Blog 18 First Responder (Derek)

An ethnographic approach to performance would position the scholar/researcher at “a view from ground level” in a local context, producing “knowledge that is anchored in practice and circulated within a performance community” (Conquergood, 146) and helps avoid what we could term the fallacy of “monolithic wholes” (Kealiinohomoku, 34). An ethnographic approach allows researchers to focus on subjugated knowledges, “to meanings that are expressed forcefully through intonation, silence, body tension, arched eyebrows, blank stares, and other protective arts of disguise and secrecy” (146). The work by Reason and Reynolds on audience experiences of watching dance is an example of researchers focusing on the body in an ethnographic study that seeks “a personal connection: ‘knowing how,’ and ‘knowing who’” (146). Their study of dance audiences shows the extreme variability of response an observer will have of kinesthetic changes in the dancers. In other words, the subjectivity of the observer complicates their understanding and interpretation of the movements they observe. This suggests a similar difficulty would face the alien researcher attempting to first recognize and then accurately interpret or understand the subtle kinesthetic changes that constitute the subjugated knowledge gleaned through an ethnographic approach to performance studies. Overcoming this barrier, however, allows for deeper and fuller knowledge in myriad situations, both in theatre and in the real world.

In the world of theatre, ethnographic approaches allow performance studies practitioners new ways of seeing and understanding the events on the stage and their effects on the audience. The stylized facial expressions and body movements of bharatanatyam, for example, or of kabuki or even of ballet, might be analyzed in terms of their significations within their respective cultures of origin, thus providing an alien observer with a new and hopefully more accurate (or closer) perspective on – and understanding of – those performances. It might help us to avoid inadvertent colonial practices of consumption and possession (Foster, 81; 89). Changing tack to focus on the audience, imagine observing the audience during a performance of Beckett’s Not I in order to track their external displays of kinesthetic empathy or other physical changes that might indicate affective reaction to the performance (e.g. searching for signs of stuplimity). Furthermore, in translating a dramatic work from one culture to another in preparation for performance, an ethnographic approach to performance studies could help dramaturgs, directors, and actors to more accurately understand the original scenes, character behavior, and especially past “native” performances prior to making their own decisions of how to interpret and perform the work in their own idiom. Something like that could be said to have occurred with the IU production of Richard III; for example, the inclusion of visual cues such as Queen Anne’s pill bottle and her (to us, an obviously drugged) demeanor and body language. An ethnographic approach might also be a tool for helping actors gain new awareness of their own craft, if such an approach could be incorporated into theater exercises. Lastly, I’d like to suggest that an ethnographic approach to performance studies could also help outsiders to understand the performances enacted within various sub-cultures (e.g. Japanese visual-kei bands).

In the real/political world, ethnographic approaches to performance studies can be utilized by researchers to inform their work across disciplines ranging from international politics to sports studies. In politics different cultures have different ways of expressing themselves in body language and facial expression. For example, to the uninitiated, it might be difficult to recognize that the unsmiling face of a Japanese politician or corporate CEO does not necessarily mean anger or some other negative emotion as it might more safely be presumed were that person American. (Whether that example falls under the domain of performance studies is perhaps arguable.) As for the applicability of ethnographic approaches to performance studies being used in sports studies, the Reason and Reynolds article made me think about my own experiences as an athlete and now as a spectator of athletic events. It seems very useful to take such an approach when studying fan behavior and the performance of team support, especially comparatively; e.g., a comparative study of the fan cultures/behaviors of American, English, and Spanish soccer fans, or even of the differences between regions within a single country, or between first division and second division team fans.

Ngai: What is the "stuplime"? (Whitney)

In her chapter on “Stuplimity” from Ugly Things, Sianne Ngai offers this term as a necessary reaction to new, primarily postmodern, objects of analysis. Contemporary criticism, she writes, “in its engagement with radically different forms of cultural production” needs “new terms designating our ways of responding to them” (271). Stuplimity is offered as a counter to the Kantian sublime that has generally been appropriated to describe emotional overwhelming reactions to objects or events. In Ngai’s words, the Kantian sublime has become, primarily through its use in relation to Romanticism, “an experience of being astonished and overwhelmed by a vast or intimidating object” (267). Ngai seems to suggest that this “contemporary version” of Kant’s term is actually an incorrect appropriation of the original concept in Kant’s Critique of Judgement, which Kant never intended to be applied to objects of art, only to “rude nature” (265).

