Recognising and mis-recognising the x factor: the audition selection process in actor-training institutions revisited In the April 1996

issue of Australasian Drama Studies, Kath Leahy discussed some of the findings of her study of the 1993 audition processes at four Australian actortraining institutions. She called for the issue of talent to be addressed because many sections of the Australian community are denied access to theatrical training and expression simply because of the underlying cultural values which inform talent.1 In particular, she argued that, in her observation of auditions, [I]t became clear that outward presence had more currency than inner facility involving emotional connectedness or imagination.2 However, ten years have past since the publication of that article. Apart from her own acknowledgement that some actor-training institutions have reviewed their attitudes since her 1993 study, no further discussion has emerged through this journal concerning the issues and challenges in legitimately recognising and nurturing talent more colloquially known as the x factor. But how can or should we talk about it, the x factor, talent? Sometimes it seems almost improper to talk about it. There is a fear felt often by actors and directors that if one tries to reflect upon, measure or analyse it, that it will disappear, never to return. Yet recognitions of having talent, it or the x factor also depend on whose interests actors, agents, directors, producers, critics, audiences, academics, acting teachers, student actors, and so on are at stake. In my doctoral research participation in the audition process in Sydney for the School of Drama, Victorian College of the Arts in December, 2000, I witnessed the following attempts to recognise the x factor: Among the twenty applicants in one of the morning auditions, a female auditionee presents Helena from A Midsummer Nights Dream. Afterwards, two VCA assessors (one male, one female), specifically confer on her audition, Female assessor: (Im not sure if its just) surface or something in her

Male assessor: I cant see it Female assessor: I see a larger life, a complex imagination Im only responding to what she presented to me Male assessor: wasnt it in her neutrality that you invested meaning? They decide to invite her back. On Call-back Day, for her Helena piece, the comment from another female VCA assessor, is clear. In her contemporary piece as Carol, the comment is enlivened. During the final impulse workshop, the auditionee, during her monologue, receives coaching from this second female assessor, Female assessor: use your voice, not in a whisper Later on Female assessor: find again, again, find again ah, thats clearer Afterwards, the male and female assessors note that she is alive, overdramatic. During the group debriefing, the auditionee says that, during the impulse workshop she felt safe, supported and that she also appreciated the physical connection, how it makes you feel, respond, instructive, intuitive She is subsequently offered a place at VCA. On another day, a male auditionee selects the role of Helena, to present as a contrast to his portrayal of Alan from Equus. 2

Male assessors first assessment: he has size bravery great voice great energy out there nineteen years old needs to be not so conscious of himself worth trying him Afterwards, he is called back to present Angelo, from Measure for Measure. Male assessor explains what he is looking for: I would like to see a simpler (presentation of the piece), a bit less conscious of performing it focus on what the person (the character) is saying and where it takes you all the emotions (at the moment) dont have a chance to shift you it affects the audience to see the lines take the actor somewhere, rather than (see the actor) controlling the delivery, the package. The male auditionee begins his monologue Male assessor interrupts to coach him: youre dropping into what I didnt want imagine he (Angelo) is in his room, thinking to himself its a private moment we want to see it not rehearsed weve seen the largeness (of your performance) now we want to see your connection I dont want to see blocking think to yourself aloud, wait until you find that reality The auditionee starts again from the beginning. Male Assessor again coaches him: so you want it right down think about what it means, try to find it (in your body) slow it right down When the auditionee concludes the monologue he is thanked and asked to wait outside. The two assessors confer. 3

