Chapters Three, Four, and Five discuss the specific case studies – Excerpts from Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters, Samuel Beckett’s Play and Footfalls, and Helena Enright’s Less than a Year. Sections one, two and three outline in turn Alba Emoting, Emotional Access Work, and Impulse and Awareness Work. Chapter Two introduces the theories/approaches to emotion that I will be using to examine my research questions and is divided into four sections.
The third part of the chapter explores the problem of emotion in Western performance, and how Diderot’s Paradoxe continues to inform the conflicting ideologies of 20th century theatre practitioners. Section Two outlines the underlying problems of understanding the nature of emotion in everyday life, primarily the difficulties in defining emotion and the predominance of Cartesian dualism in Western society. Section One explores the controversy surrounding Diderot’s Paradoxe and how his polarization of ‘real’ emotion and ‘performed’ emotion has problematically influenced and dominated the discussion of emotion in Western performance.
The Introduction highlights some of the problems and challenges around the topic of emotion in performance and outlines the research project including a discussion about practice-as-research and methodology. In a series of case studies, I apply these methods and/or their core principles to different dramaturgies, to investigate how each can address the ‘problem‘ of emotion with regard to text, characterization, imagination and the performance itself. I utilize these approaches to examine, from the perspective of a director working with actors, how they can be applied effectively to different dramaturgies and to discover if these approaches can shed light on the elusive nature of emotion in performance. The intention of this thesis is to arrive at a better understanding of the nature of emotion in Western performance using three specific theories/approaches to emotion in performance – Alba Emoting, Emotional Access Work, and Impulse and Awareness Work.
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