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.

Keywords:

• Habit
• performer processes
• Félix Ravaisson
• post-psychophysical
• sociomateriality

Notes

¹ For the purposes of this article, ‘movement’ refers to an expanded sense of motion that, in addition to the physical, includes the voice, imagination, and combinations of these and other aspects.

² For an account of habits within the broader field of performance, see Dewsbury (2012).

³ See Patsy Rodenburg’s (1992, p. 17) binary distinction between habitual and natural voices: a ‘habitual voice [is] a voice encrusted with restrictive tendencies that only awareness and exercise can undo and counteract. The natural voice (or what others term a “free” or “centered” voice) is quite simply an unblocked voice that is unhampered by debilitating habits’.

⁴ For a full contextualisation of Zarrilli’s quotation see a previous article (2013, pp. 40–46), where I present an extensive discussion of Zarrilli’s practice and discursivity.

⁵ See also Derrida’s chapter on ‘“… That Dangerous Supplement …”’ (Derrida 2016, pp. 153–171).

⁶ The allusion, of course, is to Derrida’s ‘arche-writing’ or ‘grammatology’, i.e. a generalised form of writing that includes art, music, fashion, cooking, even living, anything that is considered as textual.

⁷ Nick Crossley (2013, p. 137) argues that the concept of ‘habitus’ as formulated by Pierre Bourdieu and others can be regarded as an attempt to ‘offer an alternative to [the term] “habit”’, which ‘fell out of favour and was denigrated by sociologists in the latter half of the 20th century, and also much earlier by some philosophers’.

⁸ See my forthcoming monograph Performer Training Reconfigured: Post-psychophysical Perspectives for the Twenty-first Century (Camilleri forthcoming 2018).

⁹ This is related to Grotowski’s early formulation of the ‘holy actor’, especially within the context of the interaction between spontaneity and formal discipline (Grotowski 2002, pp. 34–36, 39).

¹⁰ I discuss extensively this ecological post-psychophysical framework in Performer Training Reconfigured: Post-psychophysical Perspectives for the Twenty-first Century (Camilleri forthcoming 2018).