An Actor Manages: Actor Training and Managerial Ideology
Dr Broderick D.V. Chow
Lecturer in Theatre
Brunel University London
Kingston Lane, Uxbridge, UB8 3PH
broderick.chow@brunel.ac.uk
Introduction
What is an actor’s work? Is it the process of creating and presenting a
character? Or is it the business of managing a career? While the former
attracts people to the business, the latter is essential. As Michael Simkins
(2013) in the Guardian estimates, 92% of actors in Britain are out of work at
any one time. The precarious nature of the business therefore means that
actors must combine the unremunerated labour of auditions, promotional
material and managing finances with one or more non-acting based jobs –
often casual or part-time and flexible enough to allow time off for auditions –
as well as creating showcase pieces and their own work during those fallow
times when an actor is euphemistically said to be ‘resting.’ The business of
acting is often set in opposition to the actor’s ‘craft’, a term that resonates
with philosopher Richard Sennett’s conceptualization of craftsmanship as
undivided skill and attention for its own sake. ‘Working on my craft’ was how I
justified handing over 300 Canadian dollars for eight weeks of scene-study
classes while a working (and resting) actor in Vancouver. Though nearly all of
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us in the class had already completed training at a university or drama school,
it was understood that working on one’s craft was a lifelong process.
Eventually, the glorious moments in scene studies of the American greats
became the thing itself, far superior to any job. In an industry nicknamed
‘Hollywood North’, dominated by commercials and two lines as a cop on
Smallville, it could sometimes seem like the acting in class, not the stuff out in
the industry, was real acting.
In this article I will argue that the business of acting and its creative craft are
two sides of the same coin. Psychologically-based actor training stems from
an ideology of individual self-management – mental, physical, and emotional
– that accompanies the emergent practice of management in the twentieth
century. By reading the theories and techniques of Stanislavskian and postStanislavskian actor training against changes in the organization of work in
North America and Europe in the 20th century, I outline a citational network
between discourses of acting and business management. I analyze three
stages in the development of organizational management – Taylorism,
Management by Objectives, and Human Resources Management – leading to
the current moment of the ‘new economy’ where a rhetoric of the ‘creative
industries’ dominates, which I suggest is a culmination of nascent ideological
tendencies. The three earlier stages of organizational management are an
instrumentalisation of tacit knowledge that resembles the development of
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Stanislavsky-based actor training. Acting and organizational management
brought an increased focus to emotion, empathy, and social relations and how
these could be produced, maintained, and instrumentalized by waged labour.
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Systematic actor training (Jonathan Chambers’ term for derivations of
Stanislavsky’s ‘System’) reaches its apotheosis of usefulness in our current
historical situation of ‘precarity’ in which the worker no longer has recourse to
forms of structure and security enjoyed under Fordism and must self-manage
– a role that the actor has long prefigured.
My method follows Jon McKenzie’s study of ‘performance’ in Perform or Else.
Drawing together three discursive fields – cultural performance, organizational
performance, and high-performance technology – McKenzie identifies three
interlinked principles: efficacy, efficiency, and effectiveness. In this citational
network, performance is concerned with whether or not something ‘works.’
Performance is a generalized principle applied to both the functioning of a
copper wire and a human being in everyday life, and is therefore a normative
and even terrorizing ‘mode of power and knowledge’ (McKenzie 2001: 164).
Here, I develop upon McKenzie’s reading together of cultural performance
and organizational management to argue that the discursive resemblance
between actor training and management theory represents an ideological
Empathy, within the theatre, can refer to both the actor and the spectator’s identification
with the character. Within the literature of management, however, we see that this human
process can be mobilized to industrial ends.
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imperative to ‘act the part.’ This imperative demands that one identifies with
one’s job on a personal, emotional, and even spiritual level. By thinking
critically across fields I hope to raise difficult questions regarding creative
labour in today’s precarious labour economy.
