Goran Pavlić
The “Second Nature” of the Actor: On Historical (Mis)Understanding of a Practice
ON NATURE
In his charming vernacular exegesis Barish, in the introduction of his study The Antitheatrical Prejudice
(1981), offers an interesting fact. Namely, in the majority of languages throughout the history of dominant
cultures in the Western European circle the epithets of artistic-expressive provenience in everyday
communication have a clear connotation. While ‘lyrical’, ‘epic’ and ‘poetic’ serve as intensifiers of a positive
impression, expressions such as ‘theatrical’, as well as other related expressions stemming from the
repertoire of the theatre have a (self)implied negative connotation for everyone. This is definitively the
case with South Slavic languages. The notions of ‘theatrical’ or ‘to act’ go beyond the scientific terminology
of reflecting upon the theatre as a social and artistic institution, and predominantly imply an artificial,
insincere, unauthentic character of actions or objects thus attributed. Indeed, it is a wide communicational
consensus. The base of this widespread interpretation is grounded on a conceptual opposition of ‘natural :
artificial’ which reaches far beyond the very field of art and is used in almost all domains of human practice,
ranging from communications, nutrition science, ecology to the most specialised fields of neurocognitive
science.
Barish’s study presents a history of primarily a specific social dynamics within which, and in an interaction
with which, the theatre has been developing since its roots in Antiquity to the present time. From the very
beginning, the anti-theatre argumentation was firmly founded on the very a priori postulate: the theatre is
bad because it is not authentic, not sincere, in short, it is not natural. Both ethical and aesthetical
argumentations over the centuries have had to, explicitly or implicitly, take into account this basic
distinction. However, until the Age of Enlightenment there was no analysis of the very concept of nature or
natural. That is, there could not have been for at least two reasons. On the one hand, under the spiritual
dominance of Christianity, which had taken over the fundamental categories of Hellenic thought, nature
was always understood as something secondary –opposed to the spirit– and as such was not exactly a
legitimate domain of autonomous reflection of the mind. On the other hand, only with the social-historical
circumstances of the great world discoveries as well as the revolutionary development of citizenry did the
door for the development of natural sciences open. Within the coordinates so defined, the systematically
conceived concept of naturalness was only reached with the more radical materialistic thoughts which
ripened within the circle of the French Encyclopaedists. The contributor to this intellectual circle and, for
the Western cultural circle, historically and epistemologically crucial movement was Denis Diderot whose
essay The Paradox of Acting is an unavoidable study on the phenomenon of acting based on which, or
opposed to which, all the preceding theories of acting formed (Roach, 2005). A more extensive review of
his theses would go far beyond both the ambition and the scope of this paper, but it is important to note
that the consequent debate about the problems Diderot identified had a significant impact on the
formation of the great acting-theoretical systems, such as the one by Stanislavski. The implementation of
the then emerging concept of conditioned reflexes in methodological-educational system of acting enabled
the conceptualisation of structurally induced spontaneity, or in Stanislavski’s words the ‘second nature’
(ibid.:209) which, to everyone else looks like the first, authentic nature.
“Second nature” is a basic concept of Barba’s theatre anthropology as well. His book The Paper Canoe
(1995) defines what exactly finds specific of theatre anthropology as a discipline. It is not, on the contrary
to the traditional concept, just another comparative-anthropological compendium with reviews and
analyses of theatre practices from different cultures and periods, but is ‘the study of the pre-expressive
scenic behaviour upon which different genres, styles, roles and personal or collective traditions are all
based(...) in an organised performance the performer’s physical and vocal presence is modelled according
to the principles which are different from those of daily life. This extra-daily use of the body-mind is called
‘technique’ (1995:9). This technique, when applied, sets in motion the actor’s physical and physiological
predispositions, leading to the generation of a new complex of pre-expressive tensions. This complex
generates a particular energy, a new ontological register, called ‘scenic bios’ by Barba, which implies an
establishment of the performer-audience relationship before any message is transmitted.
