Phillip Zarrilli

Toward a Phenomenological Model of the Actor's Embodied Modes of Experience

How can the contemporary actor’s body and experience in performance be theorized? 2 What methodological tools are useful in an attempt to better understand the embodied work of the actor? This essay applies one among a set of complimentary methodological tools to this question—a post‐Merleau-Ponty phenomenology. 3 Like all accounts of embodiment and experience this one is necessarily limited by “our propositional modes of representation,” since it is extremely difficult “to express the full meaning of our experience.” 4 In spite of such limitations, this essay is intended to contribute to phenomenological studies of embodiment by extending their focus from

The Metaphysical Studio

The studio is a place where words count less, where something comes of nothingsound from silence, action from impulse. Zarrilli muses on the deep workdrawn from his long practice of the Indian martial art kalarippayattuthat can take place only in the studio.

For Whom Is the "Invisible" Not Visible?: Reflections on Representation in the Work of Eugenio Barba

From 17-22 September 1986 I attended the International School for Theatre Anthropology (ISTA) Congress on The Female Role As Represented on the Stage in Various Cultures organized by Eugenio Barba in Holstebro, Denmark. At this particular ISTA, a great deal of controversy arose among a number of participants. Erika Munk (1986) recently severely criticized the organizational and representational aspects of this ISTA. I will focus on larger issues of representation in performance raised by the Congress and by Barbas writings about performance. I am not concerned here with Barbas theatre directing.

Eugenio Barba to Phillip Zarrilli: About the Visible and the Invisible in the Theatre and about ISTA in Particular

Here are my reactions to your article For Whom Is the Invisible Not Visible? (TDR 32, no. I:95-Io6) concerning the International School of Theatre Anthropology (ISTA) Congress on The Female Role as Represented on the Stage in Various Cultures, Holstebro, Denmark, 17-22 September 1986. In our culture, knowledge of the actor has often been blocked by the presumption of knowledge. Critics, theatrologists, theoreticians, and even philosophers such as Hegel and Sartre have interpreted the cultural and aesthetic value of the actors art by starting from the presumption that they knew what they were talking about. In reality, they did not know. They based their writings on conjecture, on vague testimony, on their own impressions as spectators. They tried to make science out of something of which they had no experience. This form of ignorance, which resembles that of professors who prefer to quote from books rather than to risk looking through Galileos crude telescope, is also manifest in an indirect and oblique way: the way in which we delegate all authority to science. It consists in the illusion that one is able to understand theatrical behavior with greater precision if one superimposes upon it paradigms which have shown their utility in other fields of research. For Sainte-Albine and Diderot, it was the mechanics of passion. During the Brechtian period, it was the opposition between rationalism and political irrationalism. Yesterday it was psychoanalysis and sociology, today semiology or cultural anthropology. This scientific power of attorney is based on a mental attitude which is profoundly irrational. It causes one to believe that a theoretical paradigm is valid unto itself and therefore is a precise instrument even when it is used out of context.

Toward an Intersubjective Ethics of Acting and Actor Training

Using a recently created performance (‘Told by the Wind’) as a case-study, this chapter addresses the ‘ethical’ implications of intersubjectivity in acting and performance from the author’s dual perspectives as an artist who makes theatre and as a theorist who reflects on the work he creates. The essay reviews phenomenological approaches to intersubjectivity, how ethical issues have been raised in relation to theatre and the practices of making theatre, and the question of what ‘ethics’ is possible in a postmodern, intercultural, globalised world. Utilising Emmanual Levinas’ radical assertion that ‘First philosophy is an ethics’ and Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the lived body, the essay articulates some of the opportunities offered by acting for examining the ethical implications of intersubjectivity in practice and performance.

Toward a Definition of Performance Studies, Part I@@@Between Theatre and Anthropology@@@Rite, Drama, Festival, Spectacle: Rehearsals toward a Theory of Cultural Performance@@@From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play

How is social action related to aesthetics, and anthropology to theatre? What is the meaning of such concepts as work, play, liminal, and flow? In this highly influential book, Turner elaborates on ritual and theatre, persona and individual, role-playing and performing, taking examples from American, European, and African societies for a greater understanding of culture and its symbols.

