{"id":50,"date":"2006-05-26T00:45:09","date_gmt":"2006-05-25T22:45:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tale-of-tales.com\/DramaPrincess\/wp\/?p=50"},"modified":"2006-11-14T15:49:07","modified_gmt":"2006-11-14T13:49:07","slug":"paradox-of-the-actor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tale-of-tales.com\/DramaPrincess\/wp\/?p=50","title":{"rendered":"Paradox of the Actor (Denis Diderot)"},"content":{"rendered":"

read in Dutch translation by Gemma Pappot from French original (1773)<\/em><\/p>\n

Written in the Rococo period, this pamphlet argues that the best actors rely entirely on imitation skills for their performance. If they do not feel a thing themselves, they will be much more capable of moving the audience. This links the act of acting to that of writing or drawing, where observation is one half of the work and reproduction is the other.<\/p>\n

It reminded me of our desire to build the Drama Princess system “from the outside” rather than designing the emotion first and then hoping for the proper behaviour to emerge from that.<\/p>\n

Diderot’s concept is not very popular amongst actors. And probably never has been. Perhaps this is because they feel that he is giving their tricks away. Or perhaps because they can’t meet his high expectations. Diderot makes it very clear that what he says only applies to the best of actors, the geniuses. For mediocre actors, he admits that it may be better to really feel the emotion when playing it on stage.
\nObviously, in the mean time, modern theater has developed quite different goals than imitation or even moving the audience. So perhaps these ideas apply more to movies nowadays than to the stage.<\/em><\/p>\n

He also makes a big distinction between acting “in the Salon”, amongst friends, for fun, and acting on stage. The latter is never even based on real life, but on a text that was written by somebody else. That way, the actor is even further removed from real life. Standing on the shoulders of the poet, who was standing on those of a person in nature, the actor becomes larger than life.<\/p>\n

I don’t know if Diderot was ultimately in favour of a very stylised, symbolic way of acting or if he thought that imitation performed by a genius actor would look naturalistic.<\/p>\n

Here’s a quote that sounds oddly similar to things said previously in this journal:<\/p>\n

So what defines true talent? Knowing very well the external symptoms of the soul that one borrows, directing oneself to the sentiment of our audience and deceiving them by mimicking these symptoms in an imitation that makes everything look bigger in their imagination and that shapes their judgement permanently; because another way to judge what happens inside ourselves does not exist. And what does it matter whether they do or do not play from their emotions, if we don’t notice?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(from page 99 translated from Dutch by me)<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

read in Dutch translation by Gemma Pappot from French original (1773) Written in the Rococo period, this pamphlet argues that the best actors rely entirely on imitation skills for their performance. If they do not feel a thing themselves, they will be much more capable of moving the audience. This links the act of acting […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-50","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tale-of-tales.com\/DramaPrincess\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tale-of-tales.com\/DramaPrincess\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tale-of-tales.com\/DramaPrincess\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tale-of-tales.com\/DramaPrincess\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tale-of-tales.com\/DramaPrincess\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=50"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.tale-of-tales.com\/DramaPrincess\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tale-of-tales.com\/DramaPrincess\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=50"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tale-of-tales.com\/DramaPrincess\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=50"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tale-of-tales.com\/DramaPrincess\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=50"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}