Despite being firmly fixed in the 20th century by many parameters, between the work of Stanislavski and
Barba there is a huge gap. It is not inherently of analytical nature, which means that in the consideration of
all the consequences of this gap, we cannot remain (merely) on the level of the immanent development of
theatrical concepts. It is an epochal, primarily epistemological cut of postmodernism as an intellectual cut
without a match in the history of Western thought. Breaking the deeply rooted fundamental concepts of
the Western metaphysics, the philosophical legacy of postmodernism irreversibly delegitimized the firmest
topoi of criticism (as a possible way of thinking) such as the truth, subject, progress, awareness, speech,
challenging their primacy and denouncing the potency of binary oppositions upon such cognitive constructs
were built. The majority of the most eminent reviews of the historical development of the 20 th century
theatre (Carlson, 1996; Fischer-Lichte, 2008; Lehmann, 2004), which focus on the so called performative
turn, agree with such a diagnosis. In the narrower theatrical register, the key opposition which generated
certain poetics, as well as schools or directions of aesthetics, was the one between the audience and the
actor, with clearly attributed and untransferable functions of these two entities. Performative turn lies in
the crossing over this firmly defined border, in destabilising the concepts of the performer and the
audience. Erika Fischer-Lichte (2008)1 goes as far as to state that for a consistent understanding of
1
In the article I mainly refer and cite the English edition entitled The Transformative Power of Performance – A New
Aesthetics, although the original title is Ästhetik des Performativen from 2004.
postmodernist performing practices it is necessary to conceptualise a completely new aesthetics – an
aesthetics of performativity. The beginning of the performative turn is placed in the early 1960s, which
coincides with the appearance of seminal works of postmodernist thought, so the practices of performance
are further developed dialectically with the development of postmodernist theses and concepts.
However, some thirty years earlier, in the aesthetics related works of the renowned Croatian theatre
director2 Branko Gavella, we can find already thoroughly though out theses which anticipated the
destabilisation of the basic concepts of the Western dramaturgy and theory, including the theatre
aesthetics (although, noteworthy, without any explicit or implicit intention for such a degree of
idiosyncrasy). I will try to show the way his theses correspond to the latest reflections, or even go beyond
them, through analysing the particular status the actor’s body has as a co-generator of a work of art in his
theory of acting.
ON THE NATURE OF THE CUT
Hans-Thies Lehmann offers in his study Postdramatic Theatre a historical overview of the social
circumstances which influenced the gradual formation of poetical particularities, which ultimately resulted
in a completely novel format - the postdramatic theatre3. While the crucial framework of reference for the
absurdist poetics was provided by desperation over the consequences of World War II and existentialism as
the key philosophical and worldview paradigm of the period which questioned the very sense of human
existence, ‘for the postdramatic theatre of the 1980s and 1990s the disintegration of ideological certainties
represents no longer a problem of metaphysical anguish but a cultural given’ (2004:69). One of the
ideological certainties of modernism, which postmodernism efficiently deconstructs, definitively is
coherence of genealogic narrative, whether it is the human condition and its progress, the creation of sense
or system of values. The same goes for the theatre. Coherence of theatrical performances as the carrier of
sense, despite the fact that it was deeply shaken by the historical avant-garde, managed to survive the
challenges of the 1960s and continue functioning as an unquestionable principle of this art. Nevertheless,
from the 1960s, the theatre or, in a wider sense, performing arts, abandons providing a coherent synthesis
which would vouch for a semiotic integrity (Fischer-Lichte, 2008:22). Thus, its poetic features faithfully
follow a wider dynamics of the epoch of postmodernism, with the destruction of self-implied foundations
of Western civilisation as its main objective. In Lehmann’s words, by abandoning the synthesis ‘theatre,
2
The philosophical contributions of Gavella are not only underestimated by their classification in the field of general
theatre science, but, moreover, they are not even included in the official corpus of philosophical thought, although
their depth and originality at the time of appearance put them on the world top of the philosophical reflection on
theatre of that time.
3
Lehmann introduces an explicit distinction between the postmodern and postdramatic theatre, which is quite
legitimate within the frame of his poetologic-analytical orientation. But the way he distinguishes these two terms fails
to envelop the type of structural parallels critical for the argumentation of this article.
becomes the paradigm of the aesthetic’ (2004:109). The deconstruction of the unquestionable discourses
of aesthetics, the principles of the theatre or characteristics of style become a subject of aesthetic
treatment and a set of such procedures makes what, for the radical novelty it brings, can be legitimately
named a new paradigm of theatre – the postdramatic theatre. Among the constitutive features of the new
paradigm, two deserve special mention in this context: physicality and event/situation, which essentially
originate from the art of performance (2004:106-136).
