Inscribing actors' bodies : towards an epistemology of movement praxis in actor training

This thesis explores some of the issues involved in movement praxis in actor training, contextualising itself within the QUT Academy of the Arts in Brisbane and arts research in Australian Universities. To elucidate these issues the researcher applies the epistemology of Humberto Maturana's constitutive ontology (the philosophical\ud underpinnings of the biology of cognition) in multiple sites of performance theory and practice, with particular reference to the movement learning of actors. The research process has focused on publishing articles and a monograph for different groups of observers of the phenomenon under study: for Feldenkrais Practitioners, actor and drama educators, and researchers in performance studies. These articles, which are presented in a modified form in the thesis, develop the conceptual framework of the thesis; identify issues in movement training for performance, explore these issues and track movement training to performance. Insights garnered are then applied in the\ud researcher's practice as director of The Rivers of China by Alma De Groen. Because the researcher occupies different sites, such as that of actor in training, of director, of actor educator and Feldenkrais Practitioner, the research is polysituational and results in a heteroglossic text. This text coheres around the central proposition that\ud live performance can be constituted in terms of the particular dynamic of human interrelationship involved in the contract to play, and that there will be more coherence\ud in the movement preparation of actors for live performance if that project is viewed in terms of the dynamics of this interrelationship rather than from mechanical or instrumental theories of the moving body