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COPYRIGHT AND USE OF THIS THESIS This thesis must be used in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1968. Reproduction of material protected by copyright may be an infringement of copyright and copyright owners may be entitled to take legal action against persons who infringe their copyright. Section 51 (2) of the Copyright Act permits an authorized officer of a university library or archives to provide a copy (by communication or otherwise) of an unpublished thesis kept in the library or archives, to a person who satisfies the authorized officer that he or she requires the reproduction for the purposes of research or study. The Copyright Act grants the creator of a work a number of moral rights, specifically the right of attribution, the right against false attribution and the right of integrity. You may infringe the author’s moral rights if you: - fail to acknowledge the author of this thesis if you quote sections from the work - attribute this thesis to another author - subject this thesis to derogatory treatment which may prejudice the author’s reputation For further information contact the University’s Copyright Service. sydney.edu.au/copyright Real Human in this Fantastical World: Political, Artistic and Fictive Concerns of Actors in Rehearsal: An Ethnography by T.M. Crawford A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Performance Studies University of Sydney 2015 ABSTRACT This study adopts an ethnographic and—in part—autoethnographic stance in the observation of professional rehearsal rooms, with a view to identifying the division of interests and responsibilities of actors working in mainstream Australian theatre. From a position of intense professional locatedness as an actor and acting teacher, I examine and interpret rehearsal practices utilising an ethnographic rubric that embraces the legacies of Pierre Bourdieu, Clifford Geertz, and Michael Jackson, and through the lens of my own experience. The study pursues a centripetal action, beginning with a focus on industrial and social realities, toward an identification of distinctions between artistic and fictive concerns, and so identifies three notional compasses: symbolic spaces that actors occupy in their journeys through professional engagements. These are: the political compass, representing industrial and social restrictions and liberations; the artistic compass, lying within the political, enormously divergent, and determined by the nature of the text under pursuit, and the influence of the director; the fictive compass, lying wholly within the artistic, which is found to be of a consistency and reliability that belies its prominence in the canonical literature on the craft of acting, particularly in the Stanislavskian tradition. That is to say, these actors in rehearsal are found to concern themselves most consistently and reliably with artistic challenges, as distinct from fictive challenges, and in the constant light of their industrial and social circumstances. Along this centripetal path, notions of acquiescence, compliance, agency, mystery, roguery, epistemology, democracy, friendship, loneliness, and phenomenology are encountered and examined in the context of actors’ weird working lives. Finally, claims are made for actors as artists, and these claims are held to the light of prevailing industrial structures that, perhaps, neither admit nor utilise the actor as artist. i ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This study has been a deep pleasure and privilege to undertake. I am profoundly aware of the mechanisms that have allowed it: the University of Sydney and its officers; and the policies, structures, and people of the Australian Postgraduate Awards. Although I hope I have credited them fully throughout the work, I must here thank the artists and managements that allowed me into their rehearsal rooms for the purposes of this study. All actors were kind and open in their forbearance of my odd presence, and some went further, offering time outside and inside rehearsals to discuss their work: Matilda Bailey, Kate Cheel, Tom Conroy, Lizzy Falkland, Jude Henshall, and Deirdre Rubenstein deserve special thanks in this, as does Alirio Zavarce, who inadvertently provided me with the study’s title. The four directors were extremely generous in the access they allowed, and the kindness and interest with which they allowed it: enormous thanks to Geordie Brookman, Adam Cook, Chris Drummond, and Rosemary Myers. My pursuit of this research compromised my commitments to my regular students, and to my colleagues, at Adelaide College of the Arts, and I am grateful to them for their patience in this. In particular, I thank Ian Grant, whose “blessing” was required to undertake the study, and who gave it with the greatest enthusiasm. Ian is not only a fine institutional arts manager; he is also an expert gardener, and having built a metaphorical garden around my study with his support, he came to my house and built an actual garden around the backyard shed in which I worked: an unforgettable kindness. As associate supervisor, Dr Glen McGillivray has made well-timed, provocative incursions into my work, for which I am very grateful. Associate Professor Ian Maxwell’s support and guidance has been steadfast, caring, enthusiastic, highly sensitive, and expert. I could not have hoped for more from a principal supervisor, and I thank him with great respect and affection. I believe that context is the source of all meaning, so finally I must acknowledge the context of my fortunate life, my friends and family, and the stars of that show: Louise, Lotte, Jack, Ava, Cassius… and Henry, a Labrador who might have expected something a little different for his middle years than lying at my feet hearing about ethnography. