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The tyranny of neutral: Disability & actor training

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Abstract

The size, shape, and carriage of an actor's body on stage convey much more than a character's physical dimensions. In Western dramatic and performance traditions, outward physicality is most often used as shorthand for the character's inner psychological or emotional state. Consider Oedipus's self-inflicted blindness, a bloody wound that signifies his denial of truth; Richard III's hunchback, a beacon of evil, justifying his antisocial behavior; or Laura Wingfield's limp, a mark of shame, explaining her depression and unrealized cravings for male companionship. Disability in the dramatic canon always signifies, serving most often as a work's central image, what literary critics David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder have called "narrative prosthesis."1 Despite the ubiquity of disabled characters in the dramatic canon, there is a paucity of professionally trained disabled actors to perform them. And because disability always signifies in representation, the trained disabled actor is rarely given the opportunity to play nondisabled characters. Disabled actors are told that their impairments would detract from the playwright's or director's intent for a nondisabled character. Disabled people who want to be actors learn this tenet early on and are dissuaded from pursuing training. Other barriers to training include inaccessible classroom and theater spaces and demeaning, stereotypical roles. Training programs, though, are no longer able to deny otherwise qualified disabled students access to their programs based on these barriers and attitudes. Because of civil rights laws such as Section 504 of the Vocational Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, training programs are required to provide access to their curriculum. As a result of such laws, disabled people in general are becoming visible in U.S. culture, making themselves more and more a part of mainstream life. Some theater artists have begun to take note of the emergent, vibrant disability arts and culture scene and are willing to incorporate disabled people in their programs. Good laws and good intentions, unfortunately, will not significantly improve training opportunities for the disabled actor. While obvious barriers such as the lack of meaningful roles and inaccessible spaces are being addressed by nontraditional casting practices, new plays by and about disabled people, and the alteration of physical space, less obvious barriers remain that require scrutiny if training programs are to become more accessible. This essay addresses one of these less obvious barriers: Acting curriculum. I confronted these barriers myself as a physically disabled student in undergraduate and graduate acting classes where, despite the good intentions of my teachers, I earned credits despite the curriculum rather than because of it. Here, I focus on how conventional associations between outward physicality and inner psychological states are embedded in the disciplinary practices of many actor-training programs. This correlation between body type and inner life suggests which bodies are capable of portraying which inner states and even which bodies are capable of representation at all. To illustrate my point, I will take on two concepts often used in beginning actortraining programs. First is the concept of "neutral," the physical and emotional state from which any character can be built. Actors who cannot be "cured" of their idiosyncrasies to approach neutral may be considered physically and emotionally "inflexible," unable to portray anyone other than themselves or those like them. The second concept is what I am calling the "emotional body," or the belief that physicality develops from past emotional experiences. This belief is put to use in both rehearsal exercises and in the making of acting choices. Uncritical use of the emotional body can humiliate the disabled student in rehearsal and lead to stereotypical choices in performance. Ultimately, unless training programs' very foundations are rehabilitated, current curriculum will dissuade disabled actors from pursuing training.

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... A casting experiment briefly recounted with typical flair by Konstantin Stanislavski in the autobiographical My Life in Art glints with frustrated aspirations and well-meaning acts of exploitation that reveal his unstable relationship with conventionalized performance habits. The story's relevance for today's actor training relates to the continued denigration of habitual action in theatre practitioners' discourse, particularly obvious in what Carrie Sandahl (2008Sandahl ( [2005) calls 'the tyranny of neutral' in training methods. The efforts to erase mental and physical habits that an actor brings to the studio from their daily lives go beyond Stanislavski's fraught yet balanced view on habit (and partly because of a one-sided interpretation of Stanislavski's practice). ...
... A casting experiment briefly recounted with typical flair by Konstantin Stanislavski in the autobiographical My Life in Art glints with frustrated aspirations and well-meaning acts of exploitation that reveal his unstable relationship with conventionalized performance habits. The story's relevance for today's actor training relates to the continued denigration of habitual action in theatre practitioners' discourse, particularly obvious in what Carrie Sandahl (2008Sandahl ( [2005) calls 'the tyranny of neutral' in training methods. The efforts to erase mental and physical habits that an actor brings to the studio from their daily lives go beyond Stanislavski's fraught yet balanced view on habit (and partly because of a one-sided interpretation of Stanislavski's practice). ...
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In ‘Stanislavski versus the Peasant Woman: Acting habits beyond the neutral’, Ilinca Todoruț analyses Western theatre’s fraught relationships with acting habits by reading between the lines of Konstantin Stanislavski’s short account of a daring casting experiment gone awry. In a slippery two-page text, Stanislavski narrates how he attempted to cast an unnamed peasant woman in the 1902 production of Leo Tolstoy’s The Power of Darkness. Prying open what went wrong at the Moscow Art Theater, despite the best of intentions, helps guide a critique of contemporary performance training methods geared towards eliminating habit.
