Real Human in this Fantastical World: Political, Artistic and Fictive Concerns of Actors in Rehearsal: An Ethnography

Abstract

This study adopts an ethnographic and—in part—autoethnographic stance in the observation of professional rehearsal rooms, with a view to identifying the division of interests and responsibilities of actors working in mainstream Australian theatre. From a position of intense professional locatedness as an actor and acting teacher, I examine and interpret rehearsal practices utilising an ethnographic rubric that embraces the legacies of Pierre Bourdieu, Clifford Geertz, and Michael Jackson, and through the lens of my own experience. The study pursues a centripetal action, beginning with a focus on industrial and social realities, toward an identification of distinctions between artistic and fictive concerns, and so identifies three notional compasses: symbolic spaces that actors occupy in their journeys through professional engagements. These are: the political compass, representing industrial and social restrictions and liberations; the artistic compass, lying within the political, enormously divergent, and determined by the nature of the text under pursuit, and the influence of the director; the fictive compass, lying wholly within the artistic, which is found to be of a consistency and reliability that belies its prominence in the canonical literature on the craft of acting, particularly in the Stanislavskian tradition. That is to say, these actors in rehearsal are found to concern themselves most consistently and reliably with artistic challenges, as distinct from fictive challenges, and in the constant light of their industrial and social circumstances. Along this centripetal path, notions of acquiescence, compliance, agency, mystery, roguery, epistemology, democracy, friendship, loneliness, and phenomenology are encountered and examined in the context of actors’ weird working lives. Finally, claims are made for actors as artists, and these claims are held to the light of prevailing industrial structures that, perhaps, neither admit nor utilise the actor as artist.