Habit

Abstract

The thread of my argument is wound between two basic determinations of human life: that to survive we must both be able to adapt and yet also to spontaneously perform actions without thinking. Thus conceived, habit is a polar phenomenon, with ‘bad’ habits (mechanical repetition) at one pole and ‘good’ habits (informed choices) at the other. Far from considering habit as a mechanically repeated action, I maintain it is the form taken by embodied knowledge. Habit is what we perform, and the more we learn, the richer our performance. We are dealing with a form of knowing that is evidenced through expert performance rather than verbal discussion – in this sense, it is tacit.

The acquisition of tacit knowledge (the mastery of a skill) takes place in four stages: from unconscious incompetence to conscious incompetence, to conscious competence, to unconscious competence. Put another way, we begin by not knowing that we do not know, and upon realizing that we do not know, we embark on a course of learning during which time we know that we know, finally reaching a stage when we know more than we can tell.

The three sections of this article offer different routes into understanding the interrelation between habit, training and performance. The first deals with repetition and creation in actor training. This leads to a discussion of awareness, a crucially important faculty that characterizes the mental state of the performer in performance. A discussion of the neuroscientific literature reveals how perception, action and memory are functionally and intricately intertwined through sensori-motor loops. This faculty could be summed up in one word: noticing. All of this leads to the conclusion that habit can only be seen as negative if considered as a response or performance that is unchanging.

Habit is Janus-faced. On the one hand, it registers the mastery of a practical skill. This is when you have learned a skill so thoroughly that you can ‘do it in your sleep’ and do not have to think about it again. On the other hand, there are ‘bad’ habits, fixed and sometimes harmful ways of doing and behaving that one cannot shake off. In both cases, habit is a spontaneous response to a situation and happens without conscious reflection. Often it is for reasons of self-preservation that the reaction has to be fast. I will argue that a ‘good’ habit is informed and enriched by a continuing process of learning that creates a background ‘library’ of possible responses that are available to the expert practitioner. The moment of choice is unconscious and finds the best match from that background library to the specific needs of the situation; in this sense it is a response. A ‘bad’ habit is a more generalized reaction that would be deployed across a wide variety of different situations; it is less discriminating. A fixed habit is close to what Keith Johnstone calls blocking (1991: 97) – it is an action that has little relation to or awareness of what is going on. In brief, the first is a form of knowing and the other is a block to further knowing.

Beyond ‘good’ and ‘bad’, there is a further distinction to be made about habits in the practical and creative realm. In the context of skill-acquisition, much neuroscientific research has addressed practical tasks, but less has been done on the work of interpretive artists. Attention needs to be paid to the expertise of the interpretive artist, which I argue lies in a capacity to notice and to feel more. In this article I will draw on a range of thinking – specifically neuroscience – to analyse how a performer’s spontaneous and unconscious choices connect with conscious training. The knowledge that characterizes the expert practitioner lies in this repertoire of possible choices of action that are accumulated through training or learning. Psychologist Kerry Spackman offers a dramatic example of this learning when he explains how Formula 1 Driver Lewis Hamilton draws from a huge repertoire of possibilities when taking a corner at speed – a repertoire accumulated through his ability to learn from each successive race (see Williams 2007).

The thread of my argument is thus wound between two basic determinations of human life: that to survive we must both be able to adapt and yet also to spontaneously perform actions without thinking. Thus conceived, habit is a polar phenomenon, with ‘bad’ habits (mechanical repetition) at one pole and ‘good’ habits (informed choices) at the other. These polar opposites are variously described as being between creativity and repetition, grace and addiction, the vital and pathological (Malabou 2017), fast and slow thinking (Kahneman 2011), hare brain and tortoise mind (Claxton 1997), and, in the case of Feldenkrais, choice and habit (1980; 1981; 2010). Far from considering habit as a mechanically repeated action, I maintain it is the form taken by embodied knowledge. In this sense, habit is what we perform, and the more we learn, the richer our performance. We are therefore dealing with a form of knowing that is evidenced through expert performance rather than verbal discussion – in this sense, it is tacit. Michael Polyani coined the term ‘tacit knowledge’ to explain how experts ‘know more than they can tell’ (2009: 4). An example of such tacit knowledge is Siobhan Davies’ participative piece Manual (2014) where members of the public instruct dancers how they come to standing from lying using only verbal instructions. Of course, the audience knew how to do it; the difficulty lay in telling them how.

