Toward a Phenomenological Model of the Actor's Embodied Modes of Experience

Abstract

This essay utilizes a post-Merleau-Ponty phenomenology to explore the question of how the contemporary actor’s body and experience in performance might be theorized. Drawing on Drew Leder’s account of corporeal absence, a fourfold model of the actor’s embodied modes of experience is proposed. To Leder’s everyday surface and recessive bodies and their respective modes of absence, two additional extra-daily modes of embodiment (and their absence) are proposed: an aesthetic “inner” bodymind discovered and shaped through long-term, extra-daily modes of practice, and an aesthetic “outer” body constituted by the actions/tasks of a performance score—that body offered for the abstractive gaze of the spectator.