I am writing this review of two important books contributed by Phillip Zarrilli after the announcement of his death on 28 April 2020. In the context of his lifework of persistent practical research and pedagogy in martial arts and actor training, his worldwide acting and directing work, and his ample publications, these volumes reconfirm Zarrilli as a master and expert practitioner who shared many secrets and insights of the psychophysical and spiritual art of the intercultural performer.
An actor, director, acting pedagogue, and multidisciplinary theatre scholar, Zarrilli was first of all a master teacher of the Indian martial arts of kalari-payattu and marma adi as well as an expert in the wu style of tai chi chuan and various forms of yoga. Zarrilli’s practical knowledge of these diverse forms of Asian psychophysical training became a foundation of his approach to acting and actor pedagogy.
Few theatre artists have developed such eloquence and rigor in transmitting their lifelong research and knowledge through scholarly discourse on acting while simultaneously providing vivid practical guidelines for actors and acting students. As an artist-scholar, Zarrilli belongs to a rare breed of those who conceive their theoretical approach from a wholistic direct encounter with “the thing itself”—he derives knowledge from the insights produced by the body-mind actively present in the world. He stands among such practical researchers as Jerzy Grotowski, Eugenio Barba, Peter Brook, and Richard Schechner. Yet, he may be singular in his clearly articulated phenomenological approach to the art of the performer conceived through interdisciplinary research and illustrated with careful intercultural evidence of practical work. As a theatre scholar deeply invested in phenomenology, I will remain in conversation with what he has left behind in his body of writing.
(toward) a phenomenology of acting “is a vital response to Jerzy Grotowski’s essential question: How does the actor ‘touch that which is untouchable?’” (i). Indeed, in his newest and sadly last book, Zarrilli shows practical ways to approach the “impossible” task of being attentive to “the things themselves,” as Edmund Husserl once put it (Reference Husserl and Findlay2001:168). In other words, Zarrilli reports “from the studio,” providing actors, acting pedagogues, and interested theatre and performance practitioners and scholars with methodologies of “‘doing’ philosophy ‘in the flesh’” (1).
Zarrilli approaches the art of acting as the art of being, directly connected to what he calls the art of cognition, referring to the use of memory, reasoning, and imagining, which includes the body in the process. More importantly, he points to embodied cognition as the initial and formative process that takes place before the development of thoughts and meaning. In other words, he focuses on what takes place before language enters the process: “whenever we have experiences we assimilate, negotiate, understand, reflect upon, problematize, or re-think our experience through the available assumptions and/or ‘concepts’ available to us at any given moment” (178).
Zarrilli shapes his approach to the actor’s work using phenomenologist Dan Zahavi’s three notions of self: the individual coherent identity self, the narrative self, and the prereflexive self. While the first two serve best in the creation of naturalistic characters, the third is well-suited for work with “no backstory—before language—such as the Protagonist in Beckett’s Act Without Words I” (145). This complex notion of the self allows for an expansion of the prevailing model of psychologically constructed character and the corresponding character-based actor training to include the treatment of character as “function” or “purpose” in the play rather than a rational and emotional mimetic whole. Such Aristotelian conceptualizations of character historically predominated theatre work until the birth of modern psychology and realism. Only shyly coexisting with the Stanislavskian “identificational mimetism” in symbolist, expressionistic, and lyrical genres, this broader approach to the actor’s creation became indispensable in the postmodern and postdramatic environment.
Mindful of the reader-practitioner who might use the exercises in the book in their work, Zarrilli offers a very clear structure in which each chapter and section is introduced conceptually, followed by several examples (often illustrated by photographs, of which there are 45 in the book), and topped with a summary and notes. While this setup gives the book the appeal of a “practical guide,” it also provides a solid theoretical grounding in phenomenology useful to graduate students and scholars of acting and acting pedagogy.
