What does the actor resonate with the role she plays?
by reviewing the different theories of empathy and performance and then considering the concept of “duality”, it is used to describe the viewer or audience’s perception of the relationship between actors and characters. This double or double tuning also applies to the viewpoint of the actor himself, who must distinguish between the character portrayed and the portrayed in her own role at certain points. The concept of
helps to understand how the actor feels her role. For actors who have to study and rehearse the role, empathy may begin with a higher level (narrative or imaginative) process that provides a contextualized understanding of the character. This understanding is ultimately combined with the more basic empathetic process in her actual performance.
"The job of an actor is empathy." (Natalie Portman)
"The game really means correct, logical, coherent, thinking, hard work, feeling and action are consistent with your character... thus absorbing a psychological technique that is part of life."
What does it mean to resonate with the role she plays? The answer lies at the intersection between empathy theory and various performance practices. It's a complex scene, the first priority is to draw the scene and then define the actor's position on that scene.
Psychological Perspectives on Empathy
Psychologist Edward Ticzner translated German term Einfühlung into the new English term "empathy", when Germany was in a fierce debate about Einfühlung. Theodore Lips is the main character in this debate, and he uses this word to refer to our experience of aesthetic objects and our feelings about other minds.
Although Lipps believes that empathy is a daily event involving the automatic reflection of resonance, William Dilthey sees it as a methodological tool for historical analysis, more generally as a method in the humanities and social sciences.
Dilthey believes that empathy involves a "transpose" process in which one puts himself in the position of another. To immediately notice the direct relevance of these considerations to performance: there is an aesthetic object in the form of a character to portray; this empathy may count not only as what happened, but as a method; it involves placing oneself in the perspective or situation of others.
To clarify these relevant points and lay the foundation for the discussion, it is important to list some details about the empathy debate.
According to Moritz Geiger's brief summary of the debate in the early twentieth century, some theorists believe that empathy is a form of imagination, while others believe that it is a real example of another human emotion.
Lips accepted the latter view. He claims that we experience (not just imagine) the same things that others experience. Therefore, if we experience the anger of the other person, this anger is not simply facing us objectively, but we are in it. We live in a kind of anger, which gives itself completely, although for other reasons, it does not have the same effect as anger in daily life.
How we do this involves a form of projection in which we add our own stuff to our experience of external signs of others (gestures, facial expressions, etc.). We add something psychological from within ourselves—here we have a special behavior of the essentially spontaneous nature of psychological, rather than simply receiving data transmitted to us from the outside. Projection involves drawing out our own experiences to fill in what we cannot gain experience with others.
Although Dilthey thinks about empathy in similar terms of transposition and projection, he distinguishes between "basic understanding" and "advanced form of understanding", both involving empathy. Basic understanding comes from real life and our communicative practice. It involves explanations of basic expressive behaviors or activities, such as picking up objects, letting the hammer fall, cutting wood with a saw, which in turn adds to complex movements. To understand these behaviors, people rely on their own experiences and project themselves into some given expression.The advanced form of
transference is based on this basic transposition, but adds attention to context or empirical connections, which requires understanding to move along the route of the event itself. It must continue to move forward with the progress of life itself. The process of transforming oneself or transposition extends to re-experience the creation along the course of events.
He believes that this more full or higher empathy is facilitated through artistic expression in poetry or drama, or through fiction or historical narrative. It involves an imaginative process of re-presentation of a particular situation that “stimulates us to experience it again.”
Specifically, by transferring oneself to the other’s environment, a person can re-experience the other’s feelings. Therefore, humans determined from the inside can experience many other types of existence through their imagination. Under the limitations of the environment, they can still glimpse the exotic beauty of the world and the living areas they cannot reach. This advanced form of empathy requires us to make a judgment on the other person's character and ability. For insight, context and environment are important.
phenomenology perspectives on empathy
Many phenomenologists such as Edmund Husserl, Edith Stein and Max Scheller joined the debate by providing a sensory description of basic empathy.
Contrary to Lips, according to Husserl , our experience with Lips is the same emotions as other people experience, and when we catch another person angry, we ourselves do not necessarily feel angry; if we see others afraid, we will not sympathize by experiencing fears ourselves.
Zahavi clarifies this objection: how reasonable it is to claim that I have to be afraid to understand my child’s fear, or if I want to realize the anger in the face of an attacker, I need to become angry myself.
Phenomenologists believe that Lips' position has a second problem, and it is not clear whether we project our own experience (or why we have reason to project) on the other side.
According to Stein, this projection can only explain at best a form of automatic imitation/infection, which lacks empathy. According to phenomenologists, empathy involves perceived awareness of the other person’s intentions and emotional states.
For Husserl and Stein, transference is a unique form of emotional intention, pointing to the other as the subject. In transference perception, we treat the other person's body as an objective entity, as the scientist may perceive, but an experiential or living body, a body that expresses the other person's subjectivity. I gain this feeling of other people's bodies through my vague experience of my own body, which is both lively and objective.
Empathy is not a situation where attribution , imagine, project, infer or recognize the mental state of others, but rather involves complex perceptions of the other person's intentions and feelings that perceive existence in her gestures and expressions.
The phenomenological concept of pairing based on empathy is to perceive the other party's specific behavior based on a set of practical and expressive abilities, which are also the possibility of my own specific existence. Hence, she regards her physical behavior as intention or feeling; in other words, not to look at her in isolation, but to point to our common world.
Neuroscientific Perspectives on Empathy
If you fast forward 100 years, you will find that in the early 21st century, a new debate on the concept of empathy is underway. This debate repeats many of the terms from the previous debate, including the difference between basic and advanced transference, as well as similar views to those defended by Lips and phenomenologists about basic transference, and the latest advances in neuroscience now.
In fact, recent debates are partly caused by the neuroscience of mirror neurons, whose activation is interpreted as a simulated form in social cognitive philosophy and psychological descriptions. Simulation is a complex concept, but in a way, simulation involves imaginatively placing oneself in another person’s shoes and asking what we would do in her case.This simulation is considered a form of empathy, where the term "empathy" is roughly equivalent to "simulation." Neuroscientists such as Goldman and Stueber and Gallese believe that a very basic automatic transference simulation, which Gallese calls embodied simulation, is related to the activity of the neuronal system. In this regard, simulation theory draws on Lips’ explanation of transference, an automatic imitation or resonance that allows us to experience the same things that the other person experiences.
When one agent participates in intentional operations, and when the agent observes another agent participates in intentional operations, the neuronal system is also activated. Therefore, neuronal systems are said to simulate or match the other’s behavior, intention, or feelings by activating the same mechanisms responsible for their own behavior and first-person proxy experience. From this perspective, automatic simulation or matching is just a basic form of empathy.
Summary
Just like in previous debates, phenomenologists objected to the claim that empathy was reduced to automatic activation of the motor system, which seemed closer to contagion than empathy. Or there is no need to match or copy “anger” in the system.
For example, in order to grasp the fact that the other person is angry, "I" can never fully integrate into the other person's feelings from a first-person perspective. But "I" can adjust other people's intentions and emotions based on their own views on other people's behavior and physical expression, which at least partially constitutes their intentions and emotions.
To some extent, “I” understand their intentions and emotions in this way, which is what phenomenologists call empathy.
