The Gest of the Breath

This essay is about a particular moment in the actor's training. It is about a technical mistake, a failure of imagination in the actor's first knowledge and the implications of that knowledge for the structure of the actor's art. This essay is about the possibility of speaking all these thoughts on the same breath. I must do so in a language which does not yet exist; I must move among the discourses of people who do not speak with each other. For whom is this written? It is written for those who do not hear each other, and for myself, who cannot help hearing them all. Scientists of the body speak in figures, teachers of acting speak in images, artists speak in works, theorists speak in propositions. To speak in any of these forking tongues is to be split from the others. It is necessary, though perhaps not possible, that we describe a line that will join those several points. The gap between performance and thought is not simple, but is composed of subgaps on either side, between the pedagogical imagery of performance and the flesh which performance possesses, between thought about the theatre and the metathought which plays through theatre. The performer might join the signifying body to the facts of the body. The thinker might join what is signified to the discourse of significance. The performer and the thinker could momentarily meet in the sign's provisional and already receding closure. The two might be - is it too much to ask? - the same person. Most beginning students, even those who have had excellent musical experience in choruses, have heard of the diaphragm, attribute almost magical properties to it, and are astonished to discover that it is almost totally passive during exhalation /singing.1 Hollis W. Huston is Artist-in-Residence in Performing Artsfor Washington University in St. Louis. He has written in the past on contemporary performance and performance theoryfor Theatre Journal, The Drama Review, and other publications

Environmental Science · Theatre and Performance Studies

• Posing… Threats, Striking… Poses

  Dick Hebdige•SubStance•1983

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