Samuel Weber (2004), by analysing the features specific of theatre as a medium, offers a thesis that the
entire history of reflection upon the theatre revolves around the tendency to reduce the theatre to the
purely technical means of representation (dramatic text, historical truth, or any other previously existing
script) and a resistance to this tendency. The radicalness of the 1960s performative turn lies in its
consistent rejection of the very concept of representation and insistence on presentation, that is, on
presence as a legitimate aesthetical topos. Presence is, by its intrinsic definition, a physical variable so it can
only be materialised by a body, which gives body a completely new aesthetical status. Analysing
Abramović’s famous 1975 performance Lips of Thomas, Fischer-Lichte emphasises several moments of
crucial importance for consolidating the new aesthetics. The performance ended ‘unsuccessfully’ because
the threat of self-injury to the artist’s life made some members of the audience intervene and thus prevent
the further injury, but subsequently, the continuation of the performance as well. The final result of the
performance significantly redefined ‘two relationships of fundamental importance to hermeneutical as well
as semiotic aesthetics: first, the relationship between subject and object, observer and observed, spectator
and actor; second, the relationship between materiality and semioticity of the performance’s elements,
between signifier and signified (2008:17). For hermeneutic and for semiotic aesthetics, it is fundamental to
have a work of art as ‘a distinct, fixed and transferable artifact which exists independently of its creator’
(ibid.). Such a work of art in its fixed format is subject to endless interpretations which can function, more
or less, as a plausible and substantiated reflection on the work. However, the artefact of this type does not
appear as a result of a performance we observe. Quite on the contrary, the direct materiality and factual
character of Abramović’s self-inflicted injuries disabled any momentary semiotisation which could have
been able to cope with the potency and significance of the directly witnessed event. Reduced to the
individual level, the members of the audience were not primarily motivated to interpret the meaning, but,
as the result of the performance proves, to act. Thus, the entire process cannot be treated as a work of art
in the traditional sense but as an event whose wide participation destabilised the firm opposition between
the subject and the object, the performer and the audience.
Here it seems important to point to Carlson’s warning (1996:80) that an itemised catalogue of performance
practice features, which would be formed inductively4 and function as a kind of aesthetical canon of the
4
The case he refers to and which is an unavoidable instance in understanding the history of performance art is a study
by RoseLee Goldberg - Performance Art: from Futurism to the Present.
field, perhaps is not the best choice in heuristic sense. Undoubtedly, the anti-establishment sentiment, the
use of multi-media, incoherence, insistence on the physical, auto-reference, etc. are features shared by the
majority of works which belong to the pantheon of performance art. But if we decide upon this
methodological choice, we immediately face the fact that the list of features is always arbitrarily framed by
the historical and epistemological instance of the author or authoress who makes the categorisation.
Moreover, and more importantly, by doing this we turn a methodological blind eye to the fact that a
number of these features have existed even before the appearance of performance art as an autonomous
artistic practice, and that not only in the age of historical avant-garde, or in the work of poetical outcasts
such as Artaud, but even in the classical, conservative practices of the bourgeois dramatic theatre. Insofar,
the two chosen aspect – physicality and event/situation – offer some kind of privileged door to a critical
field where a consistent reflection on the importance and reach of the radical break up with the traditional
aesthetical positions will be possible.
Although, as already mentioned, the most relevant historiographic or critical studies put the time of the
break-up into the 1960s, the foundation of a particular ontology of performing practice had been set
several decades earlier. 5 Fischer-Lichte emphasises the importance of Max Hermann as a pioneer of the
theatre science who, in his works from the period between 1910 and 1930, offers a radically new view of
the phenomenon of the theatre. He emphasises that the point of the theatre is ‘a social play, played from
all and for all’ in which ‘spectators are involved as co-actors. In this sense, the audience is the creator of the
theatre’ (2008:32). However, the English translator has taken some stylistic freedom which, however
slightly, changes the meaning of the original Hermann’s thought. The original article from 1920, which is
cited by Fischer-Lichte (2004:46), reads verbatim ‘the audience is involved as a co-acting factor. The
audience is in a certain way the creator of the art of the theatre’6 (italic by G.P.) It is the very way in which
the audience co-creates the art of the theatre where the key explicative element of the new ontology lies.7
Hermann is not decisive about it further, but the implications of such a thesis with a solid physical
commitment were developed by Gavella in his observations on the nature of the art of acting.
5
The concept of ‘ontology of performance art’ in Phelan (1993) is oriented to the constitutive non-reproducibility of
performance art. However, we cannot address in more detail this particular feature as well as its consequences.
6
Referring to the same place, Petlevski (2001:44-45) in the theoretical positioning of Gavella’s thought, gives his own
translation of these theses. It, too, is philologically inaccurate, as she substituted the term ‘audience’ with the term
‘spectator’. However, this will prove to be quite justified and philosophically more legitimate from the implications of
Gavella’s approach, which will be shown further in the text.
