Abstract
The meaning of behavior, whether genuine or faked, delivers when the involved agents (actors or spectators) bestow upon it a contextual sense. So viewed, both real-life spontaneous conduct and actors’ performance in naturalist theatre are made of the same stuff, what makes theatre to be not only a mirror of social life but also a magnifying glass for the study of how the fabric of meaningful behavior is threaded for producing a credible performance. This paper discusses the capabilities of theatre rehearsals as a privileged setting for the exploration of the microgenesis of behavior via the observation of the abductive processes through which enactive arguments (body movements and prosody) are shaped into signs to be interpreted as authentic gestures, utterances, characters, scenes, and stories. Since signs are for presenting something different from themselves, the study of their fabric is helpful for bridging the gap between behavior and experience, but not to discern truth from deceit.
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Notes
- 1.
Constantin Stanislavski (real name Konstantín Serguéievich Alekséiev, 1863–1938) was a Russian actor, director, and theatre theorist who founded the Moscow Art Theatre and developed a well-known system for actor training and theatre production.
- 2.
Figure 1 shows the similarities and differences on the semiotic processes producing aesthetic experiences in the actor and in the audience. In both cases, the aesthetic experience is an interpretation (thirdness, in Peirce’s terminology) that goes together with a sign (firstness) that suggests an image referring to some more or less familiar previous experience (secondness). The difference is in how it works as a sign in one case and the other. In the case of the actor, the sign is the dramatic text (and the directions of the director), and the interpretation is the scene figures she/he performs before the audience, while for the latter the stage figure is the sign that invokes the presence of the character and provokes the aesthetic experience.
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Rosa, A. (2021). The Fabric of (Faked) Behavior Shows in Theatre Rehearsals: An Exploration on How Body Movements Turn into Signs for Experiencing. In: Wagoner, B., Christensen, B.A., Demuth, C. (eds) Culture as Process. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77892-7_25
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