Towards Enactive Affectivity in Theatre Training and Performance: a phenomenological study of the actor's affective embodiment in selected Indian, Japanese and intercultural practices

Abstract

This thesis investigates the role of ‘affectivity’ in theatre training and performance. New research into affectivity is put into dialogue with selected Japanese, Indian and intercultural theatrical approaches to affective embodiment. The aim of this cultural, philosophical and practical cross-pollination is to move towards a more inclusive, comprehensive and refined understanding of the actor’s affective processes across theatre performance and training cultures. By examining continuities and divergences between the selected theatre practices and the affective worlds they enact in their sociocultural contexts, this project aims to improve intercultural communication in theatre around affective processes.

I propose that Colombetti’s philosophical framework of ‘enactive affectivity’ is most suitable for re-thinking understandings of affective embodiment across theatre cultures. Affectivity (as conceptualised by Colombetti, 2014) is not synonym of emotion or affect. It is wider and deeper. It is defined as every organism’s inherent life-sustaining capacity to be affected, which makes emotions, moods, affects and other affective phenomena possible but is not limited to them. The theory of ‘enactive affectivity’ provides a new approach to understanding affective phenomena, which has not yet been applied to theatre and performance, especially considered cross/inter-culturally.

In order to explore how culturally specific expressive systems shape the performers’ affective life, I have selected three theatre practices that are connected to the pedagogy of the Intercultural Theatre Institute (ITI) of Singapore. ITI is an intensive three-year actor training programme combining traditional and contemporary theatre practices, that I attended between January 2012 and December 2014. I will focus my analysis on two traditional practices taught at ITI (Indian Kutiyattam Theatre and Japanese Noh Theatre) and one contemporary intercultural practice developed by director and ITI alumno Shankar Venkateswaran. I draw from my experience as a practitioner, from observation of teachers and students in training and rehearsal, and from their first-personal testimonies to carry out an investigation of the performers’ phenomenological experience of affective processes within these specific cultural contexts.

Through this cross-cultural analysis of expressive affectivity across contemporary and traditional performance practices, I foreground alternative non-Western conceptualisations of affectivity and affective training in performance. Current philosophical and enactivist approaches to embodied affectivity benefit from a performance-based perspective, since the selected theatre practices provide concrete and suitably complex examples of affective embodiment across cultures. Through this research, I propose that a deeper understanding of how culturally embedded theatrical expressions shape the performers’ affective experiences/practices can have an emancipatory potential for the practitioners’ enactment of their creative identity, both through codified and newly devised forms.