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ABSTRACT
This is the third of a four-part series of interrelated articles discussing the pedagogical, ideological, and sociological functions of the audition process in drama school training. For this third paper, we have re-interviewed our contributors in 2019, as they come towards the end of their formal training. We have asked them to compare their experiences of professional auditions with their experiences of auditioning for drama school recounted for the first two papers. Their accounts describe a complex and contradictory response to the process of audition which negates any possible interpretation of a linear or progressive development. This is apparently at odds with the pedagogic strategies pursued during their studies. Aiming to explain that dissonance we draw on the Bergsonian concepts of “clock time” and “psychological time” to help to classify and analyse these experiences, broadly categorizing these with reference to an actor’s own conscious states in audition. Using Stanislavksi’s writing as a key point of reference allows us to align our theorization with his discussion of a long-term and indeterminant pedagogical process of actor development. This is also counterpointed by Stanislavski’s recognition that technique, no matter how it has been acquired or how competently it may have been mastered may not be sufficient for the actor to exercise her craft. In the last section of this article, we utilize Csikszentmihalyi theorization of “flow” states in order to reinforce the distinction felt by our interviewees between auditions determined by/in “clock time” and those inscribed within/by the psychological time, which Bergson calls la durée.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. See Bergson, Time and Free Will, and also David Scott’s ‘The “concept of time”and the “being of the clock”: Bergson, Einstein, Heidegger, and the interrogation of the temporality of modernism’ in Continental Philosophy Review, June 2006, Volume 39, Issue 2, 183–213.
2. Foucault, Discipline and Punish.
3. Ridout, Stage Fright, Animals and Other Theatrical Problems.
4. Ibid.
5. Bergson, Time and Free Will, 122.
6. Stanislavski, An Actor’s Work, xxxi.
7. See Jackson and Csikszentmihalyi in Weinberg and Gould, Foundations of Sports Psychology, 147–148.
8. See Matthews, The Life of Training, 78.
9. See Arendt, The Life of the Mind, 7.
10. Bergson, Time and Free Will, 100–101.
11. Matthews and Ladron De Guevara, “Auditions and Stress,” 219–222.
12. Ibid., 223–225.
13. Matthews and Ladron De Guevara, “Auditions and Self,” 147–149.
14. This usage of ‘gig’ is thought to have emerged first in the 1920s or 1930s as a term used by musicians to denote an ‘engagement’ to play at a party for one evening. See Partridge, A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, 462.
15. A term coined in the 1980s but popularized in the 1990s through the publication The Socialist Review and more recently by writers including Noam Chomsky and Guy Standing.
16. Chow, “An Actor Manages,” 131.
17. Matthews and Ladron de Guevara, “Auditions and Self,” 147.
18. Ridout, Stage Fright, Animals and Other Theatrical Problems, 9.
19. Davies, “The Transformative Conditions of Pshychotherapeutic Training.”
20. Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.
21. For a brief history of this cultural-materialist theory see Baroniam, Marx and Living, 116–188.
22. See Matthews, Training for Performance, 45–48.
23. Bergson, Time and Free Will, 101.
24. Ibid.
25. Ibid.
26. Seton, “Recognising and Mis-Recognising the ‘X’ Factor,” 170.
27. Ibid, 174.
28. Ibid., 173.
29. Ibid., 174.
30. Csikszentmihaly, Flow.
31. Stanislavski, An Actor’s Work, xxxii.
32. Ibid., 615–616.
33. Ibid., 618.
34. Ibid., 620.
35. We are aware that the descriptions included by Stanislavski in this section of the book are, predominantly, rhetorical exercises. However, we would like to suggest that within that particular construction, there is something rather significant and meaningful about his pedagogical endeavours.
36. Stanislavski, An Actor’s Work, 549.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
John Matthews
John Matthews is Programme Leader for Acting at Plymouth Conservatoire, a new drama school run jointly by Theatre Royal Plymouth and University of Plymouth. He is the author of Training for Performance, Anatomy of Performance Training and The Life of Training, and he is former Research Fellow of the Stanislavski Centre.
Victor Ladrón De Guevara
Victor Ladrón De Guevara is Programme Leader for MA Performance Training at Plymouth Conservatoire. His scholarly work is centred on Acting Training processes, the use and understanding of the body in performance, and the interrelationship between theory and practice.