The acquisition of tacit knowledge (that is, the mastery of a skill) takes place in four stages: from unconscious incompetence to conscious incompetence, to conscious competence, to unconscious competence. Put another way, we begin by not knowing that we do not know, and upon realizing that we do not know, we embark on a course of learning during which time we know that we know, finally reaching a stage when we know more than we can tell. Central in this simplified model is the interplay between conscious and unconscious mental processes. Performers are warned not to ‘overthink it’ just before a performance; the propitious moment for thinking precedes and follows the performance. This question of tacit knowledge constitutes a challenge for a teacher or coach: how to translate their unconscious competence (tacit knowledge) into conscious, verbal terms that can help a student improve their performance? The relation between conscious training and unconscious performance lies at the heart of my argument.

Each of the four sections of this article offers a different route into the interrelation between habit, training and performance. My approach is necessarily interdisciplinary and could be described as a conversation between different fields and disciplines that I have co-opted to describe the practical knowledge of the interpretive artist and how it can be developed through training. I would further argue that it is these disciplines and not literary hermeneutics that have the necessary capacity to analyse the embodied knowledge that constitutes the sensibility and know-how of the performer.

The opening section deals with repetition and creation in actor training. The interpretive art of the performer lies in how – through repeated performances – they can remain sensitive to the different rhythms of each performance. Next, we approach the question of the fast/slow binary in learning and performance; while we have to respond appropriately in the moment, this ability is informed by slow training. To explain the slow, ‘tortoise’ mind, Guy Claxton introduces the notion of the ‘undermind’, which engages in a form of deliberative reflection that characterizes the creative process of the performer. This leads to a discussion of awareness (a key term in the Feldenkrais Method), which is another crucially important faculty that characterizes the mental state of the performer in performance. A discussion of the neuroscientific literature reveals how perception, action and memory are functionally and intricately intertwined through sensorimotor loops. This faculty could be summed up in one word: noticing. I discuss the kind of training that allows a performer to notice, that is, to perceive more. All of this leads to the conclusion that habit can only be seen as negative if considered as a response or performance that is unchanging. If, as Stanislavsky suggests, an actor (indeed, anyone creative) needs to be in a state of continual training, we will understand that a habit is a form of responsive action that is revised and improved through continuing practice.

REPETITION AND CREATION IN ACTOR TRAINING

Look up ‘rehearsal’ in a French dictionary and you will find the word répétition; yet French stage artists will talk instead of being en création. Why the distinction? Possibly because neither in its form of rote learning (‘repeat after me’) nor in its mechanical form of reproduction is repetition appropriate to training the actor’s sensibility. Rehearsal is not (nor should it be) about the slavish repetition of given moves and lines: to be a creative process it demands a heuristic dimension, it is a collaborative process of discovery. As for performance, no two performances are the same, and an actor needs to be sensitive to (though not necessarily conscious of) subtle shifts in pacing and atmosphere that result from the unspoken (nonconscious) dialogue within the cast and with the audience. An actor’s feeling for the dynamics of stage space and timing, their uncanny ability to change how they move and thus behave as their character, are subtle skills that require a very specific kind of training. These are more subtle than practical, everyday skills and involve a facility for change and a sensitivity to ongoing processes. Actors need to develop a facility for ‘extra-daily’ perception (to use Eugenio Barba’s term in, for example, The Paper Canoe (1993: 16, 25 and 65)). The aim is a performance that has the vitality and unpredictability of a spontaneous response.

Anyone who teaches theatre knows that half the job is about challenging a student’s existing conceptions about theatre. When conducting auditions for the Julliard School of Acting, New York, the director and teacher Michel Saint-Denis wrote: ‘we felt that it was essential to concentrate at first on young talent which was not yet ossified, still free of theatrical bad habits’ (1982: 46). Stanislavsky is equally clear about how actors can pick up ‘theatrical bad habits’, arguing that every self-respecting actor needs to ‘study anew’ every four or five years throughout their career. This is not just to get rid of ‘bad habits’, but also to take account of changes in the body as it ages, as well as changes in the artistic milieu. He ends with a mantra: ‘Do not think of performance – think only of training, training, training’ (cited in Torpokov 1999: 155). While neither Saint-Denis nor Stanislavsky define these ‘bad habits’, they are placed in opposition to a dynamic form of training that prevents the actor’s skillset from becoming ‘ossified’ or stale; the aim is for the actor to remain live and unpredictable in their reactions. Once again, we see an opposition between dynamic processes and fixed responses.

