Role Play
What is the nature of “role-play”? The very roots of drama are grounded in the religious experience of “becoming” another entity or person through role-play.
In earliest times, a shaman took on the qualities of an animal by donning the mask of an animal that he wanted to influence or commune with. The mask is a powerful representation of the animal because it captures the perceived essence of the animal.
This process appeared to watchers to be almost magical as the shaman “absorbed” or psychologically internalized the qualities of the animal through the mask. For example, when donning the mask the shaman started to exhibit externally the sharpness of the beak, the strength of the jaws, or the stealth of the animal which he abstracted from the mask and internalized. These perceived qualities of the animal are “physicalized” through the shaman’s process of wearing the mask.
Ancient Greeks
The next step of representing a god or another human being with a mask (as the Greeks did in religious dramas and eventually in giving rise to the theatre as an art form) is a small one. Whether animal, human or god, the mask continued to symbolically represent the “other” whose qualities were to be “re-lived” through role play.
Greek priests (and eventually Thespis, the first recorded actor) extended the act of taking on abstract “qualities” that began with the donning of an animal mask into the internalizing of perceived attributes of gods or human characters represented by the masks used in performances. For example, the sharp, jealous nature of the goddess Hera as portrayed in the mask (and supported by the text) helped the greek actor/priest to “incorporate” her character emotionally and physically when wearing her mask.
In modern theatre, the final step is to drop the mask completely and to rely on the written play to provide character detail and motivation. It is a more complex psychological process, but no different in nature from abstracting information from a mask. Actors now abstract and interpret their characters from the text and stage directions almost exclusively—no mask needed. How? A concrete example makes this clear.
Internalizing a Role: Sandpaper!
The example I use to help students grasp an actor’s imaginative process starts with asking them to imagine a piece of coarse sandpaper.
I generally pretend to hold up a piece of sandpaper and ask how many people can “feel” what the texture of the imaginary paper would feel like if they were to run their fingertips across an actual piece of sand paper.
Again, none of the students touch the paper, because it does not actually exist. Most hands go up, indicating they can “feel” it in their mind’s eye (for lack of a better term).
What people are doing is abstracting the quality of “roughness” from the sandpaper in much the same way a shaman would internalize the qualities of an animal represented from an animal mask. The coarseness of the paper can be “felt” in the mind, but also in the body. It is not just a mental image.
The shaman “becomes” that animal through abstraction…he/she creates a kinesthetic, emotional, and mental map of the “other” (animal) that is “lived” in the moment, making the dramatic experience real and experiential. Actors do the same today.
Present Day Actors
Modern actors have simply extended this practice of “internalizing” the abstract qualities represented by the mask into a very sophisticated process of abstracting qualities from dialogue and given circumstances within a script.
The literal mask as a presentation of the character has been dropped, but the abstraction process of “internalizing” perceived qualities remains essentially the same.
If the role-play is sophisticated and/or emotionally felt, then the player “lives” the life of the character in the sense meant by Stanislavski. The French actor Louis Jouvet (1891-1951) articulated this process when he stated that, “On the stage and in the presence of an audience, the comedian must not only portray a character, he must also be that character and feel his feelings.” (Cole and Chinoy, p. 229)
Mindful Actors
In this way, the performer or player becomes both “self and other” at one and the same time through role-play. This is the essential aesthetic experience of role-play, whether the role-play is initiated through improvisation or through text.
The process of abstraction has a different starting point in both instances, but the experience during role-play is the same.
An actor, then, undergoes a process of building a contextual “map” of the role, which they internalize almost magically through a process of abstraction.
Are all actors in control of how this process functions? Indeed, are all actors even aware that this process is at work? Definitely not.
However, mindful actors understand that their awareness of “self” remains intact, even as they enter into the present moment and “live” the emotions, thoughts, motivations, and physicality of their character.
This awareness differentiates mindful actors from other performers who often lose themselves in a role or, worse, never connect with the emotional life of their characters at all.
David Plouffe 