Ngai emphasizes three key problems with using the Kantian sublime as a way to describe our reactions to postmodern texts like Gertrude Stein’s text The Making of Americans and Gerhard Richter’s installation Atlas. (Side note: I’m labeling most of the works in Ngai’s essay as postmodern because they follow with my understanding of that categorization, but if someone closer to that field needs to correct me, I’d be grateful for a clear understanding of the pre- and post- modern distinctions). The first clarification Ngai makes about the Kantian sublime is that it “applies only to a quality or state of the subject’s mind, and not to the object that excites that state of mind” (266).  In other words, for Kant, sublimity emerges only properly on the side of the subject and cannot take into account any overwhelming or intense characteristics inherent within or attributed to the object itself. Secondly, the movement of sublime reaction in Kant is transcendental – “involving an uplifting transcendence” – rather than the postmodern works which “tend to draw us down into the sensual and material” (267). This second discrepancy is tied up in the difference in subject matter between Kant’s examples and the postmodern works Ngai analyzes. Kant’s examples all come from nature and involve encounters with the infinite, while Ngai’s examples encounter “bits and scraps” of finite material – copper pennies, words, paper, etc. (271). The final problem with using the Kantian sublime to express our reaction to postmodern objects is that it can only properly take into account the “astonishment” part of the reaction process. “Boredom” is the other piece of the reaction that Ngai attaches to the objects she analyzes and Kantian sublimity cannot account for the kind of “dissatisfied (and often restless) mood of boredom” (269).

Stuplimity, then, once Ngai situates it as an alternative to the Kantian sublime in these three significant ways, is finally defined as “the aesthetic experience in which astonishment is paradoxically united with boredom” (271). Put another way, stuplimity is a “bringing together…of sharp, sudden excitation and prolonged desensitization, exhaustion, or fatigue” (271). Additionally, just as stuplimity is offered as a new term for aesthetic reaction, Ngai suggests that the work of postmodern objects that call on this reaction also push us to formulate new tactics for reading (272). By forcing an emphasis on “the finite and iterable” – those material and potentially overlooked elements of everyday life that structure the organization of our existence (language or money, for instance) – and presenting these objects simultaneously or in repetition, stuplimity induces “a series of fatigues or minor exhaustions, rather than a single, major blow to the imagination” (272). Consequently, these objects invite the viewer forward while consistently pulling him or her back, suggesting that our traditional mode of progressional reading must be questioned.

Course Blog 12 (from Derek)

1.

How does the object of analysis (opera|drama|scriptive thing|performance) encompass an expressive volatility that resists domestication or that threatens an uncontrolled signification, and how is this expressive volatility either settled or unsettled through performance?

Inspired by Levin’s discussion of the tension between the settling force of conventional opera and the unsettling force of a dialectic or polylogical staging; see pages 26-27 and 32.

2.

How is the object of analysis (opera|drama|scriptive thing|performance) being framed or mediated?

Inspired by Taylor’s discussion of how the windows of her apartment and then the TV screen framed the crisis of 9/11, and how she felt “the intensely mediatized seeing became a form of social blinding” (p.244) as the images of 9/11 were framed (ideologically) by the government and media, repeated and consumed endlessly, in the sense of a fixed masterpiece (Artaud, 253).

3.

How does the object of analysis (opera|drama|scriptive thing|performance) nudge the spectator out of the realm of having an experience and into a position of being forced to make a (moral) choice, thus affecting society?

Inspired by Brecht’s discussion of what happens to the social function of the theater when “text, music and setting ‘adopt attitudes’” toward content”, when “illusion is sacrificed to free discussion”, and when the spectator is “forced…to cast his vote” (39).

4.

How does this object of analysis (opera|drama|scriptive thing|performance) function as culture, reproducing and re-creating itself by surrogation (i.e. by offering “a substitute for something else that preexists it”)?

Inspired by Roach’s discussion of memory, performance, and substitution, in which he argues that “performance…stands in for an elusive entity that it is not but that it must vainly aspire both to embody and to replace” (3).

Bernstein Prompt: Primary Post (Whitney)

In “Dances with Things: Material Culture and the Performance of Race,” Robin Bernstein argues that objects of material culture can (and often do) script human action and that very particular performances emerge out of interactions with racially meaningful scriptive things. This argument is articulated fairly comprehensibly within the first three pages of her article. Bernstein uses her primary example, the “watermelon” photograph, to initially engage the key elements of her argument. After a short discussion of both the “why” (related to questions about the woman and her interiority – person) and “how” (related to ways the photo produces historically located meanings – text) questions that come to mind on viewing this photo, she suggests that the distinction between the “why’s” and “how’s” of this photograph is disturbed by “a complex interaction between the two figures” (68). Because the active (“sentient”) agent is evidently taking her bodily cues from the passive (“inanimate”) thing, Bernstein claims that the caricature itself, as a thing, prompts and structures human action. Consequently, “in the dense interaction between thing and human, the caricature scripted the woman’s performance” (68).