The book consists of seven chapters dealing with all aspects of acting pedagogy as seen through Zarrilli’s phenomenological lens and as practiced by him in his studio. They cover the first-person embodied experience of the world through “living communication,” the notion of “living/lived bodymind,” attention and perception in action, concepts of the self and their employment in actor’s creation, the voice as sonorous speech, imagination, and the issue of intersubjective ethics. A concise historical note (with suggested further reading) on phenomenology appears at the end as an appendix, followed by references, and an index.
Zarrilli impresses with his array of theatre references from dramaturgy to theories of acting, and beyond, reaching to philosophy, neuroscience, consciousness studies, and embodied cognition studies, all of which complement Zarrilli’s practical work as a director and acting teacher.
Phenomenologist Evan Thompson’s remark in the book’s foreword rightly claims that (toward) a phenomenology of acting is a “culmination of a life’s research in acting, directing, and mind-body disciplines” (xiv). Coming to terms with the fact that Zarrilli’s studio practice has ended, we nonetheless have much to glean from his writing. He will remain present for years to come in the scholarly discourse on contemporary actor training.
Zarrilli is also one of three editors of the collected essays from international authors, Intercultural Acting and Performer Training. The other two are T. Sasitharan, Singaporean actor, director, producer, and cofounder and director of the International Theatre Institute (ITI); and Anuradha Kapur, Indian theatre-maker, author, and educator. It would have been great if the contributors of the 16 chapters that comprise the collection had also been introduced to provide details about their unique perspectives. Combined, their essays offer the reader a polyphonic voice of “our global, urban, multi-, inter-, intra- cultural paradigms, perspectives, and realities as the norm rather than the exception” (2), as Zarrilli notes in his introduction.
While Zarrilli’s own volume builds a consistent argument on behalf of a phenomenology of broadly conceived acting and illustrates it with his own teaching and working perspective, Intercultural Acting and Performer Training brings multiple perspectives from the realm of globalized theatre practice, considering such a practice as a norm in today’s world. Actor training approaches developed in response to cultural globalization that are described in the collection greatly challenge the rarely questioned dominance of the psychology-based Stanislavsky-spun “realist” pedagogy in the West.
Fourteen chapters of the volume include accounts of various intercultural processes, such as those at the Intercultural Theatre Institute (ITI) in Singapore, or at Suzuki Tadashi’s company in Japan. The various essays cover intercultural uses of butoh, intercultural actor training in post-apartheid Johannesburg, an acting process in an intercultural production described by Korean actors within their cultural context, intercultural and nonnor-mative vocal training, a case study of the integration of taijiquan into actor training, a study of the use of selected butoh exercises in multicultural actor training, contemporary approaches to acting in Indonesia, an example of the use of Balinese techniques by Brazilian actors, and a study of Western-influenced changes in traditional Taiwanese opera. All these examples of world theatre point to a process rather than aesthetic product in the contemporary ontology and training approaches to acting as part of an overwhelmingly globalized culture.
In this plethora of treatments of cultural material that is other than one’s own, the performer engages with the technical as well as philosophical aspects on the level of foundational training, that is, through a careful employment of the means so that the resultant work can emerge more or less organically from the training.
It is important to note that issues of cultural appropriation as pertains to these specific practices do not figure in this practical guide-overview. Without denying the existence of such ethical issues, Zarrilli, his coeditors, as well as the chapter authors focus on the reclaiming and expanding of the abilities of a contemporary performer already immersed in the globalized practice. In his introduction, Zarrilli points out that “[i]n the body-to-body, person-to-person collaborative exchanges of the intercultural studio there is no place for an US against a THEM mentality” (5). While these kinds of disclaimers do not reassure, Zarrilli also points to the need to always consider the political implications and dynamics of power in a specific context. There seems to be enough evidence in the volume to indicate that the Other arrives as a teacher who instills new foundational knowledge to a complex cultural process into which that knowledge becomes assimilated in a unique way. A new norm may not be very “normative” after all—it may endlessly question the concept.
