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David Jackson - ‘A Performance Experiment: The Psychophysiology of the Actor’
Monday 2nd June 2014, 2pm. Jarman Studio 2.
In this seminar, I will describe an interdisciplinary ‘performance experiment’ that is scheduled to take place at Birmingham City University in September 2014. The project is a collaboration between Professor Robert Ashford, Head of the Graduate School of the Faculty of Health at BCU, Dr Kate Muir, Research Fellow in Psychology at the University of the West of England and David Jackson, acting tutor at the Birmingham School of Acting.
The experiment occupies a space at the intersection of three major fields of discourse, two of which are dominated by dualistic debate. In psychology, basic emotion theory views emotions as the products of phylogenetic evolution, best understood as modes of perceiving the world that are conducive to survival. Scholars frequently identify six basic emotions and argue that such emotions are universally recognizable across eras and cultures. Constructionist theory, on the other hand, suggests that emotional response is socially conditioned, that its manifestations are virtually infinite in variety and that specific emotions cannot be located in biology. Similarly, acting theory contains two polar opposite approaches to the embodiment of emotion on stage. The ‘experiencing’ school of the Stanislavsky tradition strives to enable actors to undergo the same emotions as the characters they portray, while the so-called ‘detachment’ school rejects the need to reproduce actual emotions and focusses instead on the accurate representation of feeling. Thirdly, the project takes place in the intellectual climate of the cognitive revolution, which has paved the way for numerous attempts to generate new knowledge through dialogue between science and the humanities.
It is widely recognised that Stanislavsky’s ‘system’ was influenced by Théodule Ribot’s concept of affective memory. Ribot distinguished between the ‘memory of emotion’, i.e. the simple recall of emotive events and true ‘emotion memory’, which is accompanied by the physiological events associated with the original experience. Contemporary Russian practitioners, such as Sergei Tcherkasski and Andrei Malaev-Babel, argue that in order to fully represent emotion in the theatre, these physiological symptoms must be present. Tcherkasski goes further, to propose that the true measure of an actor is not their ability to perform audition speeches, but their ability to respond physiologically to emotional stimuli. These suggestions raise a number of intriguing questions about the nature of acted emotions: which emotional exercises have the greatest physiological impact? Can we distinguish between the stress of performance and emotions that belong to the fictional world? Is there any evidence that trained actors have a greater ability to respond to emotional stimuli than non-actors?
In this seminar, I outline the theoretical background to the performance experiment and the rationale behind its approach. I summarise the experimental protocol which blends the methodology of the clinical trial and actor training practice to generate both empirical and subjective data. Conceived as a pilot for further investigations, the performance experiment is the first step in a process that seeks to address long-standing questions in the physiology of the emotions, the psychology of subjective response and actor training practice. Moreover, we hope to develop a new methodology for interdisciplinary study.