Cet article est né du Laboratoire "The performer's cognition"(août 2015), mené par Corinne Jola, Gabriele Sofia, Victor Iacono et Daria Lippi, avec 24 participants entre artistes et chercheurs, venus de neuf pays.
Extraits
1. Introduction
An actor on stage faces the challenge to capture an audience's attention and ‘move’ them performance by performance. While there is considerable discussion on how an actor can consistently succeed in this task, there is little consensus on the competences (or skills) required of actors. McVittie (2007), for instance, proposed that abstract competencies, such as maintaining a role or a character, establishing circles of attention, delivery of text, stage ‘presence’, and conveying the illusion of naturalism are vital. Since ‘naturalism’ is linked to a particular theatrical aesthetic, we propose the use of other terms, such as the facility to convey credibility and organicity (Ciancarelli & Ruggeri, 2005). In either case, a better understanding of the requirements of an actor to perform a role convincingly and repeatedly through voice, gesture and movement is of great interest to the actor, the curious spectator, as well as directors and teachers. At present, however, the exact required capacities remain unknown. Our aim is therefore to shift the focus from the discussion of which skills are needed to how the relationship of actors and their daily practice can be modified, in order to enhance their experiences by means of a more reflective and inquisitive approach.
[...]
2. Actors' daily practice: Some empirical background
[...]
Despite a large body of theoretical debates on developing the actor’s performance abilities (e.g., Chekhov & Prey, 1985), there is very little empirical evidence on how contemporary actors maintain or perfect their practice over time. Empirical data regarding the professional life of actors and their daily practice is sparse. To our knowledge, the French national survey on the practice of professional acting, initiated by the Ministry for Culture and Communication and conducted by the Arts Sociology Centre run by Pierre-Michel Menger only a decade ago, is the only available empirical source to date. The findings support the prevalent observation of experts in the acting sector: actors think they learn on the go, while their engagement in training is limited (Patureau, 1999). The perception that it is feasible for actors to pick up the essentials tools in a rather unplanned manner persists even though most casually employed actors underwent a training specific to the actor’s trade. In fact, 85% of the actors participating in the survey had undergone at least one form of professionally-oriented drama training, such as private classes, municipal and regional academies/conservatoires, courses with the National Drama Centres, university drama studies or internationally highly acclaimed establishments. Notably, when asked about what they do when not employed - which is an essential feature of an actor's life – regular deliberate training is not named. Instead, an actor spends most of the time out of contract in search for new work. Hence, when actors report that the challenges of their profession require them to continually revise their professional skills and knowledge, one is left to wonder how they actually do that.
[...]
4. Actor Training Challenges
[...]
In general, an acting exercise is built on one or more constraints (or limitations) similar to those used to find novel and/or creative solutions in dance improvisation (Torrents, Ric & Hristovski, 2015) as well as in sports training (Hristovski, Davids, Araújo & Button, 2006). The effects of constraints on creative solutions have also been explained for complex neurobiological systems (Hristovski, Davids, Araujo & Passo, 2011). As already indicated above, it is relevant to distinguish between initial training (i.e., formal education), continuous training or practice, and warming up exercises. Just like the athlete or the singer, the actor prepares his/her voice and body for the extra-daily effort required during rehearsals, performance or training. The difference between warming up and training is, therefore, subtle, yet relevant. Training engages the performer completely and creatively, in a way that is comparable to the work on stage during a performance. The aim of training is not just to improve physical skills, but to explore a different logic in any given action, as well as to enhance sensory awareness and to provide a new way of organizing the body-mind system of the performer. Hence, training is not something that occurs before or in preparation for the theatre, but it constitutes a dimension that is integral to the work in the theatre.
[...]
5. Neuroscientific Reflections
[...]
