Towards a cybernetic understanding of the performer's 'work upon himself'

Abstract

Eugenio Barba, in The Paper Canoe, refers to Theatre Anthropology as a pragmatic science 'of the performer and for the performer.' With this pragmatic science, Barba and his collaborators at ISTA, the International School of Theatre Anthropology, want to investigate the actor at a pre-expressive level. Barba gained awareness of this pre-expressive level when he began to observe certain working principles common to both his Odin Teatret actors and actors belonging to Oriental performance traditions. Barba's observations on the pre-expressive level lay the grounds for a discussion of the actor as a particular 'being'. This form of being is governed by principles that are different to the ones that govern the everyday organisation of the self It is an artificial being, in that it is the creation of the craft of the actor-it is the creation of the work of the actor upon himself This allows one to see the actor not simply as a human being who represents another human being, but as an artificial organic being, an organic system whose creative faculty is, specifically, that of 'informing' its being knowingly. In Never on a Sunday, John Schranz stresses that the contemporary actor is narrating 'the story of matter elevated to the plane where it can knowingly work upon itself'. From this perspective the actor is no longer he who plays another - acting is no longer simply a matter of playing a game of psychological make-believe. Rather, the actor works with all his psychosomatic faculties in order to consciously transform them and to be transformed by them in return. As the creature of his own creation, the actor incorporates an immediate (in the sense of it not occurring via any medium) exchange of information between creator and creation. This exchange of information can link what Eugenio Barba says about the scenic bios or second nature of the actor in Theatre Anthropology to the discourse of cybernetics. This dissertation aims to make this link, with particular reference to Gregory Bateson's cybernetic matrix in Angels Fear Towards an Epistemology of the Sacred. In so doing, the dissertation hopes to show that the observations made in the field of Theatre Anthropology could perhaps earn further clarity when juxtaposed to the discourse of cybernetics.