Acting and Being: Some Thoughts about Metaphysics and Modern Performance Theory

Abstract

Modern theorists have for some time expressed considerable ambivalence on relative value of spontaneity in art especially in performing arts. For that matter, modern performance theory embraces a running debate on simultaneous (and paradoxical) needs for control and improvisation, artifact and life.' At core of modernist paradox lies a phenomenological pleonasm: need to employ the real in order to re-present the real. If man is, as Appia called him, itself, then how is one to go about using a living actor in service of representing a reality as compelling as his own reality? Is it possible both to be and to pretend to be not alternately but simultaneously?