On habit and performer training

Abstract

This article initiates a discussion on actor and performer training from the perspective of habits. In addition to the exploration of the rich connections and overlaps between the two phenomena, the aim is to contextualise and counterbalance the predominant view that habits are obstacles in restraining innovation and freedom in movement, behaviour, and imagination. By evoking Jacques Derrida’s logic of the supplement, where something generally deemed peripheral comes to constitute a crucial dimension of the subject under analysis, the article offers a defamiliarised account of habits and its potential application to performance. Accordingly, far from arresting creativity, the power of habit is located in its capacity for generative change in performer processes like training, composition (e.g. devising and adaptation), rehearsing, and performing. A nuanced understanding of habit with close spatio-temporal connections with the material world is proposed as a possible post-psychophysical discourse that resists mind/body distinctions, focusing instead on the mechanisms, dynamics, and processes of habit formation, development, and disruption.