By Jane Goodall
Focusing on examples of concert in drama, dance, opera and lightweight leisure, Jane Goodall explores a attribute as compelling and enigmatic because the performers who reveal it.
The mysterious caliber of ‘presence’ in a performer has robust resonances with the uncanny. it truly is linked to primal, animal traits in human members, but additionally has connotations of divinity and the supernatural, when it comes to figures of evil in addition to heroism. Stage Presence strains those issues via theatrical background.
This attention-grabbing research additionally explores the combination of technological know-how and spirituality that accompanies the appreciation of human strength. Performers show a magnetism in their audiences; they electrify them, show mesmeric command, and boost chemistry of their communique.
Case reviews contain: Josephine Baker, Sarah Bernhardt, Thomas Betterton, David Bowie, Maria Callas, Bob Dylan, David Garrick, Barry Humphries, Henry Irving, Vaslav Nijinsky and Paul Robeson.
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Additional resources for Presence: The Actor as Mesmerist
Sample text
36 Henry Irving, the greatest stage mesmerist of the late Victorian era and the model for Bram Stoker’s Dracula, was renowned for his uncanny evocations of the diabolic and the divine. 39 Those who exude this kind of supernaturalism are also those who experience the stage itself as an arena charged with power. Here one may think again of the young Simon Callow, stepping out before a vacant auditorium onto a bare stage and finding it ‘throbbing with energy’. Ian McKellan, of whom Harold Hobson wrote ‘no player of similar age… has such lustre, such interior excitement, such spiritual grace’, recalls following a group of variety theatre performers backstage in his youth.
It seems that in being asked to undo all familiar patterns of reaction and behaviour, actors in this kind of theatre are being asked to undo modernity itself. Is there some essential qualitative difference between the forms of humanity modelled in post-Renaissance civilisation, and the human experience expressed through the ancient mysteries? Are the cultures of modernity nothing but an excrescence around the vital core of being? Grotowski insists that his 36 T H E S U P R E M E AT T R I B U T E holy theatre is contemporary ‘in that it confronts our very roots with our current behaviour and stereotypes and in this way shows us our “today” in perspective with our “yesterday”’.
The real face he speaks to, whether a step or ten steps to the side of the director, is a circle of glass’. In this process, life is being lost. ‘An emotion produced from the churn of the flesh is delivered to a machine and its connections manage to produce a flow of images which will allow some related sentiment in those who watch’. This is the point at which the vital spark re-enters. 69 Returning from an existential to a practical view of the matter, actors can and do cross between theatre and film (in both directions) all the time, but in doing so they answer to very different technical demands.