Female assessor: all he is trying to do is find out where you want it placed Male assessor: physically, hes fine, thats not the problem (we need to) test if hes taking in the words what is he getting from the line (so that) hes not constructing (his performance) can he be shifted will the Callback check what he hasnt got? call him back and well have a bit of a talk. The auditionee is called back. Male assessor: We have a bit of a dilemma something very strong there but you talk about it Auditionee: it feels like histrionics, moving, using the floor space, I dont connect emotions to movement (I) rehearse rigidly (but I) recognise its limits. Male assessor: try to find the progress (of the text) in doing it people speak because they are driven to speak Im getting articulation but not what is internally pushing him to speak unless that comes through the words (it is meaningless) (Im not talking) about histrionics On Call-back, the initial comments by the two assessors are still constructed and imagination. During the impulse workshop, he is called upon three times to work through his monologue but no coaching is given. The assessment afterwards is good. During the debriefing, the young man admits:

 impulse work freaked me out, but then (it) became liberating, but first, so terrifying our bodies were rubber no sense of time He is subsequently offered a place at VCA. 3 On these and other occasions during the 2000 VCA auditions, I witnessed the attempts of auditionees to demonstrate they had it or prove they could find it. They sought to demonstrate this through a concurrent negotiation of verbal expression and embodied behaviour. I would contend that this wasnt just about some discursive protocol. Something experiential and embodied was always happening. Possibly, in the case of those who were rejected, even if it was being offered, it was not being perceived or recognised as such. The VCA assessors were looking for a sense of energy, connection or spirit and, simultaneously, they were seeking to draw it out. It was as if there was an object to be found, released, or willingly extended back in response. Alternatively, the assessors may have been trying to invoke a different disposition in the actor towards them. By disposition, I mean the habitual reproduction of embodied techniques that produce affective aesthetic and social meanings for an audience, or in this case, an assessor. Possibly, a change of the actors disposition would either convey or produce a certain vulnerability or sense of connection between the body of the actor and the bodies of the assessors. Whatever the circumstances, I propose that it becomes highly crucial and powerful to understand how such experiences of energy, flow, it, connection, spirit were to be known and recognised between student and assessing practitioner. In the first of the auditions I have recounted here, the conversation between the two assessors suggested that they expected to see some object of talent either on or in the auditionee. I would describe this as a search for a certain givenness. Some commonly used acting terms attempt to invoke this ontology of self-contained, self-sufficient givenness. In the West, various stakeholders be they actors, directors, casting agents, critics or audiences may refer to a person having energy, charisma, passion, emotion or sex appeal. However, in everyday practices of acting assessment, this assumption of ownership is problematised. There is an acknowledgement that evaluation must also include recognition of the auditionees intentionality towards his or her audience. For example, in the second VCA audition documented, one assessor 5

commented Im only responding to what she presented to me. 4 The practice of assessment was made further transparent by the questioning wasnt it in her neutrality that you invested meaning?. 5 There was a shift in recognition that ability may not lie in the givenness of the auditionee, but possibly be a consequence of particular interpretive readings of certain gestures in the auditionees performance. One could even speak of the assessors constructing their own investment or belief in what was being offered by the auditionee. In this brief exchange between two assessors I became aware of the multiple misrecognitions operating in what may be described as ability or talent. Significantly, on the Call-back day, one of the auditionees had learnt either the experience and/or the language to participate in her own recognition and validation of bodily vulnerability that was valued by the VCA she spoke of physical connection, how it makes you feel, respond, instructive, intuitive . 6 In the second audition documented, the conversation between the male assessor and the auditionee implied that audience and assessor recognition of ability were synonymous. The male assessor was looking for signs on or in the body that indicated that the text and emotions were shifting the auditionee. He legitimised this personal expectation with the claim that it affects the audience to see the lines take the actor somewhere, rather than (see the actor) controlling the delivery, the package. 7 The assessor looked for embodied connections between auditionee and text rather than what he perceived as a construction of a performance. Here, I believe, a dramaturgical agency is inferred (though not necessarily consciously) through actions of exchange, transaction or transformation. Actor and actor, actor and assessor, or actor and audience experience an exchange of power, a transference of knowledge and feeling, or a sharing of flow or connection. However, again it was significant in the exchange between this assessor and his female colleague that the dynamics of power relations (in this assessment context) were made transparent in the observation about the auditionee that all he is trying to do is find out where you want it placed .8 The assessors concern was to see evidence that this auditionee could be affected by the text a certain shiftability or vulnerability but this was also located in the auditionee as a givenness rather than a disposition. The male assessor wondered will the Call-back check what he hasnt got. 9 To address such uncertainty, one procedure repeatedly used in the VCA assessments was to have the 6

