Minus workshop 4, part 1: embodying emotion
- In theatre we do the opposite of how emotions are formed: we embody emotions
- Emotions form by the association of physical, social or cultural—including aesthetic and intellectual—actions with the feelings that we have words for, like pain, happiness, nostalgia, grief, anger, love and hate. Bergson says (again with the Bergson!) if an action does not already have this association it is unlikely to form it later, which points to the non-innate but inchoate nature of emotional association: when emotions form is largely through the developmental stages, potentially before birth, particularly through early childhood—the period of socialisation—and into maturity
- In Minus theatre—given cultural variations in theatrical practice I can't speak for theatre in general—we learn to embody emotion by going in the opposite direction
- (Deleuze calls this (again with the Deleuze!) counteractualisation:) Rather than the action that forms the association coming from without, we bring it. Now it might be thought that it comes from within, many (Declan Donnellan included, in The Actor and the Target, 2002) disagree: rather, it comes from the actor's body. This simply means they act
- Through their actions they work to get to the point, as far as possible, that they embody the emotion. They put it into their body, by undertaking whatever actions are necessary to them. Actors have wildly divergent approaches to embodying emotion, either by strenuous exercises, even denying the emotion, to let it inhabit them; or by intellectual exercise. As Jan Švankmajer puts it (in his "10 commandments"): Before you start making a film, write a poem, paint a picture, create a collage, write a novel, essay, etc. That is by doing something quite different from acting
- An actor has as their target the association of what we might best call an emotional image. It's also up to the actor—and in fact the director and in some cases the group—what composes that image, whether for example it's a cliché or a symbol. For Minus it's not what we habitually associate with that image, either tears for sadness or whatever might symbolise it in any given cultural tradition, rather the image precedes the actions the actor undertakes hoping to arrive at embodying the emotion
- "An Actor never deals with elements smaller than a world" is the title of a paper by Essa Kirkkopelto. In Minus we say that an actor never deals with a gesture smaller than a world. The gesture is an action in which their body and mind compose that image
- And that image is never smaller than a world. For the painter Francis Bacon and Deleuze following him, the Potemkin image above expresses a world. So, how arrive at it? by getting into that world imaginatively
- We want to wind up with the image, not to film it but to have it on stage for the briefest time. Because it is only the briefest time it is beyond value. (I say stage but I mean working space, in our case Ellen Melville Centre auditorium.) Since a gesture never deals with elements smaller than a world, and a gesture can be that of the face, body, voice or something deeper, the actor puts the world of the emotion before the emotional image it presumes. They get their body to where it can embody the image
- We might say at this point, What is a body? And we don't know but engage ourselves with exceeding any definition given. The joy, as Spinoza writes, is in enlarging its sphere of action—to, in our case, bring life to the image
- Where theatre differs from therapy is in the direction it goes: it doesn't go from the emotional association, the image, as having to be worked through or returned to—for example, an association formed in early childhood or an image by the imprint of any emotional and traumatic event—but as having itself to be got to and worked towards
- Where then is it? It's in whatever world the actor has to traverse to get there, which for each actor is different; I am hoping it is enough in this workshop to call it the kind of fleeting image or flicker we have been speaking about in previous workshops as belonging to the work of the imagination: emotional image as virtual form. In other words, it is an energy and has energy
- And from this also comes its honesty: does it have the intensity of feeling of, for the examples we will be using in the workshop, the photographs in the exhibition The Family of Man, at the top of this post? Does it have the energy we can feel on the working floor?
