• ARTICLES

Darkness in the theatre: The perception of the embodied self in action

Mills, D. M

Keywords:
personal constructs, embodiment, acting, phenomenology

Abstract:
Drawing on the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, especially his concept of bodily space, the author elaborates the parallel between the actor on stage, inhabiting many characters, and the person in the world, acting in within alternative sets of meanings. By juxtaposing Kelly’s geometric model of personal meaning with Merleau-Ponty’s basically theatrical view of the bodily situational space in which we each find ourselves, the paper explores the dimensionality of that lived space from which our ideas of geometric space are abstracted. While the two views may seem at odds—with Kelly making our meaning construction accessible by giving our attentiveness to it a geometric structure, and Merleau-Ponty emphasizing the fundamental inaccessibility of the mystery of how meaning derives from bodily experience—taken together they point us toward a deeper understanding of what Kelly might have meant by saying that a person “lives in anticipation.” This consideration of the actor as person and vice versa leads to a theatrical view of bodily experience in which the person is seen to inhabit multiple spaces of meaning, navigating among them as an actor would set aside a character and take up or ‘become’ another. By showing how spatial movement and meaningful action are intricately intertwined, the paper points toward a consideration of a person’s kinaesthetic sense as much more than a sense of movement—in fact as the perception of the meaning of their own embodiment in action.