The actor's 'instrument'

The actor is exposed onstage and in a certain metaphorical sense ‘naked’. This may be part of the reason why so many books about acting liken the actor’s body to a musician’s instrument. In a way, this gives the actor something to ‘hold on to’. But it’s a mistake.

There are two superficially sensible main ideas combined in the analogy: 1) the actor’s body needs to be kept in good (finely tuned) condition, maintaining its full expressive range, and 2) the actor needs to know how to make effective expressive use of her body. But the analogy is flawed; a musician’s instrument is separate from the musician’s self, in a way that the actor’s body is not. Why then should the actor be encouraged to see his or her own body in a similarly detached or ‘externalized’ way?

Cicely Berry makes a closely related point about the actor’s voice in Voice and the Actor when she says that “the actor must never think of his voice as an instrument, as this implies something exterior to himself with which he can do things, and then it will be false” (16). Berry’s point is not just that the idea of the voice as instrument is conceptually wrong, but that adhering to this idea will negatively affect the voice itself. Maybe that's true of the body too, when it's falsely conceived as an instrument.

But to see more clearly what's wrong with this idea we need to go a step further. Although actors are so often singled out as needing to see their bodies as being like instruments, the foundation of the idea is an instrumental view of the body that is widely taken to hold for all of us. In the phrase ‘an instrumental view of the body,’ the word ‘instrumental’ really means ‘tool-like’. The underlying assumption is just that one of our primary or fundamental relationships to our bodies is that of a tool-user to his tool. We use our bodies, in other words, in order to get things done, including simple things such as changing our location or picking up an object that we have a need for. It’s also assumed that this is a ‘natural’ way of relating to our bodies, not an artificially learned one, so it doesn’t require the acquisition of special skills, only everyday ones, and it’s not something we need to give special thought to. Because this instrumental view of the body is taken for granted, at least in the western tradition, it doesn’t (usually) need saying.

In the case of the actor, however, it does seem to need saying. Why? Because the actor’s body conceived as a ‘tool’ really is like an ‘instrument,’ in the special sense of ‘musical instrument’ (after all, a musical instrument is a kind of tool). It needs saying, that is, because a musical instrument is the kind of tool that needs special, refined skills to use – that is, to play. Hence the actor is asked to become aware of his or her instrumental relation to her or his body in a way that the rest of us usually are not.

The instrumental view of the body is the other side of the coin of the conception of the ‘self as conscious controller’ (that’s the “we” in “we use our bodies”), which I try to put in question in Part Two of Re-Imagining Your Body. Hence whenever this commonplace analogy rears its head in discussions of acting, there is, not surprisingly, usually also plenty of emphasis on the actor needing to be in full control of his or her body. This is not strictly ‘wrong’ – but it is misleading.

To see why, first note that the concept of self comprises two fundamental elements, the sense of identity and the sense of agency. Both are problematic, but it’s the latter which concerns us here, for in this ‘instrumental view of the body’ the self is misconceived as having agency over the body, as a precondition of its agency within the world. It’s true that we only have agency within the world through our bodies and their capacity for action, but this is not at all the same as having agency over the body. To suppose that it is the same is rather like assuming that willing an act involves an act of willing, or that the inside of a box is inside the box. It’s a confusion of categories arising from a wholly unjustified conceptual slippage.

And as far as the actor is concerned, this mistake also serves to obscure the fact that there is, after all, an ‘instrument’ which she can ‘play’. The actor’s true instrument is the playing space. I’ll look at what this means in a later post.