Bits and Objectives: Scientific Management and the Detailed Division of
Labour
Since the 1990s many governments have turned to the ‘creative industries’ as
a key player in the ‘new economy.’ The UK Department of Culture, Media and
Sport (DCMS) was influential, bundling together a number of industries
including advertising, publishing, and (together with music and visual arts) the
performing arts, as the ‘creative industries’ (DCMS 2001). The creative
industries, Kate Oakley (2004) points out, bear a heavy burden, charged with
the revival of entire cities and communities without sufficient evidence that
they are up to the task. Justin O’Connor (2012), in an extended critical review
of Terry Flew’s The Creative Industries (2011), points out that what began as a
policy to secure more funding for culture was uncritically expanded as a way
of redefining other forms of work. Within this ‘creative industries’ ideology,
‘creativity’ takes on a dual meaning. On the one hand, it is mainly associated
with what we tend to think of as ‘artistic’ labour. On the other hand, today,
creativity is also thought of as a general feature of work, artistic or not. In this
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vein is Chris Bilton’s work on ‘creative management’ (2006, 2010), which aims
to manage and nurture innovation, while negotiating uncertainty. But
adopting the rhetoric of creativity also risks adopting creative labour’s
precarious conditions and a high-level of personal and emotional investment
in one’s labour (see Hesmondhalgh and Baker 2009, 2011; McRobbie 2002).
While theatre is only one of a series of creative industries today, the ‘actor’ is
the figure that haunts the history of management. Management increasingly
resembles the acting labour of the Western modern theatre, in which actors
create characters with believable psychological interiority. My argument
focuses on Stanislavsky’s system and subsequent adaptations, which remain a
backbone of most training regimes in the English-speaking theatre, though
they are by no means the only forms practiced today in conservatoires or
universities.
Alison Hodge notes that actor training is a phenomenon of the modern,
director-led theatre, which resulted in ‘a more objective examination of the
nature of the actor’s work’ (2000: 2). As well as being motivated by these shifts
in the European theatre, Konstantin Stanislavsky’s experiments also
determined the shape of the theatre industry to come by systematizing and
professionalizing the actor’s work. His experiments at the Moscow Art Theatre
(MXT) in the early 1900s correspond with practices at the beginnings of
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modern organizational management, which were taking place in America a
decade or so earlier, specifically Frederick Winslow Taylor’s development of
the paradigm of Scientific Management, commonly known as Taylorism.
Taylor argued that managers must gather knowledge of the entire production
process in order to divide the process into tasks for the worker (hence, as the
political economist Harry Braverman points out, the huge expansion from
1890s to 1950s of degrees in engineering). Scientific management separates
‘conception’ from ‘execution’, as managers assume a ‘monopoly over
knowledge’ (Braverman 1974: 113). A ‘task-based’ management theory,
Scientific Management parallels other performance practices. As a number of
scholars have argued, Vsevolod Meyerhold’s system of biomechanics was
directly inspired by Taylorism’s Soviet adaptation while also ‘humanising’ it
(Pitches 2003; Evans 2009). What has not been acknowledged, however, are
the parallels between Taylor’s work and Stanislavsky’s. These are not
similarities in terms of specific practices so much as ideological similarities; a
drive to systematize and rationalize embodied knowledge.
A ‘craft’ is a skill or process that an individual performs, whether the portrayal
of a character or repair of an engine. Craft is what Scientific Management
seeks to break down. Dividing a process among several workers (what
Braverman calls a ‘detailed division of labour’) directly benefits the capitalist in
terms of economy and control. As labour is the source of surplus value, and
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the accumulation of value the driver of capitalism, the capitalist is driven to
economize on the overall wage bill by dividing a process into tasks. The
capitalist can then pay lesser-skilled workers less money to perform the easier
tasks, whereas the minimum pay of the worker who performed all operations
of the process would be by default the highest pay for the most difficult task
(Braverman 1974: 77-80). This economizing creates greater output for less
input, and improves the efficiency of production processes (as in Henry Ford’s
assembly line). At the same time, separating planning from doing further
alienates the worker from the products of his/her labour. The designation
‘Scientific’, therefore, is not neutral, but ideological – it naturalizes the
imperative of maximizing surplus value, regardless of the human cost.
The destruction of traditional craftsmanship entrenched class divisions
(Braverman 1974). By concentrating ‘knowledge’ in the minds of managers, a
workforce of laborers with specialist knowledge became unnecessary; a
process Braverman calls ‘deskilling.’ By ‘destroying the craft as a process under
the control of the worker’, Braverman writes, ‘[the capitalist] reconstitutes it as
a process under his own control. He can now count his gains in a double
sense, not only in productivity but in management control, since that which
mortally injures the worker is in this case advantageous to him.’ (1974:
78).Therefore, Scientific Management represents the destruction of embodied
knowledge and a division of knowledge between the head and the hand.
