Acting without "meaning' or "motivation"
a first-person account of acting in the pre-articulate world of immediate lived/living experience
pp. 287-309
in: Stuart Grant, Jodie McNeilly-Renaudie, Matthew Wagner (eds), Performance phenomenology, Berlin, Springer, 2019Abstract
Oscillating between being "within' and "without' a performative experience, Phillip Zarrilli's chapter details the ways in which performance, as necessarily embodied and perceived, makes manifest some of the better-known tenets of phenomenological thinking. In particular, he illuminates the way in which a performance event underscores the prevalence of the bodymind (as per Merleau-Ponty), and even more explicitly (through his key example of Beckett's Act Without Words I), a Heideggerian "thrownness'. The chapter further touches upon many of the key phenomenological tropes that are highlighted early and often in the book, especially a desire to be precise and rigorous in terms of articulating what phenomenology is and what it does, specifically with respect to the study of theatre and performance.
