generalize such theories by saying that they all radicalize in some way the distance between character and actor as well as rethink the relation between representation and audience. A modern way of conceptualizing acting therefore requires a rethinking of the actor's role: not as someone who incarnates another human being so convincingly that one loses track of the differences between them, but as a performer whose job it is to communicate or, rather, to signify. "The actor's task," Phillip B. Zarrilli persuasively argues, "is creating signs through voice and body." 54 Seen in this light, the actor becomes a signifier in charge of a signified. Brecht for one felt very strongly that actors not get lost in their parts. Indeed, when method actors go inside the self to find emotional equivalents to what troubles the character, the original predicament is uncritically internalized. In other words, they accept everything that happens to the characters as "natural and unavoidable."55 Not only are the events justified, but spectators are also invited to identify emotionally with the plight of the individuals on the stage. Brecht wanted none of this. First, he advocated moving the emphasis of the play from the individuals themselves to what happened between them. A typical ploy here involves the substitution of a social gestus for the mere motion of an individual human being. The gestus is a rec-

 



Film Production Theory2000
Film Production Theory2000
ISBN: N/A
EAN: N/A
Year: 2004
Pages: 126

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