7
Petlevski (2001:45) claims that Fischer-Lichte ‘does not 'read' the recent theories of performing arts into the analysis
of Hermann’s contribution to German theatrology. However, Petlvski’s study was published in 2001 and refers to the
earlier works by Fischer-Lichte. Nevertheless, in the Aesthetic of the Performative from 2004, the German
theatrologist incorporates Hermann’s insights into the theoretical grid of the theory of performance art.
ON THE NATURE OF ACTING
Branko Gavella (1885 – 1962) claimed that ‘since his directing beginnings he has considered himself to be
an advocate of literature in the theatre’8 (1970:8; italic in the original). His directing practice certainly
proves it, and the methodology he always explicitly emphasises starts from concrete problems he
encountered in staging mainly classical dramas. Consistently with that, he claims that ‘the central problem
of the theatre, its association with the drama, equally cannot be solved until the concept of acting is
thoroughly distilled’ (2005b:29). However, this central problem is not just an a priori thesis unreflected
upon. In his review of the present theatre-critical insistence on a literary value of drama exclusively, back in
1912, Gavella, in his article ‘Stage and Drama’, decisively claims: ‘drama has an aesthetic value only as a
scenic artwork’ (2005a:173). Therefore, despite his intimately self-admitted ‘conservatism’, i.e. his
advocating literature in the theatre, his aesthetic reflection upon the phenomenon of the theatre is already
farsighted. More concretely, at the very beginning of his artistic engagement he displays reduction of the
theatrical phenomenon to the literary model, which was the aesthetical dominant of the time. In the article
‘Acting – Theatrical Problems’ from 1934, as an already mature director he lays down ‘three fundamental
facts upon which rests the entire complicated phenomenon called the theatre,’ and these are: 1. Acting and
the actor, 2. Collective character of the art of the theatre, and 3. Reproducible character of the art of the
theatre’ (2005b:32). The third factor additionally testifies to his commitment to literature, however, the
elaboration of the first two deserves special attention in the context of our argumentation.
According to Gavella, the fundamental means of expression of an actor are voice and movement, that is,
word and gesture, while gesture includes a wide scope of mimic expressions. On the contrary to the usual
repertoire of vocal abilities and body movements, ‘one should seek such deformities that the common
empirical life instrument adopts when it is incorporated into art.’ The aim of these deformities is
‘awakening of parallel psycho-physical processes in a spectator’ in order to raise his awareness of the
particularity of the vocal articulation and/or the dual character of using this human potential – natural and
artistic. With gestures, it is an analogue process – everyday gestures are intentionally deformed so that the
exaggerated movement would in a spectator ‘initiate parallel organic stimuli.’ The feeling which then arises
in the spectator’s mind ‘does not have to be associated with the performance of the actual gesture, but
with the reproduced inner image of the gesture. This image is not a visual image, but absolutely of motoric
organic nature.’ These are, according to Gavella, the foundations of the acting technique and in all the
elements of this technique there is a ‘factor of potentiating some internal organic functions, awakening of
parallel organic phenomena in the spectator’s mind’ (2005b:33-37). Since the psychological findings of the
time undoubtedly detect physiological changes associated with the appearance of sensations that a
reception of artwork arises, Gavella concludes that:
8
Petlevski notes that the same goes for Hermann, who was even more conservative in this sense (ibid.)
‘acting does the same as other arts do: it stimulates our inner life for a special function. Acting is, therefore,
such a selection and intensification of organic psychophysical resonances of man’s experience which,
transferred by the means optical and acoustic, invokes in spectators psychophysical phenomena which
become carriers of a special sensory experience. Thus, acting is not 'Schauspiel', but 'Mitspiel', which means
that in the spectator there are potentially active all those psychophysical functions that the actor needs to
perform onstage an action or utter a word. We do not perceive the actor by listening and watching, but
through the fact that parallel to his actions, all the organic elements which follow and regulate his actions
awaken in our own selves’ (2005b:39).
Absolutely consistent with the fourth-wall proposition as the then dominant paradigm of spatial (and thus
poetical) organisation of a performance space, Gavella also notes the following: ‘the inner sense of the
audience opens only once the actor’s inner activity is transferred to his environment. The actor cannot
affect the audience directly; he affects the audience by affecting his partner’ (2005b:47).
