“This Side of Reality”

Abstract

What does it mean to be “real” in performance? Referencing her work with Phillip B. Zarrilli and Andy Lavender, Bella Merlin raises a series of five provocations about contemporary acting practice that range from “What do we think we're doing when we're acting?” to an exploration of aspects of Stanislavski's toolkit. Drawing together perezhivanie (“living through a role”) with cognitive investigations into the “enactive” nature of human existence, Merlin explores the usefulness of Stanislavski's “here-today-now” to overcome dislocations from the character and as a potential antidote to stage fright. Proposing that Stanislavski's own stage fright prompted some of his acting experiments, Merlin suggests that actor-training is on the brink of a paradigm shift. As our understanding of cognitive science and human biology evolves, so too must acting processes, and the enactive approach considers emotion and cognition as unified parts of the process. Merlin also proposes that Stanislavski's Active Analysis—with its emphasis on improvisation—was an intuitive response on Stanislavski's part to what we now know scientifically of the operation of human interactions.

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