Reframing Acting Students as Embodied Critical Thinkers |By Amy Steiger. Amy Steiger reflects on some of the classic acting texts—which are overwhelmingly written by cis white men and use colonialist, binary, and patriarchal language and narratives—and how teachers should be approaching them today.
When transferred from the context of twentieth-century Russia to twenty-first-century United States, the significance of whiteness as a dominant force in Stanislavsky’s books and others like them is thrown into relief. An Actor Prepares begins with Nazvanov’s use of racist imagery in a pre-training diagnostic test. His representation of Othello includes more than one application of blackface makeup—of which there are extensive descriptions—stereotypical eye-rolling, and racist preconceptions of the character’s physicality: “…my general aspect was modern and civilized, whereas Othello was African in origin and must have something suggestive of primitive life, perhaps a tiger, in him.” Once he is onstage, the actor recognizes how “bad” this movement is, but his shame is connected simply to his lack of skill as an actor, not to his racist assumptions.
Torstov goes on to critique the young actor’s performance, saying, “Can you really believe that the Moors, who in their day were renowned for culture, were like wild animals, pacing up and down in a cage?” He continues,
You could say to any one of us, ‘Play for me immediately, without any preparation, a savage in general.’ I am willing to wager that the majority would do what you just did; because tearing around, roaring, showing your teeth, rolling the whites of your eyes, has from time immemorial been intertwined in your imagination with a false idea of a savage. All these methods of portraying feelings in general exist in every one of us. And they are used without any relation to the why, wherefore, or circumstances in which a person has experienced them.
While Torstov encourages critical capacity in the young actor and recognizes the racist culture in which his perceptions have been shaped, the critique centers on the lack of specificity in the actor’s work and his minimal engagement with Shakespeare’s writing rather than a complex analysis of racism and representation in theatre. In twenty-first-century United States, how might teachers who have assigned this text encourage students to voice concerns that none of the actors in Torstov’s class are African-descended, or that a white student chose to perform—in blackface, as was common historical practice—the role of a Moor? How can we address and make room for the pain and anger this history raises for students of color in the classroom?