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS EPIPHANY 1 GENERAL INTRODUCTION 2 • Colloquially… 2 • Study methods and provenance 3 o Positional ins and outs 4 o A many-shouldered thing 6 § Maurice Merleau-Ponty 7 § Pierre Bourdieu 8 § Clifford Geertz 10 o Ethnography, reflexivity, and autoethnography 12 o Sydney-siders 13 • What I did 14 • A voice from somewhere 16 o Tone 16 o Michael Jackson, and getting to thinking how… 17 o Components and alignments 18 o Tense 19 o Names and pronouns 19 • Architecture 20 PROLOGUE: AMONG FRIENDS 21 • Introduction 21 • Double-agent 21 • Conclusion 31 SECTION ONE: THE POLITICAL COMPASS 32 CHAPTER ONE - THE REHEARSAL ROOM AS INDUSTRIAL SPACE AND PLACE 33 • Introduction 33 • Rehearsal rooms and their others 33 • Spatial demarcation: meanings and maintenance 37 • Conclusion 43 iii CHAPTER TWO: INDUSTRIAL AND SOCIAL CONCURRENCES AND NEXES 44 • Introduction 44 • Industrial relations 44 • Before the beginning 47 • Momentum vs lunch 48 • Ease factor: camp kitchens and workshop boys 56 • Work-friend-ship, and other social games 61 • Of work and play 69 • Conclusion 71 SECTION TWO: THE ARTISTIC COMPASS 73 CHAPTER THREE: DIFFERENT ROOMS, DIFFERENT WORLDS 74 • Introduction: The play (and the production) is the thing 74 • First mornings 75 • Other times 80 • Stumbling 86 • Running 89 CHAPTER FOUR: (SELF) PORTRAITS 91 • Introduction 91 • The primacy of perceptions of the director 91 • Toward a typology of directors 101 o English Master 102 o Sports Coach 106 o Mistress of Revels 109 o Sculptor 116 • Conclusion 119 iv CHAPTER FIVE: DIMENSIONS OF DISCOURSE 121 • Introduction 121 • On theorising 121 o Assumption 123 o Slippage 123 o Inclusivity 124 o Empowerment 125 • Metaphor 126 • Meta-text 129 • Notes sessions 131 o Notes as Dimensional data 134 o Discursive variances as industrial and artistic responses 135 o A division in discourse 136 • Primacy of the Aesthetic 137 o Complicity 140 • Conclusion: See you on the other side 144 SECTION THREE: TOWARD THE FICTIVE COMPASS 147 • Introduction 148 CHAPTER SIX: THREE ANGLES 151 • Angle one: Knowing to knowing/doing 151 o Telling the same story 151 o Please, please make the right sound 153 o Singing freedom 154 o Real human in this fantastical world 156 o Bodymind 159 o Balance and imbalance 160 • Angle two: Toward a fictive habitus 161 o On habitus and field 162 o Playful cracks 163 o Coordinates and vines 166 o Political to artistic habitus 169 o Artistic to fictive habitus 175 o Un denouement 179 • Angle three: Going native 180 • A remark in summary 183 v CHAPTER SEVEN: STRATEGIES AND ENABLERS 184 • Introduction 184 • Strategies 187 o Sub-rehearsal 187 o Horizonal projection 191 o Road Runner Theory 194 • Enablers 198 o Personalisation 199 o Feel for the game 207 § Adaptation 207 § Faith 208 § Blood 209 o The state of ARIA 210 • In summary 215 CONCLUSIONS, QUESTIONS, AND PROVOCATIONS 217 • Summary of findings 217 • Art and the actor 224 • Positioning the artistic actor 227 o On creativity, agency, and silly fuckers 228 BIBLIOGRAPHY • Works cited 232 • A selection of other influential works read 245 APPENDIX: REVIEWS 253 • The City: “Mazy tour through interconnected lives” 253 • The Glass Menagerie: “Return to the dim rooms where great playwright made his memories” 254 • Land & Sea: “Lost in sea of troubles” 255 • Pinocchio: “Flair and style bring this wooden boy home” 256 vi EPIPHANY Alirio’s character passes through this scene: Gepetto searching for his lost son. Alirio goes to behind the production desk to look at the set plans in order to figure out where he enters from and what the entrance will look like. Having established an answer, he and the director are content for him to sit down, take the entrance “as read”, and move onto the next scene: a virtual rehearsal (Pin, 31-5-12, wk1). The above moment, ten weeks into my fifteen weeks of observing rehearsals, was a signal moment in the process of this study. It was startling, bamboozling, tantalising, and finally clarifying. It sustained through the following years of thinking, reading, and writing, as an emblem and a kind of haunting. I asked, and continue to ask, What kind of activity is a rehearsal when an actor can look at a map on a desk, point to the map, agree with the director on a path, then assume the rehearsal done? Although this was a radical manifestation of rehearsal behaviour, it nonetheless sheds light— in its extremism—on more regular practices.