There are several important terms to hash out that occur throughout Bernstein’s article, but the most important one (and the one I’ve already used in my brief summary of her argument) seems to be “script.” She defines her use of the term for the reader on page 69 – “I use the term script as a theatrical practitioner might: to denote an evocative primary substance from which actors, directors, and designers build complex, variable performances that occupy real time and space.” The script, for Bernstein, is that which inhabits the space between archive and repertoire. It is both the dramatic narrative, the stubborn text that structures a performance, and the enabler of action within real time and space. As she adds later in the article, the “script captures the moment when dramatic narrative and movement through space are in the act of becoming each other” (89).

Another important term follows directly from this first one – “scriptive thing.” Like a script, a scriptive thing both structures a performance in relation to itself and allows for variations within the resulting performance. The important added element here, though, is “thing,” a term that Bernstein spends a good deal of time pinning down. Bernstein takes her definition of thing directly from thing theory, which places the term “thing” in direct opposition to the term “object.” The words being in direct opposition, though, do not mean that the elements categorized by each word are necessarily in direct opposition. In other words, a thing can, at times, be an object and an object can, at times, be a thing – “the difference between objects and things, then, is not essential but situational and subjective” (69). Bernstein ultimately suggests that “performance” is the important distinguishing factor between object and thing. “Things are performative in that they do something: they invite humans to move” (70). Things, by this definition then, are also always “scriptive things” because they script “meaningful bodily movements” (dances or performances) by human beings.

“Enscription” is another important term Bernstein introduces (73). This term comes into play as she’s discussing the difference between determined and implied actions scripted by things. Her direct definition is “interpellation through a scriptive thing that combines narrative with materiality to structure behavior” (73). Like the act of turning the pages of Kemble’s alphabet book, enscription combines narrative (violence toward African Americans), materiality (the physical properties of the book that demand its reader to turn the pages), and repetition (performing this action twenty-four times, one for each letter of the alphabet). In Bernstein’s argument, enscription becomes an activity on the part of things that allows them to become “scriptive.” In other words, scriptive things enscript humans into certain patterns and indexes that become natural behaviors.

One final term I want to quickly define is “performative competence” (75). While the other terms Bernstein lays out seem to provide useful new concepts, this phrase seems particularly relevant in addressing some of our previous concepts in a new way (particularly regarding our recent discussions of spectatorship). Performative competence is an understanding of how a thing scripts broad behaviors within a particular historical moment. A competent performer will not only be able to “decode a thing’s invitation to dance” but will also understand the range of implications the scriptive thing is offering and will perform a response that lies within that range of implications.

Finally, after laying out her main argument and defining these crucial terms, Bernstein articulates the consequences of her argument toward the middle of the article. Her expectation is that proper readings of particular historically located performances that result from humans “dancing with things” can ultimately help us form substantial conclusions about larger patterns of behavior within that particular historical moment. In her words, “by reading things’ scripts within historically located traditions of performance, we can make well-supported claims about normative aggregate behavior” (76). She certainly seems to demonstrate this process in her article, and with some enlightening conclusions. While her very last paragraph seems, at first glance, to be a much too short explanation of how to do what she’s calling for (namely, “a revision of what qualifies as ‘reading’ material evidence”), she ultimately demonstrates a revision of “reading material evidence” throughout her article. Therefore, she walks us very carefully through the process she is hoping we will emulate in order to expand our knowledge of normal aggregate behavior within particular historical moments.

Course Blog 5, The Exonerated, Jenna

Sincerity. According to our friend, the OED, sincerity is defined in the following way.

sincerity, n.

The character, quality, or state of being sincere.

1a.Freedom from falsification, adulteration, or alloy; purity, correctness

1b. Genuineness (of a passage)

2a. Freedom from dissimulation or duplicity; honesty, straightforwardness.