In Training the Actor’s Body (McCaw 2018: 37–8), I examined several approaches to performer training that were precisely about ridding oneself of habits that limit artistic creativity and responsiveness. Foremost among these was Grotowski. Rejecting the word ‘training’ as ‘not right’, Grotowski declares: ‘Ours then is a via negativa – not a collection of skills but an eradication of blocks’ (1991: 218). As in the above paragraphs, training is presented as a means of negotiating fixed habits, knowledge that has become rigid. I shall not examine how Grotowski proposes to eradicate those blocks but wish to underline that training should not be quantitative, an accumulation of skills, but qualitative, focusing on responsiveness and sensitivity. From this we can conclude that a habit or skill can be limiting when not part of a continuing process of learning.

THINKING FAST AND SLOW – HARE BRAIN, TORTOISE MIND

Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking: Fast and slow (2011) argues for the importance of instant responses, but also lists a number of cognitive biases, which mean that many of those responses are wrong because they ignore or are based on a misreading of a given situation. Put simply, very often we see what we expect to see and thus in this sense a cognitive bias can be considered a habit. The situation is not examined with sufficient discrimination. Kahneman explains how the acquisition of unconscious competence is essential to the economy of human effort, arguing that this competence is acquired through sustained conscious attention, a mental process requiring much energy:

As you become skilled in a task, its demand for energy diminishes. Studies of the brain have shown that the pattern of activity associated with an action changes as skill increases, with fewer brain regions involved. (Kahneman 2011: 33)

Many neurophysiologists agree with Kahneman’s account (discussed at greater length in McCaw 2020: 244) of how competence moves from being conscious to unconscious. It is a necessary process – if we had to think about simple actions, we would have no time for other activities. Kahneman calls this the ‘law of least effort’: ‘In the economy of action, effort is a cost, and the acquisition of skill is driven by the balance of benefits and costs. Laziness is built deep into our nature’ (Kahneman 2011: 35). Having established how habits are formed, Kahneman explains why. Habits are essential shortcuts that allow us to perform basic tasks automatically thus releasing us to think about other things. William James puts the matter pithily: if the performance of routine tasks always required ‘the careful direction of consciousness’, then ‘the whole activity of a lifetime might be confined to one or two deeds’ (1950 [1890]: 113 cited in Malabou 2017). James elegantly demonstrates the degree to which such routine tasks have to be performed unconsciously.

An accumulation of unconscious skills amounts to expert intuition. As an example of such intuition at work, Kahneman cites a fire chief who gave the order to immediately evacuate a burning building: without thinking, the chief knew from the rise in temperature and the sudden silence that the fire was directly below them. Within seconds of the fire-fighters’ departure, the floor collapsed – a dramatic example of how in an emergency one has to rely on one’s expert intuition, there being no time for thinking. Such knowledge is immediately available without reflection and is the result of a sustained process of continuous practice. For him: ‘A marker of skilled performance is the ability to deal with vast amounts of information swiftly and efficiently’ (Kahneman 2011: 415–16).

Decision-making does not get much more time-critical than in Formula 1 racing. Psychologist Kerry Spackman attributes the success of drivers like Lewis Hamilton to the fact that they have ‘learned how to learn, which most drivers don’t do’. Every experience has a way of being analysed, understood and filed in what he calls a ‘mental library of solutions’. He does not ‘just pound around the track, repeating the same old habits’ (cited in Williams 2007). I would suggest that the fire chief engaged in the same way of analysing, understanding and filing away his experiences. While his reaction was made unconsciously, it was based on a recognition of signs learned over years of practical experience. ‘Learning how to learn’ describes how the F1 driver or fire chief are constantly learning as a result of their awareness of what they are doing. While performing on stage may not be as physically dangerous as F1 driving or firefighting, it is just as time-sensitive and a performer similarly develops their form of expert intuition through learning how to learn, that is, learning from experience.

