Acting vs performance?

Often, in developing a role, when a student actor really starts to act – when they start to truly become the character – they also cease to perform in a theatrically effective way (though this is more likely to happen in rehearsing a pre-scripted play than in creating a devised play). There seems to be an inverse relation here, in the sense that the more (the better) they act, the less (the worse) they perform. What I mean is, roughly, that the more true they are to the part, the smaller they are in terms of the needs of the stage.

It's a related fact that you can read whole books on acting, books written in the broadly Stanislavskian tradition as guides to how to act truthfully, in which hardly a word is said about how to perform this truthfulness. It’s as though communication to an audience is assumed to happen somehow ‘naturally’ – provided of course that the actor really has found the truth of the character. It’s also as though the very idea of ‘performance’ has been relegated to the demonstrative or histrionic style of acting that Stanislavski set out to replace with ‘truthful’ acting. Performance, in this view, is part of the problem.

But performance is what actors do – at least at the end of the rehearsal process.

Performance is a wide-ranging, odd, quite tricky word. Basically, to perform means to do, carry out, execute or accomplish something. This may be a task, function, duty, trick, display, song or part in a play or film. However, to really understand a word we need to look closely at how it's used. For example, while we can say ‘he did not perform well academically,’ we cannot say ‘he did not perform that essay well’. While some people think of sex in terms of performance, it would sound very odd to ask, ‘Would you like to perform sex with me? ... Or, since I'm a bit tired, on me?' (after all, surgeons can perform operations on their patients). Lastly, a certain kind of car can be said to perform well at high speed, but not to ‘give a good performance’ at high speed. Only some kinds of performance are (grammatically) countable, so that we can speak of ‘a performance’ or of different ‘performances’. But this in itself isn’t quite enough to fix the sense we want. A football team, after all, can give ‘a solid performance’ in a match played in an empty stadium. But the dress rehearsal of a play is not – or not quite – a performance. (Well, it is in one sense but not in another.) At a certain point and in some contexts, the word takes on the sense of ‘actively presenting to an audience’. This involves a strange kind of ‘doubling up’ of the concept; actors don’t just perform a play, they also give a performance of the play. Much the same can be said for all performing artists: singers, conjurers, jugglers…. Performance becomes almost synonymous with ‘show’ ('almost' because while you can perform a show, you can't 'perform a performance'!).

Performance in the sense of show is necessarily for an audience. This colours the way we use the verb too. For an actor to perform, she must have the goal of conveying the character to the audience. This doesn’t mean that the actor can only be said to perform when actually in front of an audience, because performance in this sense also needs to be rehearsed (even though a rehearsal is not a performance). The key to the problem of 'acting vs. performance?' is that singers, conjurers and jugglers can all perform for the audience in an open way that involves acknowledging the audience and its role in co-establishing the performance event. Actors in the theatre – at least in naturalistic dramas – can’t. This is a major difference.

In the broadly Stanislavskian approach to theatre, acting should not be for the audience in the same simple sense that, by definition, performance is for the audience. This is what lies behind Stanislavski's core concept of ‘public solitude’ – somehow, the audience is both to be forgotten yet not forgotten. It's the case, certainly, that there are undesirable ways in which performance can be for the audience. There’s a crude kind of acting which tends to signal what the character is feeling or why they are doing what they are doing, which, as acting, is always flat and clichéd. As a species of performance, it’s really a kind of ‘outline demonstration’ that expects the audience to fill in the truth of character and situation in its collective imagination, and that’s the sense in which it is for the audience. It asks the audience to do a part of the actor’s work. (Of course, there’s another kind of ‘rough theatre’ in which this may be desirable and enjoyable.)

One approach to the problem has been to think of acting as the art and performance as the craft. In this conception, the training required to acquire an art is of a completely different order than that required to master a craft. If craft consists of technique, even a set of tricks, art is that which cannot be reduced to technique or tricks. People who think like this also tend to reduce the craft of acting to a very rudimentary level; don’t turn your back on the audience (or not too often), don’t stand directly in front of fellow actors and speak loud enough. No wonder it’s hardly worth mentioning!

We should be suspicious of this. For one thing, the distinction between art and craft is quite recent, a legacy of European Romanticism. And it’s a loaded distinction. Once ‘art’ is separated off from ‘craft,’ travesty can easily arise, as it has in so much modern visual art. In general, it’s much better to think of art as the flower that can only grow from the stem or plant of craft.

But what exactly is the performance ‘craft’ that would truly support (rather than counteract) the ‘art’ of truthful acting?

It begins in (though it's not exhausted by) a heightened awareness of space. In live theatre, there is always a need to ‘fill’ the space, which is not the case in everyday life. Therefore the live performer must be highly sensitive, or attuned, to the nature and quality of that space (which is very variable from venue to venue). Space is the actor-as-performer’s ‘instrument,’ as I've said before. S/he must learn to ‘play the space’. What this involves is too complex to fully describe here, but it will be the subject of a future post. It will be seen, however, that my earlier caricature of the ‘craft’ of live acting – don’t turn your back on the audience (or not too often), don’t stand directly in front of fellow actors and speak loud enough – does, after all, inscribe some awareness of one’s relation to space. It is just that it inscribes only a tiny fraction of the necessary awareness and, in so doing, gives entirely the wrong impression. (We also need to acknowledge that pre-Stanislavskian histrionic acting was a crude and limited way of ‘playing the space’.)

Obviously this applies only to live theatre. Those books that tell you that, as far as ‘truth’ in acting is concerned, there’s no significant difference between acting on stage and acting in front of a camera are highly misleading. (Lawrence Olivier, it’s said, could never act for the camera in the way that Vivien Leigh could; he could not stop ‘playing the whole studio’ as if it were a theatrical space.)

One vital point needs to be added in conclusion. The live actor’s awareness of space, as a precondition of being able to ‘play’ it, is necessarily also an awareness of their own body. It’s the performer’s body that ‘plays’ the space.