Myth, Power and their Confluence : A Gender-Cultural Root System Viewed from the Perspective of Actor Education

This dissertation concerns a certain experienced (sub)reality, a reality which emerged from something “in between”, from a confluence of factors - the project Gender on Stage, a particular actor education programme and myself in the role of observer. The project Gender on Stage started as an interdisciplinary study between the National Academy of Mime and Acting in Stockholm and the Department of Theatre Studies and the Department of Nordic Languages at Stockholm University. It was supported by the Swedish Research Council, and its purpose was to investigate gender in actor education. Actor education is situated between traditional theatre history and trends about the future, between aesthetic ideals and a commercial market. In addition, as was described in the outline of the project, actor education must deal with a long history of male dominance. Actor education could be visualised as the epitome of a cultural production of gender, a site where one has to explicitly deal with discourses of body and language, male and female, self and other, memories and emotions, pleasure and desire. I have stressed gender in actor education as being deeply interrelated with the notion of cultural hegemony, historical discourses of acting as well as gender, myths, and unconscious themes. Beside theories of Simone de Beauvoir, Judith Butler, Sue Ellen Case and Julia Kristeva, the study invokes post-structural notions of “present absence” as well as Freud’s ideas on repression in terms of “the uncanny”. Stanislavsky’s theories of fantasy emotion and the Brechtian concepts of Verfremdung and Gestus were likewise taken into consideration. To resolve problems of confidentiality and ethics, I discuss certain significant observations, considering them to be unique situations, but also representative and symbolic acts. In discussing the gender construction, I put myself into play in the role of observer as a certain persona – a kind of converse representative and a “faceted mirror of the invisible”