... Historically and culturally shaped perceptions of bodies and humans-as well as traded techniques of appearing or exposure on stage-are "imprinted" into the performer's body (Roach 1989). Carrie Sandahl (2005) writes that the "tyranny of the neutral," which demands a "permeable" body, excludes people with disabilities from consideration as performers (p. 206). ...
... Casting a performer with disabilities is a conceptual choice because, according to Siebers (2012), actors with disabilities are visible on stage, while "neutral" bodies are invisible. Thus, the Diderotian "Paradox of the Actor" turns into a "Paradox for the disabled Actor," as Sandahl (2005) states: ...
... It leaves theatre untroubled by the real visceral idiosyncrasies of the disabled body, and audiences untroubled by real visceral encounters with the disabled body. Over the last two decades, scholars have criticised how storylines that cast disabled people as objects of horror, pity, or inspiration (Kuppers 2003(Kuppers , 2017Hadley 2014;Johnston 2016; McCaffrey 2019) and training, casting, and production practices that exclude disabled people (Sandahl 2005;Kuppers 2014;Johnston 2012Johnston , 2016 combine to create a 'hostile' (Johnston 2012) climate for disabled people in the theatre industry. Initial influential studies by Petra Kuppers (2003Kuppers ( , 2017, Kirsty Johnston (2012), Bree Hadley (2014), and Matt Hargrave (2015), and the first edited collections on the topic by Carrie Sandahl and Philip Auslander (2005), Collette Conroy (2009), and Bruce Henderson and Noam Ostrander (2010), focused largely on Western theatre forms. ...
... As noted, disabled artists have struggled to be cast in both disabled and non-disabled roles (Sandahl 2010, 236), given reasons for which include cost, commercial appeal, and the capacity to do things like dream sequences or before-and-after accident sequencesalthough the audience's ability to suspend disbelief and accept a manifestly artificial world as real is fundamental to live theatre (Johnston 2019). For Johnston (2019Johnston ( , 2016Johnston ( , 2012, Hadley (2014), Sandahl (2005), and others, the reason theatre training, casting, production, and representation prefer the able body is because it is thought to slip more readily behind the veil ofand thus not disruptthe illusion. Puppets, too, are perceived to have this capacity to support illusion, as the puppeteerclad totally in black in the Western traditiondisappears into the background to allow the puppet to take on its own life in a fictional world. ...
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... This includes logistical problems, like lack of ramps, interpreters, or flexible work patterns. This also includes a range of ideological problems that combine to constrain the horizon of possibility for disabled artists: storylines that position disabled people as symbols of pity, tragedy, morbid fascination, or inspiration (Garland-Thomson 1997;Mitchell and Snyder 2000), venues, training models, and production models that fail to accommodate disabled people (Sandahl 2005;Johnston 2016), and spectators who see disabled artists' work as therapeutic not professional (Hadley 2014;Kuppers 2014), in spite of the aesthetically innovative work disabled artists produce (Kuppers 2003;Siebers 2010;Millett-Gallant 2012;Johnston 2012;Hadley 2014;Hargrave 2015). While addressing the logistical dimension of access is essential, addressing these ideological dimensions of access is equally important for many disabled artists (Hadley 2015). ...
... However, logistical barriers like lack of access infrastructure, social barriers like lack of flexible communication options, and professional barriers like lack of flexible work patterns, are not the only barriers to career success for disabled artists. Ideological barriers, including training, casting, production, and programming practices that exclude disabled artists, or position them as costly, risky, or otherwise difficult to work with, are just as big a problem (Hadley 2015;Sandahl 2005;Johnston 2012Johnston , 2016Ellis 2016;Whatley 2019). Accordingly, to truly broaden the horizons of possibility for disabled artists, disability arts allyship needs to go beyond retrofits to accommodate wheelchair users in a specific area, specific inclusive or relaxed performance sessions, or even tagged 'disability arts' programmes that open a venue up to different artists one week a year. ...
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... There is a recognised need for research that illuminates mutually beneficial connections among performance, ageing, and disability theory and practice. While connections between performance and disability have a developing history (Conroy 2009;Kuppers 2003Kuppers , 2011Lord 1981;Masefield 2007;Sandahl 2005;Sandahl and Auslander 2005;Sinclair 1995;Tomlinson 1982), less work has been done to consider connections between performance and ageing (Basting 2009) and between disability and ageing (Gibbons 2016a;Priestley 2003); and little work has been done to consider intersections among the three fields (Basting 2009;Conroy 2009;Sandahl 2005). Finally, there is a specific need for 'academic work about disability to benefit disabled people directly and in a way that can be measured by social science methodologies' (Conroy 2009, 4). ...