Thus far I have explored continuities between different types of expertise. Let us turn to what one might call more obviously ‘artistic’ forms of thinking and perceiving. The distinction ‘hare brain, tortoise mind’ is another variation on the theme of thinking fast and slow, and is the title of psychologist Guy Claxton’s 1997 book. Claxton’s ‘hare brain’ ‘is characterised by information-gathering, intellect and impatience, one that requires you to be explicit, articulate, purposeful and to show your reasoning’ (1997: 6). This thinking is not fast as much as instrumental and goal oriented – more simply, it is practical. In contrast, Claxton proposes a kind of ‘slow knowing’, an ‘unconscious intelligence’ or what he calls the ‘undermind’ (ibid.). He is sensitive to reflective processes that are embodied rather than cognitive, unconscious rather than conscious. Given sufficient time, the ‘undermind’ can ‘successfully accomplish a number of unusual, interesting and important tasks’:

They will learn patterns of a degree of subtlety which normal consciousness cannot even see; make sense out of situations that are too complex to analyse; and get to the bottom of certain difficult issues much more successfully than the questing intellect. They will detect and respond to meanings, in poetry and art, as well as in relationships, that cannot be clearly articulated. (Claxton 1997: 3–4)

Claxton has taken us into the artistic realm and quite another form of tacit knowledge from Kahneman’s. We are no longer dealing with routine tasks. The operative opposition here is between the everyday (‘normal consciousness’) and the extra-daily (in Barba’s sense) and involves a mode of thinking that is noninstrumental and non-linear, which must be familiar to any creative practitioner. Claxton captures perfectly the pragmatic approach of performer training when he observes that such know-how ‘grows by osmosis (rather than comprehension)’ and ‘manifests itself in specific domains of expertise (rather than in abstractions)’ (Claxton 1997: 41). This open, patient and non-directed mentality has particular application for the creative processes of rehearsal and devising.

If Kahneman’s interest is in expert intuition then Claxton’s is in a kind of embodied intelligence, which is clear from the subtitle of Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind: ‘How intelligence increases when you think less’. The title of his later book, Intelligence in the Flesh (2015), very explicitly highlights the embodied nature of intelligence, which he defines as the ‘orchestrating and conducting of a whole ensemble of influences which include, essentially, those of the body; and, through the body, those of the external world’ (290). Furthermore, he repeats how our answerhungry mind is often deaf to ‘inklings and hunches, which recent research has shown are vital aspects of creativity’. He argues that these ‘hazier experiences’ may be carrying the undifferentiated seeds of a new thought, so should not be rushed, otherwise we ‘may well sacrifice the latent insight’ (Claxton 2015: 182). This non-directed deliberative process describes the creative work of the artist. Claxton offers what could be described as a form of embodied reflection that could be used as a gloss for what Feldenkrais calls ‘awareness through movement’.

AWARENESS IN THE WORK OF THE INTERPRETATIVE ARTIST

As must be clear by now, this article deals with ‘how to’ rather than ‘what’ knowledge, and as such is practice-based rather than propositional. Two different kinds of expert knowledge have emerged in this argument: on the one hand, Kahneman’s efficient and economic action, on the other, the slower, less goal-oriented ruminations of Claxton’s undermind. And while one could use the word ‘performance’ for both Formula 1 driving and stage acting, we should note the important differences. The first is very purpose driven while the second is not. And while Hamilton is successful in that he does not repeat errors, the performance of a script or score demands a very specific sensibility. Performers need to feel the shifting dynamics of their own or their group’s performance. Catherine Malabou describes this process well. When a musician plays a piece, it is ‘an activity of both the body and awareness’, ‘but when the habit is fixed’ the ‘playing becomes just a series of muscular, motor movements, and awareness gets away from them … my muscles are substituting for my awareness’ (2017: n.p.). This takes us to the explicitly artistic problem of interpretative creativity. While a musician might warm up by rattling through scales mechanically (répétition), they would never give a public performance of a musical piece in this manner. Malabou uses the word ‘awareness’ to describe the attentional state of the musically engaged interpreter – a word not only central to the Feldenkrais Method but also a wider body of reflection.