Taking these theses into consideration, here we must reach for the aforementioned analytical instruments
of Carlson and Fischer-Lichte to revise some postulates, with the aim of a consistent upgrading of the
theory of performance. She accentuates that for both hermeneutics and semiotics of art it is fundamental
to have an artefact which must be distinct, fixed and separable from its creator, which allows it to be
subject to, in principle, endless interpretations that would reach all facets of meaning (2008:17). In the case
of Abramović’s performance, such a result was not achieved, but the audience took part in the event
instead, and the insistence on performing an event that becomes popular at that time fundamentally
redefines the status of a performed artwork. Nonetheless, even the most conservative staging of a
dramatic text is an artefact equally inseparable by any of the mentioned features. In other words, the
elements of Abramović’s performance marked by Fischer-Lichte as radically new instance which dictates a
new aesthetical approach, and these are materiality and factuality of the concrete physical event, according
to Gavella’s analysis characterise stylistically any other traditional theatre performance. The difference lies
in the degree of physical pain typifying the analysed performance, but the ontological status of the means
of expression remains the same as in traditional acting – and that is an organic process directly perceived
on the performer’s body. In this sense, physicality as a complex of organic processes in the service of a
performative means of expression does not, by itself, represent a radical novum. Fischer-Lichte concludes
that – ‘the nature of performance dictates that artists-in-action cannot be separated from their material,’
(2008:76) because their body is the very material the artwork is made of. However, referring to the above
cited Gavella's theses, the situation is the same with the actor in the classical theatre’s treatment of a text.
It is the very utilization of his trained non-daily physical potentials, or in Barba’s words ‘extra-daily use of
the body-mind called “technique”’ that allows the traditional actor to establish the zero communication
horizon which makes every single performance an event. This event, is ‘imposed’ on the audience, as a sum
of organic units – bodies, and only with their ‘acceptance’ 9 does acting appears as a work of art sui generis.
So a conceived artwork is separable neither from the performer nor from the audience. Moreover, it is the
interaction of the collectivity taking part in the event, i.e. the process of genesis of phenomena in the mind
of the spectator through awakening organic stimuli by voice and movement that gives it its special
ontological status. Similarly to the ‘imposition’ of (in this case ethical) the action in Abramović’s
performance, which was manifested in the physical intervention in the very course of the performance10, in
a traditional theatrical performance as well when acting succeeds in achieving a work of art, it is a case of
basically imposed participation manifested on the physical, concrete physiological level.
Finally, both physicality and event/situation which are, in the contemporary theory of performance,
systematically most elaborately given by Fischer-Lichte, considered the critical moments of break-up with
the traditional theatre and, thus, the constitutive factors of the new poetics of postdramatic theatre, by
their ontological definition are by no means a novum in reflection upon performing phenomena.
***
The very passage of time itself, even in a theoretically less turbulent period than the 20th century was, in
the development of any discipline leads to the development of the reflection upon the discipline’s central
object. The development can be linear and cumulative, or it can be characterised by disagreements, and
consequently the establishment of parallel, mutually opposed disciplines or schools of thought.11 The
history of theatrical reflections has been marked by a co-existence, since the Age of Enlightenment to the
present time, of mainly opposed movements and conceptions. The 20th century proliferation of theory
unavoidably infected the field of theatre. In the segment of the development of representative practices,
the moment of break-up is represented by the performative turn which started in the 1960s. The major
poetic as well as poetologic feature demarcating this breakup is the rejection of the interpretation of
performing arts, first of all theatre, as a representational practice.
Eugenio Barba, whose scope of artistic and theoretical activity belongs to the paradigm of postdramatic
theatre, and who Lehmann claims to be ‘the most influential advocate of the new actor’s physicality’
(2004:271), reaches for the concept of ‘second nature’, starting from the historically and aesthetically quite
different sources from those which were valid in the early 1920s. Lehmann claims: ‘Barba quite literally
transfers the drama which used to happen between the embodied dramatis personae to the organic body’
(ibid.). However, as I attempted to show, Gavella, almost half a century earlier, in a theoretical corpus
9
It is certainly possible to imagine a situation of ‘unacceptance’ due to various empirical circumstances, but in such a
case there is no point of discussing mature acting as an artwork.
10
Today it is not at all impossible to imagine an audience consisting of cynics of such a kind who would allow the
completion of the artefact, in the name of art, which would in this case mean the death of the artist.
11
Seminal work of such a dynamics is Kuhn’s study Struktura znanstvenih revolucija from 1962. And in theatrological
framework Roach used the same analytical apparatus (2005).
which was not systematised in some final form, succeeded in pointing to and mostly providing theoretical
grounds for the distinctions of generative potentials of an actor’s body which, with its organic potentials, is
the only one that can create drama. In his system, the actor’s body, with its vocal and gestural dispositions,
is not just a medium, or an instrument of actor’s expression which would merely channel the artistic value
of a dramatic model. More importantly, it is only possible to construct a theatrical performance as a work
of art by deforming the organic potentials of the body, that is, by creating a distinctive second nature, with
an objective of awakening such sensations in the audience as well.
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