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Actes du XIVe Congrès International des Bibliothèques et des Musées des Arts du SpectacleBeograd 15-20 septembre 1980. Beograd : 1982. ISSN 0361-7500
Alfred S. GoldingThe Acting Historian as Technologistpp. 40-44
Today within the brief time allotted to me I wish to suggest an innovative methodology for the study of acting history. The methodology is innovative because it demands special training on the part of the researcher, to which hitherto he has not been generally exposed. Unlike the dance historian, who is educated in the practical craftsmenship of that art, the acting historian usually has not been grounded in what I am here terming the technology of enacting a role in a play - that is, in the minute, manifold details of technique which are the bases, both physical and mental, on which the actor builds his art. One reason for the failure by the acting historian to utilize a technological
approach in his reconstruction derives from the fact that stage behavior
tends to conform to behavior offstage - that is acting is essentially a
more realistic and less abstract art form than is dance. Because of its
minimally stylized, relatively informal nature, acting has not produced
a clearly definable technical system, as has dance. And for lack of such
definition, acting has been only occasionally subject to the precise
A second reason for this failure stems from the inadequacy of the observer, as well as the seeming informal nature of his subject. Originally historians came to theatre study from the field of dramatic literature; with few exceptions their earlier training did not include training as professional architects, engineers, designers, or, for that matter, actors. As result they were ill-equipped to analyze the subtleties of theory and practice in these areas of professional competence. Of all the theatrical arts, that of acting unquestionably is the most intangible and the evidence of its method least present. In consequence, the study of acting has lagged behind that of theatre architecture and decoration, where at least data survives in objective and recognizable form. Because he usually lacked specialized knowledge of performance skills, the historian has in the main relied upon the resources available to him - impressionistic description, pictorial representation, memorabilia, theoretical handbook - to furnish an idea of what the actor looked like when he appeared before an audience. While such a portrait is helpful, it needs to be supplemented by a more thoroughgoing technical analysis in order to constitute a properly objective reconstruction. In effect, while probing his sources, the historian must ask: what techniques did the actor employ in his vocal delivery, in his stance and walk, gesture and mimic expression, and in his mode of characterization? What I am urging, therefore, as an innovation, is a more objective acting historiography, such as that envisaged by Max Herrmann1 in the early years of this century. The goal of this type of research is to reconstruct acting behavior from technique intrinsic to the performance, rather than from external, subjective impression. The method presumes that the historian of acting must first be trained to recognize the presence of specific performance techniques in an historic record that is frequently vague in its statement and fragmented in form. Before providing two examples of how the technologically-sensitive historian might proceed, I wish to advance two generally held assumptions which correlate with this mode of performance reconstruction. The first is that in past centuries acting was a relatively stable and traditional art whose procedures were more standard than idiosyncratic. Because of this relative homogeneity, the historian can assemble a great variety of pertinent sources of information from a considerable time range and geographic locale, for the purpose of his reconstruction. Because of this persistence of traditional stage behavior, the historian can also describe with great precision the prevailing style of a general period, as well as the peculiar divergence of an actor from it. The second assumption is that in any cultural period a common aesthetic governed the style of expression of both the dramatic actor and the painter or sculptor - allowing for the fact that social nature of the theatre invariably caused it to follow after stylistic changes in the other fine arts. Hence the historian can also gain technical information on decorous behavior and emotional expression by studying the painting handbooks and paintings themselves of that period. A similar analysis of ancillary materials of a non-theatrical nature can be particularly helpful in pre-eighteenth century research when acting had not yet emerged as a separate art. In this regard rhetorical handbooks can be most instructive, for in this time acting was taught under a rhetorical label. So too the knowing historian can examine the books on formal etiquette, for these distinguish with great technical exactness the behavior of one social class from another, and thus the style of deportment of the tragic, comic and farce actor. The presence of a common aesthetic for all the arts also allows the historian to search works on prosody and elocution, confident that the methods suggested for poetic scansion and delivery were equally valid for poetic stage speech. Similarly emblem books and works on gesture language provide significant clues to symbolic gesticulation and characterization procedures followed by the stage actor. The value of the sources, howwever, directly depend on the ability of the scholar to detect acting technique, which may or may not be obvious to his inspection. Here, for example, is Dr. Bulwer's illustration from his Chironomia (1644), originally written as a manual language for the deaf and dumb. These he derived from an already existing tradition of rhetorical hand gestures practiced by orators and actors, as may be verified by consulting earlier works of rhetoric, such as that of Louis Cresol's Vacationes autumnales (1622) with its fulsome technical treatment of classically derived symbolic platform behavior. A further comparison of selected gestures found in pictures of performing actors reveals the continued utilization of many of these gestures, as well as the periods when they were modified or no longer used. Thus the noli me tangere gesture originally was made to accompany words of threat or warning, by waving both first and little fingers while the two middle fingers were held together and folded into the palm. In time this became our still-practiced one-fingered gesture of warning. But as stage iconography reveals, the study also became a sign of upper class distinction, and in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (when a more psychological and emotional gesture displaced that of a symbolic character) became part of the tenue or properly graceful finger position of the formal ballet. Analysis of the actor's vocal delivery, however, requires greater expertise in order to detect the presence of technique within often vague description. For example, Father Lang in his Dissertatio de actione scenics (1727), Chapter X; and Goethe in Nos. 6 and 7 of his Rules for Actors warn against lising or "swallowing" sounds at the end of a sentence. Since in the rhetoric of their day punctuation still continued to be conceived as signs of pause duration and vocal inflection, the historian who has been trained as a phonologist can recognize in such a statement the presence of two acting techniques: 1) the continuation of adequate breath support to the end of a thought, where a new breath must be taken; and 2) vocal inflection carried through to the end of an idea was instrumental in separating that idea from the one following it. Other pieces of literature like Arend Fokke Simonszoon's discourse on declamatory acting of the late eighteenth century, and Gilbert Austin's Chironomia of 1806 provide technical description of the cadence and inflectional pattern which stage actors used at that time. Although evidence of the actor's delivery is spare compared to that for gesture and attitude, the historian can make good use of surviving phonograph recordings of late nineteenth century performers who had been trained in an older fashion of stage speech. These recordings can be analyzed for their conventional patterns of pronunciation and vocal quality by a trained ear and by audiospectrographic examination. What are some implications of this emphasis on the technological reconstruction of historic acting styles? For the historian, it suggests the need to become sensitive to the practical procedures - the craft of perforance. (May I interject at this point to note that two of my students are currently engaged in this style of technological activity - the one, a former choreographer, in defining the technical movement of the fifth century B.C. Greek chorus, the other in delineating with great precision the pattern of early nineteenth century English declamatory and gesticulatory patterns.) For the theatre archivist there is need to systematize the usually casually organized inconography of acting, to collect old recordings and even film materials which document a nineteenth century performance manner. Finally, there is the need for both the historian and the librarian to collaborate in the publication of check lists and bibliographies of ancillary materials which provide technical information about conventions of expression of use to the acting historian.
Footnotes: 1 For example, his Forschungen zur
deutschen Theatergeschichte des Mittelalters und der Renaissance (Berlin,
1914), particularly Chapter III, and his posthumously published Die
Entstehung der berufsmässigen Schauspielkunst im Altertum und in der
Neuzeit (Berlin 1962) which unfortunately he was unable to complete
to the Italian Renaissance. [Return]
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