Rethinking the Actor's Body: Dialogues with Neuroscience by Dick McCaw

Abstract

Reviewed by: Rethinking the Actor's Body: Dialogues with Neuroscience by Dick McCaw Dan Cullen Rethinking the Actor's Body: Dialogues with Neuroscience. Dick McCaw. London: Methuen, 2020; pp. 274. British acting teacher and theatre practitioner Dick McCaw's Rethinking the Actor's Body: Dialogues with Neuroscience is intended as a companion piece to his 2018 movement training manual, Training the Actor's Body: A Guide. It provides some useful insight into the theories of the body that underlie McCaw's practices and their attempt to bring the training techniques of Stanislavski and Feldenkrais—rooted in an early twentieth-century understanding of behavioral psychology—in line with contemporary understandings of neurological processes. In undertaking such a project, McCaw also places the book in dialogue with other attempts to define the relationship between the actor's work and the physical operation of the human brain such as Rhonda Blair's The Actor, Image, and Action: Acting and Cognitive Neuroscience (2008). Blair argues that there are significant gaps between the techniques actors use to create representations of action onstage and the cognitive processes that actually underlie human behavior. For Blair, those gaps are useful in creating performances that the spectator's brain can easily interpret. Conversely, McCaw contends that these gaps are not so great and that actor training should be working to bridge what remains of them. Rethinking the Actor's Body is divided into two parts. The first part is made up of four chapters in which McCaw defines "the actor's and the everyday body (which are, of course, the same thing)" and explains how he conceives of "the interrelation between brain and body" (10). These chapters rehearse well-trodden critiques from the last several decades that actor training relies on Cartesian verbiage, which incorrectly theorizes the body and mind as separate entities in a hierarchical relationship. Beyond that, McCaw's first chapter explores different possibilities for conceptions of the body and the nuances of considering it alternately as subject and object. From there, his second chapter outlines how the "everyday body" is transformed into the "actor's body" through training. He argues that the leap from the actions of simple organisms like ticks and sea slugs to the precisely rehearsed dramatic actions that actors engage in is much smaller than we might expect on account of their common basis in action with purpose informed by sensory information. Chapter three explains that the creation of the actor's body is never complete, that it is constantly in the process of converting cognitive processes into instinctual or habitual ones through practice. According to McCaw, "The ego … gets in the way of the source of creativity" (85). For McCaw and the neuroscientists, this source of creativity is the subconscious activity of the brain unhampered by cognitive oversight. McCaw suggests that this is what Stanislavski means when he describes proper acting technique as "nature working freely" (85). Readers cannot help but be reminded of similar arguments from the long nineteenth century that positioned naturalism and realism as the ultimate forms of artistic expression due to their supposed scientific accuracy. The argumentative structure of part two is less clear. It is instead more of a series of essays that seeks neurologically informed answers to some of acting theorists' classic questions: what does it mean to be "present" or to have "presence?" Does the body have a true, stable "center," or is the notion of "being centered" merely a useful metaphor? How does our mental image of our bodies correspond to the way we move through space, and can we reconstruct our way of moving by changing that image? By what process do we make emotions legible to other people, especially when so many of the symptoms of emotion (heart rate, pupil dilation, etc.) are outside our conscious control? McCaw concludes by acknowledging that being informed of the latest developments in cognitive science is unlikely to make the actor's job easier, but he hopes that his readers "think again about their own physical resources and potential, and in this act of rethinking to find new ways of doing" (224). Throughout the text, the author refers to his previously published practical guide as a...