Psychophysical training, physical actions, and performing Beckett: ‘playing chess on three levels simultaneously’

This essay is part of an ongoing process of collaboration and dialogue between professional US-based actress/acting teacher, Patricia Boyette, and UK-based director/actor-trainer/actor, Phillip Zarrilli about the application of psychophysical process to performing the plays of Samuel Beckett. We began to collaborate on The Beckett Project in 1995 when we made a mutual commitment to a long-term collaborative process of exploring a psychophysical approach to the performance of Samuel Beckett’s plays. The premise of our work is to practically explore and thereby research whether and how a deep, psychophysical training through Asian martial/meditation arts might provide a useful approach for actors in tackling the diverse types of ‘interiority’ demanded by Beckett’s physical and theatrical minimalism in plays such as Not I, Ohio Impromptu, Rockaby, Act Without Words I, Eh Joe, as well as in his more character-based plays, such as Happy Days. We approach Beckett’s plays-in-production within the limitations he sets for their performance. We see these limitations not as restrictions on our creative freedom, but rather as a challenge for discovering a process which allows us to fully realize the ‘interiority’ of each text, i.e., the structures of action and precise rhythms unique to each text. Each play can be viewed as a fragile, complex whole – a structure like a snow-flake with its own contours, lines, spaces, edges, and silences. The psychophysical approach we bring to the texts allows us to explore each individual structure and the physical and mental demands it places on us. While our research and practice have both been informed by broad reading and considered reflection, we necessarily conduct our research in the training/rehearsal studio and in performance. We have focused on how to practically solve the ‘problems’ present in Beckett’s plays

Collaborating on Odissi: An Interview with Sanjukta Panigrahi, Kelucharan Mahapatra, and Raghunath Panigrahi

According to Kapila Vatsyayan, Orissi [odissi] may well claim to be the earliest classical Indian dance style on the basis of archaeological evidence, the most outstanding being the Rani Gumpha caves of the 2nd century B.C. in Orissa. [. ..] Certainly these caves are the first specimens of a dance scene with full orchestration found in sculptures (1974:34). Thus the dance style of which Sanjukta Panigrahi and her teacher-partner Kelucharan Mahapatra are masters has roots deep in the historical traditions of Eastern India. Its place is Orissa, a province facing the Bay of Bengal south of Calcutta. Odissi dance has not had a smooth, unchanging history for the last 2,200 years. Much of its development is sketchy or unknown. And its story in the 20th century is full of the same kind of swift and deep changes that mark whats happened to other Indian classical dances such as bharatanatyam. Dancers were part of the population established at Puris Jagannath temple built in the 12th century. In the late 1970s close to I,500 persons have some ritual duties in this temple, all of whom are males except for the small group of devadasis. The women ritual specialists dance and sing in the temple on a daily basis as well as participate in several calendrical festivals (Marglin I980:I). The devadasis-now all but extinct in Puri and elsewhere-danced their version of odissi for Jagannath, the Orissan Krishna. Devadasi dancing was extinguished by Indians and British colonial authorities who considered the dancers prostitutes. A way around the pressures building against the devadasis and their dancing was to teach odissi to very young boys, the gotipuas, of whom Mahapatra was one. Or maybe the gotipuas were dancers of odissi independent of the temple tradition: Indian arts (as elsewhere) often have their several roots braided together. Trained in gymnasiums, dressed as females for dancing, the gotipuas were organized into village-based troupes. Al-

‘Meditations’ on Loss: Beyond Discourses of Pain and Torture in the Work of the Beckett Actor

Samuel Beckett’s work examines, explores, expresses, and dramatizes in unique ways those dimensions of our lived human experience that constantly ‘look for words’. My concern in this essay is with those among Beckett’s shorter/later dramatic texts which address – often obliquely and each in their own unique way – forms of physical/ psychic ‘pain’ associated with the fragility of our human condition, i.e. loss, trauma, loneliness, and our constant state of being toward death. Actors playing certain stage figures in Beckett’s late plays deliver difficult text while assuming equally difficult physical positions – often remaining ‘still’ for extended periods while inhabiting states in extremis. As Graley Herren has observed: ‘much of Samuel Beckett’s work meditates with ruthless intensity upon loss and the pathological efforts of the mind to deny, distort, or imaginatively overcome loss’. However, Herren presciently asserts that while ‘Beckett in pain is a crucial precondition to “Beckett and Pain”’, Beckett ‘is not his characters nor should one blithely presume to equate their sufferings as mere imitations of the author’s own’. In this essay I address the question of whether it is necessary for the actor performing Beckett’s shorter/later plays to suffer, i.e. to literally experience physical/psychic ‘pain’. Within the context of the professional actor’s work, how can we better understand, contextualize, and articulate the constraints as well as the affordances that acting Beckett’s plays offer, ensuring we do not overly emphasize or fetishize ‘pain’ or the ‘terror’ actors can experience when performing Beckett? A more balanced 1. Les Todres, Embodied Enquiry: Phenomenological Touchstones for Research, Psychotherapy and Spirituality (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), x.

