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Violence in Martial Arts Actor Training: A dialectical view
Abstract
The system, the form of presenting a totality to which nothing remains extraneous, abolutizes the thought against each of its contents and evaporates the content in thoughts. It proceeds idealistically before advancing any arguments for idealism.Adorno 19731.
Adorno, T. (1973) Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.View all references: 24 Violence is the structuring logic of martial arts practice; martial arts training is paradoxically charged with limiting the outbreak of violence. However, the violence of martial arts practices is generally unaccounted for and made invisible in discussions of martial arts as actor training. In light of this situation, I use a dialectical perspective to destabilise the cohesive force which organises accounts of actor training around issues such as psychophysicality, and argue that violence, in its non-identity with the ideals of martial arts actor training practices, underscores but also threatens to undermine discourses supporting the use of martial arts as actor training. Using critical procedures from Theodor Adorno's Negative Dialectics, I work to destabilise the 'idealism' that conspires to make violence a literal or ethical non-issue in martial arts as actor training. I conclude by reading the invisibility of violence in martial arts actor training against Žižek's Violence to consider what is 'symptomatic' (2009: 174) about the appearance of violence in this context.
When teaching acting and movement in the university classroom, I often encounter a tension between training students in specific skills while simultaneously encouraging them to embody their psychophysical identities in relation to gender, race, class, age, and (dis)ability. In response to this tension, I apply my training in the ROSS system of Russian Martial Arts (RMA) to the acting and movement classroom. RMA exercises offer blueprints for self-exploration rather than formally structured patterns, prompting students to develop perception of their own bodies and minds, as well as those of their partners, while encouraging improvisation and adaptation. Students can practise at a range of intensities, from gentle and exploratory (Softwork) moving towards aggressive and outcome-focused (Hardwork). Further, students enter the training from their existing physical capacity and adapt, develop, and refine skills for playing committed action and sending/receiving impulses with a partner. Informed by the work of Ben Spatz, Ellis Amdur, and Sara Hendren, I will analyse how these RMA exercises develop specific psychophysical skills relevant to the training of actors while simultaneously inviting students to engage their social and artistic identities. I will place these exercises in conversation with theatre-based trainings, including the Six Viewpoints, the Acrobatics of the Heart, and the Michael Chekhov Technique. I argue that the open-ended nature of these exercises builds greater accessibility within existing performance pedagogy, opening the acting and movement classroom to a diverse community of performers.
The article provides an overview of the problematics of martial arts in actor training. Its first section explores the complex meaning of the widely used and discursively constructed notion of ‘martial arts’ and underscores that it refers to a whole spectrum of approaches and techniques that are present also in actor formation. The article’s central part includes a brief historical background and lists the principal formats in which martial arts manifest themselves in actor preparation. Further, it catalogues some benefits of using martial arts in actor development as identified by their proponents. Finally, it raises doubts and queries related to the subject in question. In order to complement (and counterpoint) this panoramic view, in its final section the text focuses on two aspects of taijiquan (tai chi) which the author finds especially pertinent to actor training but which are usually omitted in related discourses. The first concerns the combat dimension of taijiquan which provides a toolbox of techniques which help the awakening of creativity and the reinvigoration of spontaneity. The second centres on taijiquan’s meditative potentiality that may nourish the process of self-discovery and unsettle a mentality oriented towards effect rather than process.
In Psychophysical actor training, the trainee is brought into an intense and articulated encounter with the detail of her own embodiment, and thus with her habitual use of her psychophysical mechanisms. This paper outlines the ways in which psychophysical training entails deep and sometimes challenging systemic changes which may be experienced by the trainee as confrontations to cognitive paradigms, or interactions with behavioural patterns or habitual movement protocols. Using the work of F.M. Alexander, meditation, and Yuasa's theory of cultivation as my main sources, I develop a detailed psychophysical model and a framework for conceptualising the inner training process. I also suggest some principles with which a trainee might guide and support a process of change.
Over the last four decades Jürgen Habermas has forged an innovative and much-discussed theory of contemporary capitalist society. Building on Max Weber’s thesis that the dynamic of capitalism actually erodes individual freedom and the meaningfulness of social life - famously resulting in a culture of ’specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart’ - Habermas traces contemporary social conflict to resistance to this dynamic by a variety of social groups. His theory of ’communicative action’ attempts to show the possibilities in contemporary society for moving toward a more balanced social life that, unlike other political currents today, would not sacrifice the truly progressive features of complex modern societies. By marginalizing methodological and other more specialized theoretical concerns, this book focuses on Habermas’s substantive portrayal of contemporary society and its discontents.
