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Acting as Hierophany: Locating a Sense of the Sacred in the Work of the Actor

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Thesis(1.11 MB)

Date

2024

Authors

Supervisor

Mazer, Sharon
Nikolai, Jennifer

Item type

Thesis

Degree name

Doctor of Philosophy

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Publisher

Auckland University of Technology

Abstract

This thesis aims to locate the sacred in the work of the actor in the context of Western theatre and its religious roots in ritual. Throughout the thesis, my research draws on my extensive experience as an actor trained in the European tradition and employed to perform the Western repertoire. I ask: How can we, in the secularised environment of contemporary Western theatre, come to understand the way something of the sacred still remains to us in performance? How might the contemporary Western actor, who is far removed from the priest or priestess of ancient times, even now be seen as a hierophant, a locus for a spiritual force beyond the human? In focusing on the actor’s work as somehow still productive of something like the sacred, I rely on Richard Schechner’s and Victor Turner’s ideas of the actor’s presence as liminal. For Schechner, the actor occupies the space “in between identities.” In this mediatory position, the actor is not unlike a priest, or a shaman – a term Schechner often uses. The act of acting, in this light, might be seen as hierophany, a word I take from Mircea Eliade’s The Sacred and the Profane. For Eliade, hierophany (hiero – sacred, phainein – to show) serves as a manifestation of the sacred. A hierophant might be a priest. I think he might, also, be an actor. This thesis sits between Theatre and Performance Studies. Its methodology as such, is one of close reading of play texts and contexts, and of interpretation and reflection. The case studies – play texts, live, and mediated performances – analysed in this thesis have been drawn from the wider repertoire. The first chapter aims to unpack conventional understandings of the relationship between ritual, theatre, and the sacred, in ancient Greek and Elizabethan theatre, through the analysis of the actor’s work in Euripides’ The Bakkhai and Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. Chapter Two leads to a re-consideration of the secularity of modern drama by focusing first on Stanislavski’s theories of acting, and then on two plays: Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull and Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. The third chapter turns to Jerzy Grotowski’s idea of the secular sacrum in his direction of Ryszard Cieślak’s performance in The Constant Prince – a performance that, for me, is the epitome of hierophany. In my conclusion, I turn to what I experience and see in the actor’s work on stage today. What I have found in this research is not what I expected. The actor rarely serves as a locus for the sacred, whether in Elizabethan or Modern Drama. Instead, what I have come to understand is that what we can see in the actor’s work is more a desire for the sacred, which is often located just out of reach. It is to this unseen force – which might be termed “the sacred” or might be the art that Stanislavski once idealised, or in any case something beyond the limits of our daily human experience – that the actor’s work, and the audience’s attention, is directed.

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http://hdl.handle.net/10292/18202

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