Affect, emotion and intensity in body training for performing

Abstract

In contrast to the accounts and descriptions about other aspects of doing theater or being an actor, the experience of acting is usually defined by those people who come into contact with it as something difficult to explain, as if it were an eminently corporal type of experience that resists to be shaped or reduced to the articulated language.

On de basis of a long ethnographic workfield in the independent theater circuit of La Plata (Argentina) and paying special attention to the ways in which acting is taught and trained, in this work I propose to address this type of experiences and to break down the thickness they present from the native point of view. In pursuit of this goal, Spinoza's heiress notion of affection and socio-anthropological works about emotions are valuable tools because, they give a central place to corporality but they do not escape from the problem of the links between body and word, but, on the contrary, it offers elements to settle precisely there, in the process of elaborating a more open notion of body.