Actor awareness in performance: an examination of actor descriptions from the survey of the actor's experience and William Archer's masks or faces

Hetzler, Eric (2012) Actor awareness in performance: an examination of actor descriptions from the survey of the actor's experience and William Archer's masks or faces. Consciousness, Literature and the Arts. ISSN 1470-5648 (Submitted)

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Abstract

Given the nature of a lot of the training for actors, how can they be engaged in a role – feeling the emotions, focusing on the action, performing behind a so-called fourth wall – and still be aware of outside influences like the audience? This question recalls a survey conducted in 1888 by the theatre critic and English translator of Ibsen, William Archer, which was published as the book Masks or Faces.
Commissioned by Longmans’ Magazine and originally published as an article entitled “The Anatomy of Acting”, Archer sought to investigate the claim by Denis Diderot that the best actors felt nothing in performance: “To move the audience, the actor must, himself, remain unmoved”. Archer felt that Diderot, in setting out his paradox had not actually done any work in drawing his conclusion beyond what he observed in performances.The following places the answers to Archer'ssurvey along side responses from the 2007 survey The Actor's Experience in order to compare how actors from 1888 compare to modern actors.

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