2b. Of feelings: Genuineness

2c. pl. Sincere feelings or actions

<http://www.oed.com.ezproxy.lib.indiana.edu/view/Entry/180056?redirectedFrom=sincerity&>

In this definition, the word “genuineness” is used twice, as is the word “feelings.” In viewing sincerity through a theatrical lens, these two words are appropriate ones to ascribe to sincerity and how sincerity may be crafted on stage—through the genuineness of feelings. Of course, assessing a play through the genuineness of its feelings assumes that there must be a judgment system in its audience through which feelings may or may not be perceived as genuine. I might propose that this judgment system is one of empathy, but I'm not sure that all moments of sincerity in The Exonerated are necessarily empathetic ones. Perhaps empathy is only a factor in this nebulous judgment system through which we intrinsically feel whether something is genuine or not.

After reading the introduction and notes on the performance of the play, it is evident that Blank and Jensen's project is one of sincerity. Through those two introductory sections to the play, the playwrights create the system through which we decide whether or not sentiment is sincere. This is done rather easily and ingenuously through the play's title and its introductory text. The characters are exonerated. Before the play begins, we are already aware of their innocence. Innocence then becomes the concept through which we may ascribe the genuineness of the play's feeling. We are told that, regardless of acting style, the performers usually channel the actual mannerisms and other characteristics of the six exonerated people. Blank and Jensen write, “It [actors unintentionally channeling the people they are playing] happens involuntarily and has nothing to do with mimicry or impersonation. It's all in the words, and in the stories” (xvii). Blank and Jensen present this play as a phenomenon. Because its dialogue comes almost exclusively from public documents and interviews, actors, seemingly inevitably, become vehicles of delivering the reality of the feeling behind the public statements made about the various murder cases presented in the play. Because the words are “true” Blank and Jensen invest them with magical qualities. Before the play even begins, these two playwrights manipulate us toward believing in the genuineness of feeling invested in the dialogue.

When reading the play, I found one of the most sincere moments on page 32 during Gary's tale of his “vision statement.” Near the middle of this story, when discussing investigators used the vision statement as a confession of how he might have killed his mother, Gary has the following line.

“Gary: [beat] I never would have hurt her.”

It is difficult to parse through exactly why this line has so much impact because it is tied into systems of feeling that I don't quite cognitively understand. Why do I judge the line to be genuine? I feel it to be true, but how does that feeling create belief? How exactly is this line using sincerity to create knowledge of innocence? I, alas, know little of the mechanisms of the brain. It may be, because I have been aware of Gary's innocence since the beginning of the play, that this line, strategically positioned against the incomprehension of Gary's investigators, makes me feel outraged that they cannot see the truth in front of their faces. In the presence of their disbelief, my belief becomes stronger. In its simplicity, Gary's line is incredibly powerful. It is only seven words and a beat, and yet underlines the emotional injustice intrinsic in The Exonerated's project. The mechanics of such emotional manipulation force one of the questions of the play—how could such apparently innocent people ever have been convicted of and almost killed for murders we know (or perhaps feel) they did not commit?

Course Blog #3 on Davis (Whitney): Theatricality's Reliance on Ideal Spectatorship

Davis opens with a very subtle and pointed question that ultimately drives her entire argument – “why did a word with a new suffix emerge in 1837, nearly three hundred years after ‘theatrical’ appears” (Davis 127). She moves from this question into a concise outline of the history of the relationship between these two terms and a statement about where she will position herself within this history. There seems to be a subtle shift between “theatrical” in relation to the stage and “theatrical” in relation to role-playing off the stage – a shift that allows for a grounded instance of commensurability between the stage and theatricality in the social realm, as Sara helpfully highlighted in her response. She then seems to discard the previously intertwined and ultimately tautological relationship between “theatrical” and “theatricality,” and grounds her own argument in the distinction between the two – a distinction that “hinges on the audience” (Davis 128).

In her subsequent tracking of various instances and definitions of “theatrical” and “theatricality,” Davis focuses on the instances where the audience and/or the spectator are specifically implicated. Ultimately, her definition of theatricality is summed up here: “A bystander, like an unengaged spectator, does not contribute to making meaning because there is no participation, whereas a sympathetic spectator ‘changes places’ with the actor through emotional participation. Such a spectator, who distinguishes between actor, role, and situation; self and other; and between self and self-as-actor, creates theatricality” (141). She backs off a bit from the stance that theatricality can be used to show direct relationships between the stage and the social realm, arguing instead that, “theatricality…is not about politics per se” but “it may exist in [either] the theatre or in everyday life as long as spectators grant it” (Davis 152). It seems to me that, for Davis, theatricality can never be a stand-alone term. It can never, in and of itself, describe the state of theater or everyday life. For Davis, it is only by the engagement of the spectator that theatricality can be properly used as an adjective; its activity (agency?) as a concept is completely reliant on the spectator becoming active.