auditionee articulate his own assessment of what was or wasnt working. By the time of the debriefing, after the impulse workshop for the finalists, the male auditionee had learnt what to take notice of and talk about. He could now converse in a genuine, inarticulate manner, in that the genuineness of the experience could be determined by the struggle to use appropriate metaphors he noted that impulse work freaked me out, but then (it) became liberating, but first, so terrifying our bodies were rubber no sense of time 10 Above all, I observed that these auditionees and their institutional assessors participated in the habitual recognition, validation, and legitimisation of what are understood to be an actors formed, habituated and regulated set of dispositions (as performative embodiment). Such dispositions could be categorised, and therefore, recognised, in terms of vulnerability, vitality, aesthetic beauty or authenticity. Both actors and any audiences, including institutional assessors, are invested in and predisposed towards particular, habitual judgements of what constitutes good acting. For example, during another VCA audition evaluation, one assessor remarks enthusiastically upon witnessing a performance that shes just there she lets herself get taken. 11 It became evident in sites of actor formation, in which I participated, that such experiences of recognisable performance are produced or emerge between people. Both in contexts of training, and subsequently, in performance practice, what signifies the experience we all, and actors, particularly, have of it, talent, or the x factor, is the sensed and recognised experience of vulnerability. This is frequently articulated in the metaphorical and analogical language of flow, energy, connection, or of spirit manifesting in and moving between bodies. Therefore I want to suggest that we, and the actors with which we engage, form each others experience in recognisable ways, while, at the same time, we radically misrecognise much of what we are doing to and with each other. In the three actor-training contexts researched Ensemble Studios, RE:ACTOR Acting Services and Drama School, Victorian College of the Arts I witnessed comments that, I believe, alluded to the highly valued dynamic of vulnerability. Zika Nester, Ensemble Studios, advised her students that if you can affect one person 7

in an audience, youve done your job actors have that power in front of people one by one, you actors become the force that civilises people 12 John Mildren, RE:ACTOR Acting Service, challenged one struggling student that the only thing that stops you is fear so take a risk, get over it get over the fear of foolishness or failure 13 And Lindy Davies, School of Drama, Victorian College of the Arts (VCA) suggested to auditionees that you need focus, concentration, rigour, breath, centre of the moment and letting it happen to you the language working on you be willing to let anything happen 14 For teachers and potential students alike, the intentional desire is to do whatever it takes to form or be formed towards particular practices. It is these specific practices that will be recognised and experienced as affective that is, emotive, and professional acting. I believe this is what actors and their audiences seem to experience as it, talent, the x factor. Thus, in the discourse on vulnerability, that pervades sites of actor formation, the metaphorical language of the x factor, it, flow, energy, spirit is richly evocative of dynamic qualities of engagement or interaction between bodies. Paradoxically, in institutions, these qualities are assumed or understood as being desirable conditions or ideal states of separate and autonomous, self-contained bodies for successful acting. Do you have it? Has he or she got it? Can you learn how to channel it? Yet these clearly interactive experiences may function either between actors and other stakeholders who recognise their inter-actional disposition (audiences, agents, casting directors, directors, crews, fellow actors) or between actors and cultural artefacts such as texts or other mediating technologies (eg. cameras and microphones). Therefore, in reviewing the institutional preoccupation with bodily skills and dispositions, how might we begin to think and talk about the interactional or interpersonal qualities of vulnerability and their usefulness? Some of the aforementioned metaphors and descriptions of embodied experiences are actually misrecognised as things in themselves: they are mistakenly understood as objects or attributes of a person. These then become the stakes within this particular field of cultural production. They are essential manifestations of a vulnerability that functions, in sites of training and performance, as a valued disposition. 8

I can illustrate this factor of simultaneous recognition and misrecognition using a simple drawing Jastrows duck-rabbit referred to in Wittgensteins Philosophical Investigations 15:

