The knowing body : meaning and method in Yat Malmgren's actor training technique

Little has been written of Yat Malmgren’s actor training technique, despite its international influence in mainstream western actor training. Created originally for the construction and performance of characters in theatrical and screen realism, at the Drama Centre, London, in the 1960-1970s, Malmgren’s actor training process, known as Character Analysis, forms a body of knowledge, which is transmitted practically and experientially to trainee actors. This thesis outlines the Malmgren technique’s traditions, processes of transmission and centres primarily on the modes of understanding that underlie this practical system. This research sets a series of widening contextualistations of understandings of the modalities of embedded/embodied knowledge disseminated through the training process. Interwoven throughout this thesis, the researcher’s voice appears as a Researcher’s Journal, placing the embodied awareness of the researcher, as one of the principal Malmgren trainers in Australia. The material and engendered locus for this research is my own embodied consciousness. This research differentiates Malmgren’s training process both from Laban’s movement techniques and from other twentieth century western actor training processes. It begins with the traditions of Rudolf Laban’s movement theories, from which the Malmgren technique arose, Hermeneutic phenomenology is the methodological framework used to investigate the meaning of the Malmgren technique to those studying it, taking into account contemporary performance and communication theories of agency and embodiment. Benner’s (1994) hermeneutic phenomenological method of data collection and analysis, used previously in nursing research, is newly applied to the field of acting. Participants from three full-time acting courses, where Yat Malmgren’s technique is the principal mode of actor training, provide the interview data to articulate a series of phenomenological themes. This research uses Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s image of the chiasm, where materiality and consciousness interweave as an underlying metaphorical structure for embodiment. This research proposes a six-step progression, through which Malmgren’s technique enables trainee actors to develop a growing performative awareness of their bodily-located behaviours. This research also posits the generation of heightened differentiation of sensory inputs and expressions for trainee actors through the Malmgren technique, and how this opens up possibilities for transformation in modes of embodiment for the trainee. Using feminist theories, this research links this development of embodied awareness, in particular the awareness of non-verbal communication and the ‘unspoken’, with a greater understanding of alterity. Whilst the Malmgren technique was developed for purposes of theatrical realism, this research indicates that the technique’s impact facilitates a range of modes of performance by investigating the less articulated forms of performative communication