For the final question of the prompt, I want to try to put Brecht and Davis into conversation, though more in terms of a scenario that both arguments coaxed me to think about. When we read Brecht several weeks ago, I thought a lot about the relationship of his theories to a (maybe not mainstream but certainly consistent) trend in plays to have the transformation into the imaginary world occur on stage in front of the audience. I’m sure everyone has either seen, heard of, or been in at least one play that enacts this framing mechanism – the actors come out in “plain clothes” and, during the first scene, somehow decide that they are going to put on a play and then use clothing or props on stage to transform into the characters. Brecht’s arguments made me think about this technique in relation to the role of the actors and Davis’ argument makes me think about it more in terms of how such a spectacle reflects back on the spectator/audience. It seems that this technique is generally meant to ease the audience into the action (and ultimately bring them further into the imaginary world of the play) by allowing them to see both the mechanism behind the transformation and the transformation itself. But, maybe if we engage this technique with Davis’ argument, the framing has more to do with effectively modeling a version (maybe even an ideal version?) of engaged spectatorship. Using Davis, could we read this technique differently: the plain-clothes actors are essentially originally spectators but then they become so engaged that they actually take up the mantle of acting out the play?

Blog #3 [Sara], Davis -- Theatricality is a process for spectatorship

In her Theatricality and Civil Society,”  Tracy Davis takes the Oxford English Dictionary to task, interrogating its entry on theatricality” that, in her view, critically misreads the historic usage of the neologism coined in the writing of  Thomas Carlyle (1795 – 1881), a Victorian-era Scottish satirist and historian. Dependent on what she calls a tautological construction”  (127), the definition employs the root word “theatrical” to define Carlyle's creation as a quality pertaining to the stage or exhibiting a self-conscious showiness, simulation, or extravagance. According to Davis, the OED’s error lies in its misreading of context both in the personal and historical writings of Carlyle and his successors. Rather than an “ aesthetic effect” or a relationship of theatre to lived reality,” Davis characterizes theatricality as a process for spectatorship” (149) that goes beyond the cliché of mere dramatic spectacle to address the commensurability of  [the act of] spectating to civil society,” (151). 

I had to turn to the dictionary myself at this point, noting that "two concepts or things are commensurable if they are measurable or comparable by a common standard." So, it's important to note that Davis finds spectating to be capable of being directly compared to what she calls "civil society." This is immediately confusing, as spectating is a gerund that describes a process of doing and civil society seems, at least at first glance, to be a collection of people, or as Davis later stresses, a public. Where exactly are the common standards?

According to Davis, although theatricality is dependent on inauthenticity in phenomenology,” (that is to say that the spectator must not be carried away by the illusion of the picture, stage or otherwise), it is not necessarily this inauthenticity that makes the crucial distinction between illusionism and theatricality, but rather the spectators’ choice to engage in critical discourse within the public sphere (149-51). Citing Jürgen Habermas, Davis characterizes this "volitional spetatorship" as capable of breaking the spell that collective public viewing oftens casts on audiences, letting them forget their individuality in a pursuit of common attention on an object exterior to the private self. Within theatricality, one is actively aware of his own "dédoublement" or acting in the reception of the performance, and can thus consider a reaction that is detached from his own sense of self, but this awareness is centered on the active denial of sympathy to objects in the performance frame (153-54).

The foundations of Davis’s argument lie in her efforts at philology and her research into etymology. She effectively traces the coinage and use of theatricality in its many derivations from its genesis in notions of the theatrum or elevated realm of public interest through the late twentieth century associations with spectacle and conscious mimeticism, though, by focusing on an historicized analysis of Carlyle, she traces a genealogy that consistently brings her back to notions of comparing critical spectatorships in civil society. Finding that Carlyle’s notions of theatricality extended from the theatre to the gallows, she suggests that theatricality is neither a state nor a relationship but rather the process of that “dédoublement” or active self-awareness that translates into the revelations of social injustices. (142-43)  She acknowledges her relationship to Brecht, calling for enabling the effects of active dissociation, or alienation, or self-reflexivity, in standing aside from the suffering of the righteous to name and thus bring into the self-possession of a critical stance,” but notes that her notions of theatricality are not synonymous with Brecht’s V-effect, but rather the process that make his “epicness” (or at least dialectism) possible (152). Her theories also jive with Handke’s manifesto in their shared awareness that the basis for theatricality lies in the intellectual efforts of the spectators rather than strictly in the hands the artists, asserting that it is “ the spectator, who by failing to sympathize and instead commencing to think, becomes the actor,” (151). Like Handke, in Davis's view, the onus lies on the spectator to engage, not the artist to be politically engaging, for it is the only way that art might "show us new ways of seeing, being, thinking" instead of perpetuating familiar and potentially problematic ways of knowing in the world. This is a revolutionary statement that, though it does not share the violent aggression of Debord, at the very least, hearkens to his cynicism of a spectacular machine. The only way to do harm to the oppressive regime of the spectacle, Davis might say, is to be always aware of it.

