An actor manages: actor training and managerial ideology

Abstract

This article reads the development of psychologically based actor training against larger changes in the organisation of work in North America and Europe in the twentieth century. Konstantin Stanislavky's System and later adaptations including the American Method are wrapped into a larger ideology of individual self-management and discipline – mental, physical, and emotional – that accompanies the emergent managerial class of the post-war era. An actor is an ideal manager, and therefore prefigures only a few decades later the ideal freelance worker in the post-Fordist era of creative, immaterial, flexible, and precarious labour. The article maps the contours of a citational network between actor training and business management, focusing on the production, maintenance, and instrumentalisation of emotion, empathy, and social relations by waged labour. This ‘alternative’ historical reading of actor training allows us to question and perhaps challenge discourses of ‘transferable skills’ and ‘employability’ in higher education drama and theatre departments. When do the positive qualities of a career in theatre or performance such as creativity and autonomy become the same qualities required by those who can survive the insecurities, uncertainties and overall precarity of the ‘new’ flexible labour market?

Keywords::

• theatre
• political theory
• body
• performance studies

Notes

^1. Empathy, within the theatre, can refer to both the actor and the spectator's identification with the character. Within the literature of management, however, we see that this human process can be mobilised to industrial ends.

^2. The question of course becomes: ‘who is the audience for this show’ of compliance? Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek's body of work from 1989 onwards would answer: The Big Other – the network of socio-symbolic rules that guarantees our intersubjectivity, but crucially, doesn't really exist.

^3. In the 1970s, Drucker argued that the United States was seeing the retrenchment of corporate power. Naïvely, he suggested that top CEOs would no longer be household names, an idea that Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Rupert Murdoch, and many others have since belied.

^4. Arlie Russell Hochschild (1983, pp. 37–38) notes this similarity in The Managed Heart, her study of ‘emotional labour’ in the service industries (specifically among flight attendants and debt collectors), making use of Stanislavsky's theories to conceptualise her distinction between ‘surface’ (feigned) acting and ‘deep’ acting.