“A samurai must have both literary and martial skills: to be versed in the two is his duty. Even if he has no natural ability, a samurai must train assiduously in both skills to a degree appropriate to his status.”
In a recent talk at Duke University on his work with the World Performance Project titled “Ambient Poetics,” Joseph Roach proposed “kinesis as the new mimesis.” Engendered by his experiences of the past few years investigating and producing global dance and theatre, Roach posited kinesis as the twenty-first century’s equivalent of Aristotelian mimesis. Inspired by this discussion as both martial artists and dramaturgs, we propose to illustrate how dramaturgical training and martial arts study are deeply imbricated and create the potential for a new theatrical poetics. We therefore recognize that theatrical performance and martial arts share certain qualities with ritual and religious practice, chief among them the imbuement of actions with specific, extra-normal meanings that recondition reality and move the participants into the creation of a community.
Dramaturgy is defined by Adam Versényi in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Theatre and Performance as “the study of how meaning is generated in drama and performance,” which “can be understood as an attribute, a role, or a function” (386). That is to say, dramaturgy can refer to the aesthetic architecture of a piece of drama, the individual person who is assigned to cultivate an understanding of that architecture, and also can refer to the functional means by which that architecture is discovered in rehearsal. By the same token, martial arts can refer to the architecture of a physical bout, the individual who engages in that physical bout, and the functional process by which the martial artist discovers the best techniques to use at any given moment in that physical bout. It is key to note that the primary purpose of both theatrical performance and martial arts is to imbue actions with meaning.
Such a statement will hardly surprise theatre artists, even those who have not studied the works of Etienne Decroux and his “phrase plastique.” In his essay “Dosage of Mime for the Speaking Actor,” which appeared in Il Cigno in 1953, for instance, Decroux repeatedly uses grammatical terms to talk about movement. When he discusses what the actor adds to the meaning of a line in performance, he writes that
[w]hen he [the actor] pronounces the verb, he simultaneously expresses its adverb. If “I will kill you” is written, and if the writer was thinking, “I will kill with pleasure,” the actor, of course, says only “I will kill you,” but does so in such a way that the audience infers that the man thinks of committing this murder with pleasure. The two ideas, one of action and the other of manner, reach us at the same time, by the same voice and the same route. Is that not marvelous? The text on its own is not capable of such a feat.
The actor, then, becomes the one who completes the theatrical sentence only partially inscribed by the playwright, first by developing a dramaturgy that interprets the playwright’s intention, and then employing a physical language of pitch, tone, intensity, speed, and gesture. The playwright, Decroux argues, works hard to leave the actor enough room to do this critical work. This was a key element of Decroux’s concept of the corporeal mime. Gordon Craig, after witnessing Decroux’s performance at the Maison de la Chimie in Paris in June 1945, wrote that he had witnessed “the creation of an alphabet—an ABC of mime.”
This kinetic language is as beholden to cultural conventions for its grammar as a spoken or written language. Kinetic language depends not on syntax and lexicon, but rather on kinetic contingencies that likewise must be decoded; that is to say, kinetic meaning is derived from relationships between movements that create meanings. Mimes learn, for instance, to isolate individual body parts so that the movements between different parts of the mime’s body can create these dialogic relationships. Traditional stage actors also focus on the relationships between two or more bodies moving...
This article discusses the cultural contexts in which yoga, tai chi and Feldenkrais currently take place and traces the way in which the ideologies that underpin the practice of these disciplines may affect the trainee's process. It aims to complement accounts that have explored these disciplines in terms of the student/actor's individual development, and to argue that the efficacy of these regimes needs to be viewed and explored in relation to the social, cultural and economic circumstances under which they and actor training programmes operate. The article is informed by scholarly sources as well as the author's own practice of yoga, tai chi and Feldenkrais within various actor training contexts.
On August 2, 2012, an ensemble consisting of six University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) undergraduates and seven boys on probation (ages 13–18) from Los Prietos Boys Camp (LPBC) united on Center Stage Theater in downtown Santa Barbara in order to perform the odyssey that they had worked collectively to develop, using Homer’s epic poem as a template. If only temporarily, they inscribed their identities into the world by articulating their failures and triumphs as seen in front of the audience of family, probation officers, classmates, city officials, and peers from the probation center who had come to serve as witnesses and jury (Fig. 1). For six weeks, the cast had been guided by their director, Professor Michael Morgan, through a rehearsal process that included writing exercises, dance, mask-making, voice work, visual art, and martial arts for four hours a day, four to five days a week on the campus of UCSB. This essay explores how performance disciplines like martial arts can be used to form transformative spaces and communities as an alternative to penality and youth incarceration. The analysis demonstrates how The Odyssey Project (TOP) drew on martial arts principles, in particular those found in aikido, as a way to narrate moments of conflict and celebration by harnessing, focusing, and choreographing the kinetic energy of LPBC and UCSB members into constructive moments of encounter throughout the rehearsal period and the final performance. Seemingly disconnected communities of prisoners and students were simultaneously embroiled in processes of rehabilitation and education. As a theatre and martial arts practitioner and a doctoral student in theatre studies writing about performance disciplines like martial arts, jazz, and dance, TOP provided me with an opportunity to meld scholarship and practice by creating the martial arts choreography for the final confrontation between Odysseus and the Suitors.