In The Craftsman (2008), Richard Sennett also uses the word ‘awareness’, arguing that there is a loop between acquired skills and the ‘explicit awareness’ with which they are performed. At the higher stages of skill-acquisition, there is a ‘constant interplay between tacit knowledge and self-conscious awareness, the tacit knowledge serving as an anchor, the explicit awareness serving as critique and corrective. Craft quality emerges from this higher stage, in judgments made on tacit habits and suppositions’ (Sennett 2008: 50). The concept of ‘explicit awareness’ goes some way to describe the attentional state of the interpretative artist. Sennett brilliantly describes this loop between the anchor of the acquired skill and the ongoing shifts and changes that arise through awareness.

I began writing this article with the intention of focusing on the distinction that the Feldenkrais Method and the Alexander Technique make between habit and choice. They both offer a process of slow reflection that is intended to inhibit fast, habitual action. Over the process of writing and re-drafting this article, I have realized that Sennett and Malabou offer a more nuanced approach to the creativity of the interpretative artist. I have already suggested that through training a performer notices more. This is because of the attentional state of ‘awareness’ that allows an artist to learn through the experience of doing. Both Alexander and Feldenkrais base their approaches on experiential learning, and both have been used in performer training.

Alexander practitioner Teresa Lee argues, ‘It is only in our unconscious, habitual thinking that choices do not exist.’ She therefore argues that the actor must ‘consciously inhibit’ habits to ‘create a space in which choice can operate’. And it is precisely that operative space that ‘allows for the moment of living truthfully on stage’ (Lee 2002: 71). Another practitioner, Niamh Dowling, also uses the term ‘conscious inhibition’, instructing a student to ‘[s]top for a minute and notice that habit and release that part and give yourself conscious directions’ (2014: 81). Habits are therefore ‘bad’ because they block a performer’s access to a range of possible actions (filed away in Spackman’s ‘mental library’). I am more interested in developing a mind-set that enhances one’s perceptual capacity, rather than accessing a repertoire of ‘already learned’ procedures.

Feldenkrais was a career scientist with a great interest in the martial arts, mixing both in a method that focuses on the functional connection between the sensory and motor nervous systems. He believed that only ‘through [sensory] feedback can an action become a new habit in life’ and ‘this is possible only through the light of awareness. Because awareness is a part of the correction, it is turned into the action itself; it listens to the action. Such listening, I think, is the first feedback’ (Feldenkrais 2010: 174). This ‘listening’ requires that the movements made in a lesson of Awareness Through Movement™ are performed minimally and slowly. The learning comes through the degree of awareness exercised rather than the movement performed. When director of the International Workshop Festival (from 1993 to 2001) I must have taken part in about 200 workshops led by some of the world’s greatest teachers, and the key word that echoed through all of them was the word ‘listen’. Although Feldenkrais shares an interest in economic movement (that is, not wasting energy), his lessons are more about helping students get a clearer experience of themselves in movement.

Training is not (just) about adding to your mental library of moves but your capacity for learning: Feldenkrais argues it is ‘more important to learn the way to learn new skills than the feat of the skills themselves; the new skill is only a reward for your attention’ (1981: 92). This argument repeats two earlier principles: Grotowski’s insistence that training is not ‘a collection of skills’ and Spackman’s praise of drivers who have ‘learned how to learn’ from their driving. We are now getting close to an understanding of the sensibility of the performer that I mentioned above. Feldenkrais is concerned with changing the ‘dynamics of our reactions, and not the mere replacing of one action by another’ (1980: 10). His method is not about replacing bad habits with good ones but creating a dynamic loop between feeling and action.

The technical term for this interdependence of feeling and action is called a sensorimotor loop. Faced with a novel situation (and each live performance is novel) one feeds forward a response and then listens out to the feedback from that response to gauge its effectiveness. Of course, the performer relies on their memorized score or script, but it has to be played according to the emergent rhythm of each particular performance. A performer’s sensibility consists of their ability to listen out for these microvariations, a learned faculty that is deployed unconsciously.

NEUROLOGY OF PERCEPTION AND ACTION

Psychologist Chris Frith can help us better understand the development of a performer’s sensibility to detect subtle variations. He explains that when trying to read an unfamiliar scene we feed forward models based on past perceptions of similar scenes and then judge how well they answer the needs of the new scene. The discrepancies between the two identifies what is new in the scene: ‘My brain welcomes these errors. These errors teach my brain to perceive’ (Frith 2007: 126). You could call this ‘learning from our mistakes’ (and recognizing them as such). He concludes:

We don’t create in our heads. We create by externalizing our thoughts with sketches and doodles and rough drafts so that we can benefit from the unexpectedness of reality. It is this continual unexpectedness that makes interacting with the real world such a joy. (Frith 2007: 137)

Apart from being a fantastic description of the process of improvisation, this account explains how we grasp what is new in the external world. This open approach is the absolute reverse of the habitual that feeds forward the already known and is deaf to any feedback. Frith’s account of learning is not simply about adding to one’s mental library, but also about developing our perceptual acuity, developing a more acute sensibility to variations in an emergent process.

