| This dissertation locates turn of the century acting techniques within a set of diagnostic discourses that strive to convert the body's visible surfaces into legible signs of invisible psychic interiority. To facilitate the reading of somatic surfaces, these discourses deployed photographic imaging technologies capable of rendering the surface of the body transparent. I argue that the period's foremost theater artists, notably Andre Antoine and Konstantin Stanislavsky, applied "photographic" diagnostics to their rehearsal processes and acting systems. These figures developed hermeneutic strategies that enabled actors, during rehearsals, to extrapolate their characters' interiorities from clues available on the surfaces of dramatic texts. In performance, actors presented somatic surfaces upon which these constructed interiorities were eminently legible, such that spectators, perceiving the invisible truths beneath the opaque surfaces of onstage bodies, shared the observant detective-clinician's photographic diagnostic acuity. This theatrical praxis should be understood as satisfying an acute desire for epistemological certainty about the body in a historio-cultural moment when such certainty was proving increasingly elusive.;Articulating Andre Antoine's theater practice as one of fin de siecle Paris's positivist discourses, my first chapter proposes that the Theâtre-Libre presented tableaux of arrested, silenced bodies whose surfaces, like those of Jean-Marie Charcot's photographed hysterics or apprehended recidivist criminals, were actively re-narrativized, rendered them epistemologically stable. The second chapter argues that Stanislavsky's detailed production plan for Chekhov's The Seagull produced actors with re-inscribed interiorities who functioned as x-ray photographs or hypnotized hysterics performing a death-in-life, displaying at once perceptible interior and transparent surface. The third chapter demonstrates that Stanislavsky's theater space offers, in its relationship between actor and spectator, the doctor-patient relationship central to the Freudian analytic scene: System-trained actor-patients, using affective memory, make their characters' forgotten pasts perceptible on the present surfaces of their recollecting bodies. In the final chapter, I examine Stanislavsky's Method of Physical Action, arguing that rehearsal techniques encouraging actors to develop their roles as meticulously-developed chains of Pavlovian conditioned reflexes effectively perform onstage chronophotographic motion studies: series of discrete images in which nuanced expressions of interiority are easily registered by an audience as the perceptible end-products of reflex acts. |