One of the toughest prejudices considers the actor as someone who is very good at imitating reality. The actor is thought of as someone who “walks in the character’s shoes” so that she or he lives somehow through the situations experienced by the character she or he has to play. A spectator may thus be unaware that what they watch results from the creation of different dynamics that may sometimes be opposed to those ruling everyday life. Hence, the neuroscientist may also remain bound to a sort of “spectator ethnocentrism” (Barba, 1995: 42), which leads them to consider an actor appearing perfectly natural on stage as someone who is perfectly “repeating” reality. This assumption ignores that such naturalness is just an effect made possible by the actor’s technique. Such “spectator ethnocentrism” disregards an element that may be supposed to have precise physiological consequences: stage acting is not merely acting on a stage, but a kind of acting that is supposed to constantly keep, feed and rule the attention of the spectator. A practical example can maybe make this concept clearer: if an actor has to drink from a glass on stage, every motor act he is going to activate (“grabbing the glass”, “bringing the glass to his mouth”, “swallowing the water”, “put the glass again on the table”) will be aimed at performing the act of “drinking a glass of water”, but, although the action is factually the same and follows the same series of motor acts and is performed in the same time, it will be different, since the actor is here supposed to stimulate the spectator’s attention. The actor’s action is not only directed to an on-stage aim (drinking the glass of water) but also to the audience (stimulating the spectators’ attention). The same action has at once two different aims. This gives rise to a “double intention” of the actor, or better to a dilated intention (Sofia, 2013b) that broadens from the performed action out to the audience. We can reasonably suppose that such a “broadening” of the intention concerns a peculiar neuromotor dimension.
[...]
Very recently, studies in cognitive neuroscience commenced to embrace a more complex perspective, one that calls for an inclusive methodological approach (Klein et al., 2010; Reason et al., 2016); renegotiating the sharp distinction between the body and the mind as present in the Cartesian mind-body dualism and the cognitive sciences at the time (Gallagher & Zahavi, 2008). Current trends in cognitive neuroscience regard the body-mind more as a dynamic continuum emerging from processes connecting different levels of organization, from the neurobiological to the cultural level rather than placing the mind as the ‘commander’ instance (Jola, in press; Dijk et al, 2008; Kiverstein & Miller, 2015). Neuroscience contributes particularly to our understanding of processes of actors training by placing an emphasis on motor perception, motor prediction and execution. Research increasingly regards the nervous system as an instrument for action, rather than representation (Berthoz & Petit, 2008). Such studies provide further evidence of the importance of training motor faculties as a way of enhancing the performative apparatus as a whole. For instance, training can lead to an enrichment of the individual’s motor repertoire. Studies related to the mirror mechanism indicate that when a group of people train together, thus sharing their motor repertoire, they also enhance their creative potential, both individually and as a collective (Sinigaglia & Rizzolatti, 2011). In this sense, cognitive neuroscience can contribute towards a deeper appreciation of why ongoing training, besides rehearsals, is important for creativity in performance.
[...]
6.2.2 Performative body schema
Another means of explaining the challenges of the exercise is through the framework of a performative body schema. Shaun Gallagher defined body-schema as:
"A non-conscious system of processes that constantly regulate posture and movement – a system of motor-sensory capacities that function below the threshold of awareness, and without the necessity of perceptual monitoring” (Gallagher, 2005: 234).
As we noted above, when we practice the 8 steps exercise we experience that our conscious attention is not expandable to more than a certain number of tasks. A more common illustration of such an attention mechanism can be noticed when we learn to drive a car. We are incapable of paying attention at the same time to placing the foot on the clutch and the hand on gear lever, we stall. When we learn how to drive, only experience, the hours spent driving, allows us to free our attention enough to be able to admire the landscape, speak to the passenger or sing at the top of our voice, all while driving. Some tasks have been integrated to another level that is pre-conscious. To put it differently, through practice we have created a body-schema that is adapted to driving. We posit that the same process takes places in the execution of such an exercise as the 8-steps. As in music, actor training entails constraints whereby continuous practice in time allows the modelling of an extra-daily body-schema. The difference lies in the fact that, compared to learning how to drive or learning a musical instrument, in this case there is no object or instrument that the body-schema needs to adapt to.
[...]
6.3 The Actor Scientist
[...]
In other words, a training that does not merely serve as apprenticeship or warming up requires the actor to develop a scientific aptitude: the ability to make precise distinctions and connections, to predict, to simulate and model aspects of performance, to measure, to experiment and produce further questions from the forthcoming results. In particular, such a scientific disposition allows the actor to use training exercises as models through which to address specific aspects of their performative organisation.
[...]
Training by way of ongoing professional development entails a research dimension, which is, precisely how actor training developed in western theatre. At the turn of the twentieth century, influential figures such as Stanislavski, Meyerhold and Copeau regarded training as performative research. The so-called “director-pedagogues” of that time were concerned especially with the actor’s creative development, therefore with the actor’s learning processes. In line with their work we have chosen to relate cognitive neuroscience specifically to actor training, rather than to theatre poetics (how theatre is made) and aesthetics (how theatre is presented). Their research on the performative self inevitably led to investigating the organization of human cognition in performance: what can we learn about human action, emotion, imagination, perception, attention, and so on, that we may then learn how to consciously organize performance in the creative encounter with the spectator?
[...]