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Management (despite the etymological link to the Latin manus, or hand) is
demarcated as an intellectual exercise – the head can understand what was
previously known by hand.
The detailed division of labour does not seem immediately applicable to the
creation of individual, singular characters – while a director could economize
by dividing up Keira Knightley’s performance to forty-four child laborers – she
is probably not going to. But both Taylor’s practices at the Midvale Steel
Works in the 1880-90s and Stanislavsky’s practices at the Moscow Art Theatre
a decade later attempted to capture knowledge that was at first glance tacit,
embodied, natural, and mercurial, in the form of method – understandable,
transmissible. When embodied or intuitive practices are broken down,
whether they are the mechanic’s craft or the actor’s work, they can be
understood and perfected. Both Taylor and Stanislavsky were outsiders to
closed, guild-like practices. Taylor’s apprenticeship in the factory was, as
Braverman points out, an act of youthful rebellion against his wealthy father;
Stanislavsky was an amateur actor, who, as his biographer Jean Benedetti
notes, was pretty bad at acting. In Stanislavsky’s case, having viewed foreign
actors such as Eleonora Duse and Tommasso Salvini in Moscow, he sought to
capture what his biographer Jean Benedetti describes as the ‘ease, naturalness
and flow of the actor of genius’ (2000: 3) by means of a method.
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Unlike the factory worker, the actor does not simply carry out the tasks set by
a director but engages herself in a complex process of planning. The emphasis
on planning is at the heart of Stanislavsky’s system and was, in some ways, a
theatrical revolution. Compare the 1896 staging of Chekhov’s The Seagull with
the MXT’s fabled production two years later. In the first, Sharon Carnicke
argues, actors would learn their parts on their own, and meet for ‘a few’
rehearsals; in the latter, Stanislavsky’s actors ‘put eighty hours of work into
thirty-three rehearsals’ (Carnicke 2000: 12). The labour of the actor shifts
behind the closed doors of the rehearsal room, with the actor analyzing the
play and dividing it into a ‘score’ of actions. ‘If our preparatory work is right’,
Stanislavsky wrote, ‘the results will take care of themselves’ (Stanislavsky qtd.
in Carnicke 2000: 25). Reading Stanislavsky through Taylorism, the actor is
both a manager who plans a series of actions, and a worker who executes
them.
The Stanislavsky ‘event’ transformed the modern theatre, most would say, for
the better. By systematizing the ‘nature’ of the actor’s creativity, Stanislavsky
inspired a century of Western actor training and democratized the profession.
The MXT and its ensemble mode of working replaced the Russian theatre’s
star system, meaning anyone, in theory, could learn to be an actor. But it is
tempting to see this moment of the actor’s autonomy as the beginning of the
profession’s precaritization.
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In the next phase of management the skills of the actor enter into the remit
of the manager. What Taylor overlooked was the role emotion played in
organizations and workplaces. Taylorism’s monopoly on planning degraded
the worker’s psychological and emotional wellbeing – to maintain
productivity management would also need to mediate antagonisms brought
on by the degradation of skilled labour. Management theorists from the
1930s onwards would address this oversight, including the focus of the next
section, Peter F. Drucker.
Performing (Self) Control: Managerial Ideology and Labour as Dressage
Managers hold control and power, but they are not the same as owners. In the
early phases of industrial capitalism, this lack of (literal) ownership was viewed
as a problem. Adam Smith, in The Wealth of Nations, worried that because
directors of ‘joint-stock companies’ were managers of other people’s capital,
they would not employ the same vigilance as if it were their own (1776, in
Fournier and Grey 2000: 8). The manager is therefore a median figure that
requires its own role and corresponding ideology to justify its existence.