Affective Performance and Cognitive Science: Body, Brain and Being, edited by Nicola Shaughnessy

and analysis of Gill’s directing and playwriting career, informed by personal insight and passion and the testimony of Gill’s collaborators and colleagues, such as John Burgess, Kenneth Cranham, William Gaskill, and Max Stafford-Clark. Setbacks, disappointments, and failures are acknowledged but not afforded the same level of attention as the positive aspects, which means that reasons for Gill’s marginal position are not fully explored and an important critical dimension is missing. Although Norris does not explicitly place Gill in the context of postwar British theatre, key features are highlighted: on leaving school, without recourse to university, Gill’s departure from working-class Catholic Cardiff to London; Gill’s attachment to an English-language theatre tradition from the Elizabethans and Jacobeans through Oscar Wilde and Harley Granville-Barker to John Osborne, Joe Orton, and Harold Pinter; and the salient place of Anton Chekhov, D. H. Lawrence, and Samuel Beckett in Gill’s aesthetic development. Understandably, Norris especially notes the class and cultural connections with Lawrence, to three of whose plays Gill gave revelatory productions at the Royal Court (1967–68). Gill’s plays echo Lawrence, says Norris, in his political assertion of ‘an insistent, defiant humanistic sensibility, which has led him [Gill] to look at forgotten people and the margins of society in his own work’ (p. 57). Scrutiny of this body of work, from his first play, The Sleepers Den (1965) to Versailles (2014), the latest at the time of publication, forms the backbone of the book. Norris, however, does not simply offer textual analysis but astute performance analysis too, frequently demonstrating how the practicality of Gill’s directorial approach is inseparable from the expression of his vision on the page. Many of the plays are mapped out against the imaginative landscape of his Welsh upbringing, ‘exploring the vanished world of his youth, traversing through his work the distance placed between himself and his past by geography and time’ (p. 10). According to Norris, Gill’s approach is ‘first of all social realist’ (p. 11), yet in his plays he ‘complicates this aesthetic – while his plays are written with minute, intensely naturalistic attention to detail at the level of the individual line or scene, they are structurally complex, often radical in their form’ (p. 11). This is an aspect of Gill’s plays rarely commented upon. It can be seen, for example, in the allusive and elusive monologues of Small Change that subvert the play’s time sequence and sense of a present tense; in the oblique Kick for Touch (1983), which unfolds in non-chronological overlapping scenes and has at its heart the disconnection between the three characters, and between them and the audience; and in Another Door Closed (2009), a Beckettian revisiting of an altered Cardiff and a play haunted by death. Gill sometimes paints on a broader canvas, as in Cardiff East (1997) or Certain Young Men (1999), but whatever his scale, and whether he is exploring relationships and the limits to love in the setting of working-class Cardiff, the London underworld of rent boys (In the Blue, 1985), or rural Yorkshire (The York Realist, 2001), he has been able, says Norris, ‘to give beauty to people’s ordinary lives’ (p. 228). This, for Norris, sums up Gill’s marginalised project, which Norris sees as heroic despite Gill’s unique place in the major theatrical institutions of his day. Norris has duly filled the gap left by neglect of Gill’s work in a lively, fluent book that avows the practicality, pragmatism, continuity, and theatricality of Gill’s accomplishment, yet Norris is aware that his book is a preliminary report, as it were. Gill is still writing and directing, and future commentary will hopefully build on Norris’s work by offering a developed critique of Gill rooted in the detail and complexity of the theatrical landscape of which he is such a luminous landmark.