ACTING AND NOT-ACTING: AN EXPERIMENT AND INVESTIGATION IN A MONOLOGUE

Abstract

An actor of more than thirty years¿ experience, I am interested in the actor¿s process. I address Kirby¿s definition of acting: ¿to act means to feign, to simulate, to represent, to impersonate.¿ He proposed a continuum moving from Not-Acting to Acting with different stages of acting depending on matrices of pretended or represented character, situation, place and time. I test this theory and address the fundamental question ¿does acting begin with pretence?¿ with a practice-as-research methodology. I analyse how my acting shifts between acting and not-acting in one performance of a purpose-written lecture-performance entitled These Children are Dead. I argue that Kirby¿s theory is too simplistic in reducing a much more complex phenomenon to a single factor, that of pretence. My findings resonate with Lutterbie¿s approach towards a theory of acting via cognitive science which may offer insights hitherto obscured by the lack of material methods of investigating acting phenomenon.