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How you make meaning of or recognise in this image, in its totality, is dependent on how you recognise particular aspects or features. If you recognise the two protruding objects as ears, your interpretation and perception of the totality will be reinforced towards seeing the total object as a rabbit, but if you interpret the protruding objects as a beak, then you will be inclined to regard the totality as a kind of bird or duck. Furthermore, it is not possible to recognise both total objects the duck or the rabbit in the same moment, because to recognise one requires you misrecognise the other at the same time. In the light of this dynamic of simultaneous recognition and misrecognition, we could consider that some acting metaphors and descriptions are actually misrecognised as things in themselves. They are mistakenly understood as objects or attributes of a person rather than as interactions between bodies. In the Performing Arts Scoping Study (2003), commissioned by the Australian National Training Authority (through CREATE [Culture Research Education and Training Enterprise] Australia), various performance-training institutions were asked to define [the] performing arts. Listed below are definitions put forward by some respondents: 9

In a general sense, the performing arts is [sic] an industry centered [sic] around the communication of ideas, with a focus on human performance and interaction with an audience. This clearly distinguishes it from object-based artforms such as the visual arts. (italics mine)

Performing arts is the context whereby creative people present something to an audience, where an audience experiences a creative exchange. (italics mine)

Performing arts [occurs] when skilled and crafted artists present various forms and fusions of creative expression in a performance to fee paying individuals as audience, spectators or onlookers. Performance [is] a three dimensional representation whereby artists/entertainers seek to engage and stimulate the audience, spectators or onlookers by evoking emotions through use of multiplicity of sensory and cognitive provocations (italics mine)

The performing arts are seen as being art made for public performance, which has a reliance upon an audience. It covers both the actual performers and any individuals who contribute to the creation of the art form. (italics mine) 17

In each of these definitions there is an expectation that the performing arts industry requires social interaction for its efficacy. Yet such attempts to position the performing arts as a collaborative and unified field also misrecognise that, as

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Bourdieu puts it, that the definition of the writer (or artist, etc.) is an issue at stake in struggles in every literary (or artistic, etc.) field. 18 So, using Bourdieus analysis, in spite of appearances, the performing arts is actually not unified but always a site of struggles over who determines the dominant understanding of necessary activities, abilities and aptitudes.19 This power of determination has significant impact on what is perceived and recognised as necessary for performance training or formation. A close consideration of the Scoping study shows attention was given to the distinction between tangible and less tangible evidences of ability, in terms of what it refered to as hard and soft skills. Those participating in the Scoping study believed that while competency standards might be developed for hard skills, such as production and technical skills, it would be difficult to establish standards for the teaching and assessment of vision and creativity in performance. Furthermore, some in the industry proposed that there were characteristics of a performer that were intrinsic and therefore could not easily be learnt or assessed. Still others believed that certain building block skills could be taught and assessed and that these would assist the development of other more elusive skills. In the national forums held during this study, researchers argued that judgements on aesthetic performance are always based on criteria whether they are implicit or explicit. Yet, forum facilitators suggested that standards could assist in describing these more explicitly.20 Thus, even within the rubric of a competency-based market-response model of training, a kind of excess or intangible experience or encounter between performers and other performers, directors or audiences was acknowledged as part of what contributed to valued performance. Among teachers, across performance-training institutions, it is commonly agreed that actors need skills of dexterity, articulation, imagination, interpretation, awareness, empathy, and, increasingly, administrative and entrepreneurial skills to survive as self-sufficient practitioners. The assumption is of a tool-box of skills that the individual may acquire and possess reinforcing the actors givenness. Yet I would argue that all the above skills actually depend, in varying degrees, upon an emerging experience of embodied, social interaction for their efficacy. For example, dexterity as a skill may be scientifically measurable but it only gains effective meaning through

