Longing to Belong: Trained Actors’ Attempts to Enter the Profession

Abstract

My research to date has focused on a sociology of the acting profession within Australia, and particularly on the experience of trained actors entering the profession. Training involves inculcated bodily and cognitive processes that create expectations of future inclusion. This ‘longing to belong’ to the wider profession is very rarely fulfilled following graduation. It is this expectation of inclusion, the memory of emersion in the ‘before’ of performance, that leads to such a heightened sense of exclusion in the actual ‘during’ of the actors career, and often lingers for years before collapsing into a sense of an unfulfilled ‘after’. Combining phenomenological, ethnographic and statistical analysis I will argue that of all those excluded from performance, these souls are placed in the most excruciating position, lingering with a sense of being forever 'partially there'. More positively, I will also detail how producing graduates on masse with expectations that are unlikely to be met, does, from a sociological perspective, create a situation where real change is an ever present possibility as those denied what they feel is their ‘right’ to belong, seize new opportunities to do so.