Embodied Emotions Onstage and in Life

Source: Bloomsbury Books

In his book Why Do Actors Train? Embodiment for Theatre Makers and Thinkers, Brad Krumholz offers a philosophy of embodiment that applies to the stage and to everyday life. For actors and non-actors alike, he suggests, the exploration of embodiment may lead to new ways of experiencing ourselves in the world, including:

• a "sense of freedom and power (physical, vocal, and social)"
• "confidence . . . in everyday situations"
• "an ability to trust one's partners, to listen well, to initiate and maintain eye contact"
• an ability "to focus one's attention on the present time and place"
• and "a general feeling of physical well-being."

Krumholz—an actor, theater director, and Artistic Director of the North American Cultural Laboratory—makes a two-pronged argument. He offers a model for revising actor training programs in light of research in the field of embodied cognition, and he demonstrates how the principles of that training may help non-actors understand their bodies and identities in new ways.

In order to achieve this, we need to "escape the dualistic language trap." We need to understand and experience body and mind as integral to each other. Theories of embodied cognition suggest that the mind emerges from relations between brain, body, and world. The actor training methods Krumholz surveys—like somatic therapy—afford opportunities to practice embodied cognition and, in the process, to unlearn cultural assumptions about mind and body. The practice is key. Through repetition, actors come to embody new ways of being.

Krumholz points out a core paradox of acting. An actor occupies and creates the "fictive reality of the stage." That same actor is a real person with "her own particular life history and defining characteristics." One goal of actor training is to help the person act the part, or to align the embodied emotion of the character and the person. Krumholz surveys a history of training techniques designed to expand the the ability to "embody a variety of scenic behaviors" and emotional states. The training exercises he uses to demonstrate how this works are the plastiques (practicing the flow of minute body gestures), the three layers (practicing attention to perception, the joints in the body, and the body's relation to space), and vocal action (becoming intimate with the physical mechanisms of speech and how to employ them to communicate emotion).

Krumholz imagines a hypothetical actor playing Nora in Ibsen's A Doll's House:

Somehow . . . the actor playing Nora has learned the technique of how to activate a whole bodily network of small neural processes connected to muscles large and small in a way that corresponds to what will communicate to an audience within a certain set of behavioral connections. She does not activate the mental representation first and then translate that into bodily action second. She activates the entire system all at once.

The "somehow" here is key and, as Krumholz acknowledges, points to a body of research that is more suggestive than definitive. Nonetheless, he makes a persuasive argument that the way we understand the world and our place in it depends on our particular bodies. In other words, the experience of identity and social relations are embodied.

Our bodies, Krumholz reminds readers again and again, exist in relation to our environments, including other bodies. Citing twentieth-century philosopher Merleau-Ponty, he suggests that the body "is an active participant in the environment in which it exists." In that sense, we are not only responsible to others; we depend on them for our sense of being and well-being.

In concrete terms, our embodied cognition works through our "body schemas"—the unconscious sense of our bodies moving through space. The body schema (a concept explored by Merleau-Ponty and, more recently, Shaun Gallagher, among a host of philosophers and psychologists) "functions unconsciously as we navigate through space over the course of our daily lives." Unlike body image, or beliefs about our bodies, the body schema is about how our bodies feel and what we do with them.

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Krumholz illustrates this through a description of picking up a bowling ball: "while my conscious mind is aware of the task I have decided to undertake, it is the body schema that manages the unconscious network of actions and adjustments that make it possible for my body (hand, arm, spine, leg placement, the other body parts that work to keep me from falling over and ensure the proper leverage to lift the heavy object, all in coordination with the micro-movements of my eyes) to perform it and act proficiently in the world in general."

Crucially, the body schema includes "peripersonal space"—the space around our bodies, through which people and other objects routinely move. That's why, as James Krasner has argued, we experience grief through the body, akin to a phantom limb. Those we are intimate with become part of our body schemas, so we experience their loss as a physical experience.

In everyday life, as on the stage, the conscious repetition of certain practices—from riding a bike to playing an instrument—enables people to enact them unconsciously. The actions become routine for their body schemas. The same is true of social interactions. If we become aware of how our bodies feel in response to our relationships, new ways of relating to people may become unconscious. This is why actor training exercises, dance, or therapeutic somatics can make us feel more free and more confident to trust, live in the moment, and feel a greater sense of well-being.