Session 5a: Acting, Entertaining, Performing

Azra Francis - Heuristic Acting as Performing Art Therapy
School of Dramatic Art, University of Windsor, Windsor, Ontario, Canada, N9B 3P4.

Heuristic Acting is a genre of theatre acting that evolved at the same time as Educational Drama in the 1950's. While it shares with Educational Drama the focus on process rather than on product, Heuristic Acting is an application for an individual's emotional and psychological well being instead of another classroom pedagogical mode. The Heuristic approach differs from the later genre of Psychodrama in that the latter uses all the traditional components of theatre acting to focus on an unwell condition to be alleviated or eliminated. The therapy of Heuristic Acting focuses on eliciting healthy personal capacities that have not been allowed opportunity to play a full role in the development of personality and character. The health impairment addressed by Heuristic Acting is not an illness, but a misfunction that impedes an individual's healthy interaction with others. Heuristic Acting is the only genre of acting in which communication and expression are unequal dynamics of the whole, and in which the mode of pretence is not primary. Communication serves only to safeguard against expression becoming excessively internalized, and pretence is, throughout, applied as a necessary intermittent peripheral convenience only. The 8 page paper will deal with how the Heuristic approach achieves its goal through innovative applications of the main components of traditional acting, and through new interpretations of these components.

Emma Govan - Entertaining Illness
Department of Drama and Theatre, Royal Holloway, University of London

Within the realm of live performance, professionals are paid to play out illness, suffering and death for the entertainment of the public. Through reference to particular recent case studies, this paper will attempt to tease out the particular pleasures that such representations may hold for an audience.

The piece will address the work of arts practitioners who stage events that speak to social constructs of illness and the way in which those cultural products may be received and made use of by their audiences within a contemporary, Western culture that appears to actively repress pain. Throughout the paper, the emphasis will be on the theatre as a public forum which facilitates a collective consideration of illness and death in its social context.

The paper will highlight the relationship of the performer to the sick body that s/he must represent and the socially shaped conventions that s/he may bring to bear on her/his work, as well as the audience's relationship with the suffering character in performance. Through detailed reading of such elements, this paper will consider how the social and stage drama may interact and how a theatrical event may re-affirm or challenge perceptions of illness and suffering.

Mary Richards - Ron Athey, AIDS and the Politics of Pain
Lecturer in Modern Drama Studies, Brunel University, Dept.of Performing Arts, Uxbridge, Middlesex, UB8 3PH, England

I propose to examine the medical and socio-political implications of what I am calling 'masochistic' performance in relation to the work of performance artist Ron Athey, who is both gay and HIV positive. I will consider how Athey's work offers a number of provocative means of resisting traditional representations of people living with A.I.D.S. or H.I.V. infection through the use of 'pain' and 'restraint'. This paper suggests that his performances deliberately blur the boundaries understood to exist between physical 'pleasure' and 'pain' in a society generally orientated towards using technology, science and medicine to provide increasingly complex ways of cushioning the body from experiences of discomfort or disease and their association with disorder. Additionally this paper examines how the silent presence of latent illness brings about a questioning of the body as a representation of the self. The failure of our physical being as a result of disease or illness may seem to emphasise a Cartesian / binary understanding of the mind and the body, particularly when the mind continues to function perfectly. In this context the body may be interpreted as an 'other', perhaps becoming an object of suspicion and distrust. This paper considers how Athey deals with the apparent 'split' in subjectivity that results from the psychological division of body from mind. It also addresses the parallels that can be drawn between the disruption caused by A.I.D.S. related illnesses, the increased ambiguity surrounding gendered identity and social roles, and the desire to use 'masochistic' practises in a ritual process enacted to effect a social 'healing'. That is, the notion that a disruption of the social body may be 'cured' through the use of the physical body in acts of reclamation.