Frith’s model is an analogue of how a performer draws on past knowledge to make sense of the not yet experienced present. Sennett has already described this subtle interplay between the stabilizing effect of the already known (call it habit, if you will) and the destabilizing potential of the unknown. The known is used as a heuristic device to test out new possibilities. This is the sensibility that I am trying to describe, because I think it gets us close to the ‘in the moment’ creativity of the stage performer. I have used the examples of the F1 driver and the fire chief to lay the ground for an understanding of this sensibility, but needed Claxton and Frith to take us into the realm of artistic creativity. The neurological accounts explain the intrinsically creative and processual nature of perception: it is, as stated earlier, about a constant engagement with the environment, a constant testing and updating of the already known. Claxton makes a similarly powerful argument for training oneself to be more alert to the surrounding environment: ‘The body systems automatically tune themselves to register what goes with what, and what follows what. Attention is a skilled and variegated capability’ (2015: 234). On this account, therefore, ‘attention’ emerges as one of the key concepts that helps us understand what constitutes the sensibility of the performer.

An essential part of an actor’s training is to learn how to notice more. Actors need to go beyond the ‘default mode’ of everyday awareness. It is not just about ‘noticing’ but also making more sense of what is out there, in the manner just described above. To illustrate this point, here is an exercise that I give my first-year students. I ask them to write their name in space. What do you imagine they write with? Their index finger. And where? In a small rectangle in front of them. This is their default mode; they are operating on automatic (their habitual mode). I draw this to their attention and ask them to do it again but less habitually. Now they grasp the invitation to explore, some lying on their backs, drawing in the space above them with their elbows, others stand on one leg and draw with the toes of the other leg on the space below them and so on. This exercise helps students realize that they have to adopt an extra-daily approach to their practice, rather than performing the already known. In a literal sense, they need to widen their perspective, their canvas for action. For this to be possible they have to perceive new environmental possibilities, and to constantly reconceive their image of themselves and their interactions with the world.

Thus far we have focused on modes of perception, be it listening, paying attention or moving with awareness. Anne Bogart’s books take a wider perspective on the question of perception and learning in the actor’s work. She explains how ‘[m]ost of daily life involves a lot of looking, but not much seeing. Looking is a physical action, defined as turning one’s eyes toward an object … Seeing requires perception on the part of the person who is looking’ (Bogart 2021: 54–5). Just as listening has been used as an operative metaphor, Bogart here uses ‘seeing’ to describe our perceptual engagement with the external world. Karl von Frisch (who first described the ‘waggle dance’ that bees use to indicate pollen sources) explains this perceptual engagement: ‘I discovered that miraculous worlds may reveal themselves to a patient observer where the casual passer-by sees nothing at all’ (cited in Claxton 2015: 235). Once again the argument is coached in terms of an opposition between the patient observer and the casual passer-by.

To further define this perceptual faculty, Bogart introduces the notion of differentiation as ‘the ability to see, experience and articulate the differences between things’ (2001: 87). Just as with Frith’s error detection, differentiation is another tool by means of which a practitioner can make ever finer perceptual distinctions, often detecting phenomena that would elude the ‘casual passer-by’. Another word for this ability to ‘articulate the differences between things’ is ‘discrimination’, a key term in Feldenkrais’ teaching. He describes how learning entails ‘time, attention, and discrimination’, adding that to discriminate ‘we must sense’, and that sensing cannot be developed ‘by sheer force’ of will. He continues that ‘improved control of movement is possible only through the increase of sensitivity, through a greater ability to sense differences’ (Feldenkrais 1980: 59). We have here a knot of interrelated concepts: that through patient attention, through enhanced sensitivity, we will notice more, learn more and move with improved control.