... There is a recognised need for research that illuminates mutually beneficial connections among performance, ageing, and disability theory and practice. While connections between performance and disability have a developing history (Conroy 2009;Kuppers 2003Kuppers , 2011Lord 1981;Masefield 2007;Sandahl 2005;Sandahl and Auslander 2005;Sinclair 1995;Tomlinson 1982), less work has been done to consider connections between performance and ageing (Basting 2009) and between disability and ageing (Gibbons 2016a;Priestley 2003); and little work has been done to consider intersections among the three fields (Basting 2009;Conroy 2009;Sandahl 2005). Finally, there is a specific need for 'academic work about disability to benefit disabled people directly and in a way that can be measured by social science methodologies' (Conroy 2009, 4). ...
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... We see this in T's exclusion of Jayden based on her "expert" judgments about his inability to perform certain aesthetic standards (e.g., "groundedness," "vocal articulation") and in M's recollection of encouraging Jayden not to sing in choir, but rather to mouth the words. To these educators, these seem like neutral, meritocratic decisions, when they are steeped in centuries of ableism and racism in the arts (Cahill & Hamel, 2022;Sandahl, 2005). Further, in uncritically enforcing standards of classroom behavior (i.e., labeling behavior like "humming," "moving around," and engaging with classmates as "challenging"), educators can position disabled students of color as undeserving of inclusion in artmaking. ...
... As previously alluded to, scholars and activists have revealed the injustice of many traditional actor training practices. Through reinforcing normative ideas about which texts count as "canon" (Dyches, 2017), which stories and acting methods are "universal" (Dunn et al., 2020), which casting decisions are "colorblind" and "objective" (Schroeder-Arce, 2017), which bodies and minds appear "neutral" (Sandahl, 2005), and which voices sound "natural" and "free" (McAllister-Viel, 2021;Cahill & Hamel, 2022), theater educators often reproduce whiteness and ableism in our contexts (Zdeblick, 2023a). Despite what many theater educators might say about our work's inherent inclusivity (Brown, 2020), the link between theater and social justice is far from inevitable (Finneran & Freebody, 2015). ...
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... Even small access considerations can help mitigate the tyranny of the neutral performer (Sandahl, 2005). Considering the substantial effort and adaptability that autistic performers exhibit, such minor considerations seem a small price to pay for the remarkable creativity that they bring to the stage. ...
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... 23-29). Fifth, actor training is usually based on metaphors that exclude non-normal bodies from participating (Sandahl, 2009). ...
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'Every day, thousands of women enter acting classes where most of them will receive some variation on the Stanislavsky-based training that has now been taught in the U.S. for nearly ninety years. Yet relatively little feminist consideration has beengiven to the experience of the student actress: What happens to women in Method actor training?'
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Given the increasing diversity in UK actor training programs, it is imperative to recontextualize mainstream British voice pedagogy. Such pedagogy generally begins with the supposition that the voice is a representation of the sociocultural self and aims to improve the voice by undoing physical tensions that can impede usage. These tensions are usually attributed to negative societal influences that may induce feelings of fear, shame, or anger. For students with pluralistic backgrounds, racism may be such an influence that creates somatic tensions. This article will examine potential manifestations of dysconscious racism, an uncritical mindset that fails to challenge the norms of a dominant culture, within UK Drama Conservatoires. This includes: curriculum, liberal humanist assumptions in voice texts, standardized accents like Received Pronunciation, and the teacher-student relationship. By conducting semi-structured interviews and employing such methodological lenses as critical ethnography and embodied phenomenology to examine the resulting findings, this article aims to present ways that students from pluralistic backgrounds are potentially impacted by dysconscious racism in their voice training. Given British voice pedagogy’s emphasis on voice and identity, this article’s findings and analysis strongly recommend that voice teachers re-examine their practices with a critical consciousness to create an empowering environment for their students.
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This article approaches training in relation to the performer's professionalisation and work within the cultural industries. On the basis of the working conditions in the sector, it argues that the cultivation of reflexivity may equip the actor with a hermeneutic attitude and, thus, the possibility of agency. It examines the potential of psychophysical disciplines to develop an embodied and relational form of reflexivity, which can be operative beyond the moment of training and applicable to other aspects of the performer's endeavour. It thus views training and psychophysical disciplines as ‘expert systems’ which need to both be questioned and utilised; due to their position within hegemonic discourses they should be approached with suspicion and due to their potential to cultivate reflexivity they can offer alternatives to enculturated forms of embodiment and fixed identities.
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Theatre-based health policy research is an emerging field, and this article investigates the work of one of its leaders. In 2005, prominent medical geneticist and playwright Jeff Nisker and his collaborators produced Orchids, his play concerning pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, to research theatre as a tool for engaging citizens in health policy development. Juxtaposing Orchids with a concurrent disability theatre production in Vancouver entitled Ugly, I argue that disability theatre suggests important means for building inclusiveness in this kind of research and complicates Nisker's own call for international guidelines to delimit how journalists, playwrights, filmmakers, physicians and other media authors share genetics-based narratives in public.
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