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its socially ascribed value. I would also suggest that soft skills such as imagination and empathy are only possible through social interactions between unique bodies bodies intentionally vulnerable towards themselves and each other, allowing for the inevitability of mistakes and infringement of social taboos, as new meaning is created between them. Dr Patricia Shaw notes that the experience of feeling more or less spontaneous, more or less at risk, being more or less present as a participant in evolving situations is crucial to human communicative action. 21 Thus, in the context of the performing arts, all players actors, the director, the crew, the audience contribute to the efficacy or otherwise of the socially interactive experience by their habitual dispositions and their intentional participation. Social skills actually operate across and between people, or more explicitly, between bodies, rather than residing in or emanating exclusively from one party only, such as the actor. Social interaction and inter-dependency cannot be owned by purportedly autonomous bodies. Interaction emerges, concurrently and paradoxically, as a habitual disposition and an intentional practice. It is a misrecognition to view social interaction as a competency that can be mastered and owned. The outcome is a product of becoming-in-between rather than of self-sufficient givenness or a transactional agency, fixed by predetermined roles. In addition, any professional recognition or assessment of such an emergent disposition, attributed to the actor, must be founded upon a discernment, not of ownership of a skill, but rather of willingness towards inter-action. In summary, I am suggesting that we all contribute to the shaping and experience of performance as much as we are shaped by it. Acting practitioners in their practices and texts, place a high value on the ability to embody a role, to connect with a text, to flow in performance and commune with an audience. The emergence of much theorising and writing concerning acting craft, and the burgeoning of acting schools in Western economies, especially over the last century, enables such acting competencies to be more effectively reproduced. There are also institutional and social infrastructures that affirm and exploit these discourses as symbolic capital. This is clearly evident in award ceremonies such as the Golden Globe and Academy awards. We see this through the necessary promotion of purported objects such as gift, talent, charisma, sex-appeal and having it. 12

Actors are interviewed about the magic of their experiences with other actors and audiences. Various media outlets identify and promote talent in terms of giftedness and charisma how the actor affects the audience. That is where we are constantly misdirected and therefore misrecognise what is really happening between actors and audiences. Yet, if acting is to be understood as a particular set of social and phenomenological experiences that may be described as intercorporeal between bodies it seems inappropriate to refer to talent or it as being the inherent property of some bodies but not others. At best, we might say that some bodies are more practised in or disposed towards intercorporeal activity than others are. Those who encounter such interactions feel compelled to speak of such experiences even if words fail to establish a coherent or legitimate social discourse. What makes every interaction corporeally and, indeed, ethically significant is that in every instance there are bodies interacting with bodies by which meaning-making emerges. What I believe circulates in the sites of actor formation that I have studied is the simultaneous shaping of, and the misrecognition of particular experiences of intercorporeality. Acting really needs to be freshly recognised as a social, embodied practice about willingness to affect and be affected by the other. In a way, Kath Leahys concern for an inner facility involving emotional connectedness was partially right.22 This willingness is not only a necessary disposition for actors but is also necessary for those for whom they perform in that both affect and are affected by each other. As this social interaction is highly significant and powerful, I would argue for a greater ethical accountability or duty of care between teachers and students in actor training practices. There needs to be a conscious and frequently articulated acknowledgement that teachers and students are participating in ongoing circulations of desire, power and resistance. Although all training practices are formative and may feel true and appropriate in the short term, not all these are going to be sustainable or renewable over the long term. The ethical issue, as observed by Margrit Shildrick, in Embodying the Monster: Encounters with the vulnerable self, is how to negotiate

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appropriate degrees of vulnerability and intimacy without violation towards oneself or others in damaging ways. 23 In ten years of research into links between mental illness and creative achievement, Arnold M. Ludwig has documented numerous accounts of artists, including actors such as Richard Burton, Frances Farmer, James Dean, and Judy Garland, who have not managed the impact of their creative working lives on their social and relational lives. He comments: Those who delve inward and use emotional experiences as the raw material for their creative output are more likely to experience the double-edged sword of creative activity. While the creative process lets them master and channel their painful experiences through the power of their expression, they sometimes cannot contain the emotional forces unleashed through their probing. 24