Earlier I wrote about an actor having a range of subtle skills: the ability to detect changes of rhythm, to pick up on audience reaction (‘reading the room’), to find new nuances of meaning in a line of script. These are all examples of the differentiations Bogart is talking about. While this facility for differentiation applies to decisions and choices made in other artforms, she argues that it has particular application to theatre:

In the best theatre, moments are highly differentiated. An actor’s craft lies in the differentiation of one moment from the next. A great actor appears dangerous, unpredictable, full of life and differentiation. (Bogart 2001: 87–8)

This ‘dangerousness’ lies in the actor’s ability to see new meanings in an action or line where possibly no-one – not the audience, nor cast members, nor even that same actor – had seen before. The thrill of live performance is precisely about a cast achieving this state of vitality and unpredictability; they become dangerous and exciting.

CONCLUSION

My argument has been wound around several fundamental oppositions, the most important being that between change and stasis; the belt that drives this change is the process of continuing learning. Throughout this article I have been concerned with a kind of knowledge that results from the human ‘actor’ (meant in the widest sense of the word) as a neurally integrated whole. A neurotypical person cannot act without that action generating some kind of feeling. Knowledge and learning result from this interaction between action and feeling; the doing becomes better understood because the actor learns to better interpret the resultant feelings (the feedback). It is a question of the perceptual models and tacit knowledge that are fed forward and of the acuity with which the feedback is read. Put in the terms of this issue of Performance Research, it is question of habits of doing and feeling that are constantly being updated through attentive practice.

In the works referred to throughout this article, continuing training has been described variously as an ever-expanding library of solutions (Spackman), of differentiations (Bogart and Feldenkrais) or as a constant process of detecting errors in our understanding (Frith). In all cases, it is an ongoing process that explains why Stanislavsky called for an actor to focus on continuing training rather than just performance. The structural affinity between fast and slow thinking and performance and practice lies in the degree of conscious attention involved. In its split-second decision-making, fast thinking accesses tacit knowledge and is mostly non-conscious. This tacit knowledge has been laid down through moments of reflective practice that need to be slow, this being a deliberative and heuristic process. Claxton offers an excellent example of such a deliberative process when he describes the playful, attentive activity of the undermind. Frith writes about the joy of the continual unexpectedness of a world we discover through comparing the habitual (one could easily say ‘predictable’) with the actual (2007). Each error we make opens up a fresh differentiation, a new thing, a new possibility seen. The body is in a constant dialogue with the surrounding environment, a dialogue undertaken within our nervous systems. This explains why William James would argue: ‘The greatest thing is to make our nervous system our ally and not our enemy’ (cited in Malabou 2017). A person engaged in this way will see new affordances, new things one can do with an object or a speech. It was J. J. Gibson who coined the term ‘affordance’, but I suggest that in the arts we should talk of creative affordance, the means by which creative artists can mint new, non-everyday metaphors from everyday experience.

For all the above reasons, I would argue that the expertise under discussion does not just consist of possible actions, but of an enhanced ability to read signs, to see meanings, where the untrained sensibility would see or feel nothing. The tacit knowledge of the expert is both motor and sensory. I have argued that to tailor a training for performers we need to address extra-daily rather than everyday ways of doing or seeing: we need to go beyond the practical and economic towards the aesthetic. This is an aesthetic training, remembering that the Greek root of the word is ‘feeling’. While Grotowski has argued that training is not about accumulating ever more skills and is about eliminating blocks (habits), I am proposing that it is about increasing our sensory capability; not so much a question of savoir, of knowing, but saveur, the ability to discriminate between taste sensations (Barthes 1989). This is why I think that Grotowski and Feldenkrais are correct to reject the notion that one’s learning can be gauged in terms of (motor) skills; it is a case of having an enhanced sensibility, or call it expert intuition.

This ever more subtle sensorimotor capacity led Malabou and Sennett to suggest a middle way whereby the performer maintains an ongoing awareness during a performance. I would argue that this apperceptive capacity is crucial to understanding the creativity of interpretative artists. This accounts for their sensitivity to subtle shifts in pacing and phrasing, their ability to detect new creative affordances. It is an attentive state that is not conscious thinking but nor is it unconscious – it is an awareness of what is happening both within and outside the actor. My argument could be summed up that such a training enables an actor to be present in the moment, alive to its possibilities and therefore unpredictable and dangerous.