The actor is giving of himself all the time. It is his possible growth, his pos
The actor is giving of himself all the time. It is his possible growth, his possible understanding that he is exploiting, using this material to weave these personalities which drop away when the play is done.
–Peter Brook, The Empty Space
The craft of acting is deceptively simple. It starts with childhood experiences of “make-believe.” Because imitation and role-playing are such a natural extension of human social behavior, it is easy to assume that the craft and profession of acting retain the simplicity, freedom, and intuitive nature of childhood games. At its best, acting appears effortless. It invites an audience to forget that actors are in any way different from the characters they impersonate. With the support of an audience, an actor becomes another person who occupies their place within the confines of a story, imagined circumstance, or scene. This imaginative exercise is such an ingrained feature of human social behavior that we often forget that it is based on a shared acceptance — between audiences and actors — that they are both willing to play the game in order to collectively believe in and relate to a performance.
The central task of acting is impersonation, the imitation or imagined inhabitation of a different persona. Impersonation can happen on many levels. In some cultures, a familiar part of religious practice is the idea of spiritual possession in which an entranced host is temporarily occupied by another spiritual being. In Haitian Vodou, for example, a familiar relationship with spirits and ancestral worship becomes more immediate when possession occurs during a “sacred theatre” ritual. Against the background of complex drumming, induced trances invite spirits to commune and give comfort directly to worshipers.1 In this example, both the belief and the transformation into a new persona are complete, made possible by the readiness of both the possessed and their witnesses to fully believe in what they are experiencing.
Trance dancing, frequently accompanied or guided by elaborate drumming and masked impersonation, is a feature of ritualized practice in many African, Native American, and Asian cultures. The altering sense of awareness and prominence of sacred masks as spiritually vital symbols —or as a talisman for connection to ancestors or traditional sacred figures— is widespread. Even in Western theatre, the actor’s awareness on stage is often so concentrated on the task of perceiving from a character’s viewpoint that the experience is described as transformative. Recent studies involving brain scans suggest that actors do, in fact, experience different patterns of thought while “in character,” including a diminished level of activity in the areas of the brain associated with self-awareness and an increase in portions of the brain that may support a “double consciousness.”2
Masked performance often blends both creative artistic expression and spirituality. In the Bali-Hindu traditions of Indonesia, for example, perform