This emotional volatility is often celebrated and recognised, anecdotally, as part of the eccentricity of the profession that gives it its cultural status. However, there are actors who question whether the personal and social toll justifies patterns that are not sustainable both for the actors and the lives of people with whom they have ongoing relationships and responsibilities. In 1998, Carole Zucker asked the Irish actor, Stephen Rea, if acting had the potential to damage the actor. In his reply, Rea commented: I do believe that the work we do is not meant to destroy the participants; its meant to explore and enhance peoples lives. And I think that if people are getting into it on a level where its damaging them, theres something wrong with the process. I understand that any artistic process is a difficult undertaking, and painful in many ways, but art is meant to redefine, and to turn the bad into the good Because acting is not 14

just about expressing pain and emotion, its about a view, its about an understanding of a piece, its about having a panoramic vision of a piece as well as having a subjective view. 25

Any attempt to manage the intense, embodied experiences required of performance will paradoxically produce a simultaneous feeling of in control/out of control. How actors handle the anxieties associated with this paradoxical state has the potential to determine whether their working practices, and even their broader life circumstances, are resilient and sustainable. A clue lies in Philip Streatfields The Paradox of Control in Organizations, in which he argues that the notion of being in control needs to be distinguished from the sense of coherence in experience. He see that there is a tendency for people to swing too easily from a perception of order in the world to the belief that they can control some part of it. This is done in an attempt to keep anxieties associated with disorder and unpredictability on the margins of consciousness. Alternatively, Streatfield concludes, it is the capacity to live with this paradox of order/disorder, and have the courage to continue, in spite of not being in control, that enables a person to creatively participate in life. 26 Therefore, if we are to acknowledge that actor training, in reality, is preparation for a social practice of vulnerability between bodies that is always in control/out of control, how then would that alter the way we organise training institutions? If teachers and students are, together, vulnerable partners in the production of meaningful performances; if the audition process no longer predicates the existence of talent in individuals, but now has to account for the dynamics between auditionee and assessor; and if vulnerable and energetic performance is now understood as being produced and, variously, recognised and misrecognised through meaning-making interactions between bodies then how might we reconsider the way we shape actor training and work practices? These are the challenges through which I invite further conversations with teachers, students, scholars, practitioners and all other participants in the field of performance. NOTES 1 Kath Leahy, Power and presence in the actor-training institution audition 15

Australasian Drama Studies No.28 (April 1996) 139 2 3 Ibid 133 Excerpts from documented field research in unpublished doctoral thesis Forming (in)vulnerable bodies: Intercorporeal experiences in actor training in Australia (Department of Performance Studies, U of Sydney, 2004) 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 Ibid Ibid Ibid Ibid Ibid Ibid Ibid Ibid Ibid Ibid Ibid For fuller discussion of this paradox, see Ludwig Wittgenstein Philosophical Investigations trans. G.E.M. Anscombe, (Oxford and Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers, 1958) 194 16 17 18 http://philosophy.wisc.edu/forster/images/DuckRabbit.tif CREATE Australia Final Report Performing Arts Scoping Study (Sydney: Australian National Training Authority, 2003) 12 Pierre Bourdieu The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature edited by R. Johnson (New York: Columbia University Press 1993) 42 19 20 21 Ibid CREATE Australia op cit 15 Patricia Shaw Introduction: working live in Experiencing Risk, Spontaneity and Improvisation in Organizational Change: Working live edited by Patricia Shaw and Ralph Stacey (London and New York: Routledge 2006) 11 22 23 Leahy op cit 133 Margaret Shildrick Embodying the Monster: Encounters with the Vulnerable Self (London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi: SAGE Publications 2002) 118 16

24 25 26

Arnold M. Ludwig The Price of Greatness: Resolving the creativity and madness controversy (New York and London: The Guildford Press 1995) 175 Stephen Rea in Carole Zucker In the Company of Actors: Reflections on the Craft of Acting (London: A & C Black 1999) 118, 119 Philip J. Streatfield The Paradox of Control in Organizations (London and New York: Routledge 2001) 139-140

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