Habit and the Potential for Actor Training with Immersive and Virtual Production Technology

Abstract

The advance of immersive and virtual technologies draws into starker contrast the analogue modalities of dominant approaches to actor training and makes more visible certain of their dynamics, which are analysed here using a philosophical framework of habit and habitus as propositionally causative. This technology is disruptive to habit and habitus in actor training and signifies potential to experiment with these dynamics to address extant problems in actor training.

Problems in training habitus discussed here derive from trainers’ habits but arise primarily for trainees, and especially so for certain groups. I use Lazlo Pearlman and Deirdre McLaughlin’s critique of the effects on LGBTQ+ trainees of Meisner Technique to exemplify this. I make three philosophically derived practical proposals to address the problems caused by trainers’ language-use habits that are germane to the Meisner Technique context but applicable to actor training, and training more generally.

This article does not propose an un-tested adoption of technology or prejudge its effects; it builds the philosophical case for experimenting now before this technology becomes ubiquitous in actor training and makes provocative proposals about future use-cases.

Notes

1 Meisner Technique is well-established in American actor-training programmes and has ‘significant impact in the UK’ (Shirley 2010: 200).

2 In the Posterior Analytics, Aristotle states that we have knowledge of a thing only when we have grasped its cause (I 2, 71 b 9–11 & II 11, 94 a 20). That proper knowledge is knowledge of the cause is repeated in the Physics: we think we do not have knowledge of a thing until we have grasped its why, that is to say, its cause (Physics II 3, 194 b 17–20). See Aristotle (1983).

3 See Matthews (2014: 77–108) for discussion of language use and affects in training, and Matthews (2011: 67–103) for philosophical discussion of the status of language in the meta-disciplinary training process of vocation.

4 See Shirley (2010).

5 For description of this exercise, see Shirley (2010).