Course Blog 3 [Kelly Lusk]: Theatricality (Or Why Realism is Just The Worst)

While reading Davis' article, I have to admit. I got very excited.
Perhaps it was because her subject matter is totally in my element.
Perhaps it was because what Davis had to say... is something that I've felt for a very long time and here it is! Down in black and white! In sentences that made sense! And written in such a way that I, seriously, read from my table just thinking, 'That. Is. EXACTLY. What I always thought..."
Regardless the reason for my 'giddiness', I think it is of, at least, some importance that... this argument that she makes against realism is a very heated debated. I've seen wonderful professional relationships crumble over this very notion that... perhaps realism isn't all that we make it out to be.

I focus on realism because that is the main argument that Davis uses in order to defend her definition of Theatricality.

"Theatricality is not likely to be present when a performance is so absorbing that the audience forgets that is is spectating" (128). This statement is, for me, in direct conversation with the quote she supplies from playwright Wallace Shawn on 137 about how if audience members are truly here to experience 'escapism', he feels "like an idiot grabbing him by the throat and trying to get him to worry about the things that are bothering me... it's quite embarrassing, it's quite unpleasant."

It is here that we begin to understand the danger of viewing theatre as an art that is associated with leisure.  When a playwright like Wallace Shawn (the guy who played Vizzini in Princess Bride and the voice of the Green Dinosaur in Toy Story, right?) who is immensely talented, is worried about the audience before he is worried about the quality of his work.... I think is a good indicator that something is not quite right. Shawn and Davis have the same argument, in that, there MUST be participation from the audience. Even if the participation is quietly in their own head as they drive home. Theatre, like any other art, should inspire critical thinking. The danger of 'The Trance' that we discussed before in class, is that it encourages apathy. It sets up a system of, "As an audience member, I don't have to think of what it's like to be this character, how I would react, how I would like things to change... instead I'm just going to sit here and let other people figure it out."

In order for Theatricality to be present, there must be an audience present that is aware they are the audience. And not just because they have the ticket stub in their pocket.

In section VI (beginning on page 146) she addresses the system in which actors are trained to seduce the audience into this lull. Personally, I find this section very refreshing in the way I was trained as an actor, which was all based in realism. There were no other option. Realism. That's it. Sense memory was the end all, be all. As an actor you would be on stage while the director would bate you saying things like, "Your boyfriend just walked out on you after you told him you had AIDS and are about to die! When was a time when you lost someone you loved?! When they decided to leave you because they couldn't deal with your circumstance!!" The director would then continue to harass you and it was only until you broke down crying that he was finally convinced that you 'understood the moment'.

I'm sorry.... but I call bull crap.
And Davis does too.

I... have never been in that situation. I've never faced a life threatening illness and have my committed boyfriend of X amount of years leave me in one day.
And, for me to think of something that hardly even comes close to those circumstances, just so I would FEEL... is frankly insulting.

She directly criticizes this method of acting saying "it eliminates dissonance between actor and character, for "sense memory" is sincere, and taunts an audience to sympathize in the face of real human suffering" (146). She puts the actor (a medium of the director) on trial. Almost saying... how dare we ever think about doing that? Exploiting a real human emotion (and ignoring the circumstances the playwright has given the actor). She, instead, promotes Diderot's teachings. Diderot refutes the idea of sense memory all together: "they say an actor is all the better for being excited, for being, angry. I deny it. He is best when he imitates anger. Actors impress the public not when they are furious, but when they play fury well" (147).

I draw this back to a question that she prompts at the bottom of 138 (in communion with Diderot):

In performance, do actors feel what they show? 

That has been a question and topic of debate I've heard before. And I think it is extremely fascinating. Because... these people are actors. They act. They perform. How much of what they are feeling is necessary in order for them to have a successful performance?