I became involved with TOP in the spring of 2011 when Morgan first approached me with his idea of building a theatre project that would partner the university with a Santa Barbara community organization. Subsequently, my work with TOP became an exploration into the ways in which performance practices (martial arts, dance, graffiti, and hip-hop poetry) can work in conjunction to be a cathartic and therapeutic tool to awaken agency and subjectivity in young people. Many youths in the prison system are imprisoned not just by the penal institutions, but also by the institutions’ disciplinary practices. Yet, disciplinary practices also occur in a different form and with a different valence in the state university. Programs such as TOP, Unusual Suspects in Los Angeles, and Rhodessa Jones’s Cultural Odyssey offer models for how to make interventions with populations who have had contact with the criminal justice system, and these models also demonstrate that a radical reconsideration of how we conceptualize pedagogy through performance can fundamentally alter what are perceived as legitimate forms of knowledge-production and identity-formation. However, I would argue that TOP is unique, in that it attempts to restore a sense of the commons by actively bringing marginalized, in this case criminalized, youth into a public university, while simultaneously redirecting the state’s attention away from a mode of discipline and punish to a mode of perform and liberate.
The Ensemble of The Odyssey Project (TOP), dressed in their self-constructed half-face masks.
(Photo by the author.)
Yet, it must also be acknowledged that the collaboration between UCSB and LPBC produced and revealed power dynamics that were not free of tension. There were moments in which the necessity of rehearsal time and focus came into conflict with the desire to enforce rules and regulations by probationary staff. UCSB was initially concerned with the image of the university and the presence of incarcerated individuals on campus. I questioned whether our impact would matter or if we were simply replicating empty rhetoric around art and social justice. Others suggested that because Homer’s Odyssey is a key text in the canon of European literature, we were reifying a form of Eurocentricism. When discussing these issues with Morgan, I would often refer to ethnographers, such as Dwight Conquergood and Joyce King, whose work reminds...
In previous works (Miranda 2003, 2010), I have argued that the Brazilian martial art capoeira can be viewed as a corporeal practice for actors that aids in the resistance of ‘docility’ (as conceived by Michel Foucault). The physical training of actors based on capoeira aims to escape the structure and strategies of militarised physical training methods. African knowledges, displaced from their original context, were absorbed by Brazilians, who created specific aspects of capoeira such as transformation and resistance. It is these Afro-Brazilian elements that are of particular interest when considering adopting capoeira for the purpose of training actors. Capoeira, as a ‘strategy of resistance’, offers actors new possibilities to understand how their body functions in relation to other acting bodies. The jogo de capoeira constitutes itself as a jogo (game) when two partners play capoeira together. Jogo is capoeira's most traditional training strategy and requires and stimulates the development of corporeal interaction between two partners. It can be argued that the jogo is capoeira's basic structure of communication, where the ‘physical dialogue’ between two capoeira players takes place. This concept of ‘physical dialogue’ is encountered in academic interpretations of the jogo such as Lewis (1992) and Matsumoto (2001), however jogo de capoeira is also popularly perceived as a conversation between bodies among capoeira players themselves. This perception of jogo as a ‘physical dialogue’ opens up capoeira to be used in the development of an actors' ability to physically communicate.
Decision-making is a fundamental part of the actor's work. Actors must choose how to present a character, how to tell a story, and how to communicate with an audience. This article examines how certain somatic practices used in actor-training can improve processes of decision-making through the development of mindfulness. Through examining the way in which the psychologist Ellen Langer correlates increased mindfulness with a clearer sense of the available options during decision-making, the article shows the relationship between Langer's experimental studies and the practices developed by the somatic practitioners Moshe Feldenkrais (developer of the Feldenkrais Method) and Minoru Inaba (Aikido master). In conclusion, the article suggests that somatic practices and physical training should not merely be seen as tools to improve physical technique, but as valuable processes for improving the actor's embodied sense of self during decision-making.
Self and no-self: An examination of the role of ideas about the self in actor training
- Karoliina Sandström