Willard Enteman calls this ideology managerialism: an ideology in which ‘the
fundamental social unit is neither individuals nor the state, but organizations’
(1993: 154). Managerialism views the individual as a rational actor, who can
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nevertheless sacrifice his/her own self-interest for the team. Following an
Althusserian reading of ideology, however, we know that ideology is not
merely a matter of personal worldview. In his most famous essay, Louis
Althusser writes that when an individual is ‘hailed’ on the street by a police
officer, and turns around, the ‘mere one-hundred-and-eighty-degree physical
conversion’ interpellates him as a subject: ‘Because he has recognized that the
hail was “really” addressed to him, and that “it was really him who was hailed”’
(Althusser 1971: 48). Paraphrasing religious philosopher Blaise Pascal – ‘Kneel
down, move your lips in prayer, and you will believe’ (1971: 42) – Althusser
notes the way ideology is not embedded in a subject’s beliefs, but his/her
practices, or, perhaps, performances. Managerialism therefore is both an
ideology of organizations, and the practice by which the individual affirms or
performs his/her commitment to an organization. Therefore, the practice of
management lies at the intersection of organization, performance, and
emotional investment.
The manager’s labour is not directly productive, in that it does not directly
create use values. Instead, the manager indirectly improves productivity and
organizational performance (i.e. efficiency), extracting as much surplus value
from the worker as possible. One of the earliest management theorists, Henri
Fayol, noted that ‘Whilst the other functions [of the organization] bring into
play material and machines, the managerial function operates only on the
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personnel’ (1916[1971]: 181). Fayol’s principles branch out from the division of
labour to more intersubjective principles (known as ‘soft skills’ in today’s MBA
programmes) such as ‘Initiative’, ‘Esprit de corps’, and ‘Discipline.’
The substance of a manager’s labour is already ‘performance’, therefore, in
two senses (which, according to McKenzie, are intertwined). A manager is
responsible for the quality performance of an organization, and to ensure this
is required to perform a certain way. Contra McKenzie, performance has not
replaced discipline, rather, the manager performs discipline. Jackson and
Carter, drawing on Foucault, call this ‘labour as dressage’: ‘non-productive,
non-utilitarian and unnatural behaviour for the satisfaction of the controller
and as a public display of compliance, obedience to discipline’ (1998: 54).
Dressage means both ‘discipline’ and ‘taming’, but it also refers to the show of
performance of a disciplined and tamed horse. The only function of labour as
dressage is to demonstrate or show compliance2.
Here we can return to Adam Smith’s quandary: why would a middle-ranked
employee agree to this performance of compliance (without a stake in
ownership)? Precisely because managerialism provides a role to inhabit. This is
a mechanism of ideological interpellation akin to Stanislavsky’s holistic
The question of course becomes: ‘who is the audience for this show’ of compliance?
Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek’s body of work from 1989 onwards would answer: The Big
Other – the network of socio-symbolic rules that guarantees our intersubjectivity, but crucially,
doesn’t really exist.
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approach to character. The manager’s role is best explored through the work
of Peter F. Drucker, the Austrian-born theorist of management, and one of the
first to try to define the ‘function’ of the manager. Despite at times being
incorrect in his predictions, Drucker remains a benchmark for organizational
theory, bringing together Scientific Management with an interest in human
behaviour.3
Drucker recognized that Scientific Management’s exclusive concern with
productivity meant it was poorly placed to address the problem of worker
motivation. A purely Taylorist organization diminished worker flexibility and
adaptability, and increased resistance to change: ‘[Scientific Management]
knows how to organize the present job for maximum output but only by
seriously impairing output in the worker’s next job’ (1977: 232). Denying the
human dimension of management hindered economic performance. In this
way, his theories brought Taylorism together with Elton Mayo’s human
relations movement, which ‘recognized that the social-psychological climate
of an enterprise is as much a factor in productivity as technical capability’
(Locke 1996: 24). Drucker’s innovation is known as ‘management by
objectives’ or MBO. MBO sets goals for an organization and distributes these
goals in objectives to be accomplished by individual workers or teams. What is
In the 1970s, Drucker argued that the United States was seeing the retrenchment of
corporate power. Naïvely, he suggested that top CEOs would no longer be household names,
an idea that Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Rupert Murdoch, and many others have since belied.
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distinctive about MBO, however, is that objectives cannot stand on their own
as singular tasks, but must be integrated into a ‘job.’ ‘The human being does
individual motions poorly’, Drucker writes, but a job, allows the worker to
invest in his/her work personally or emotionally (Drucker 1977: 230). A human
is not a tool, Drucker argued. Therefore, management must make use of a
worker’s ‘will, personality, emotions, appetites and soul.’ (1977: 230).
Drucker gave little advice on ‘soft-skills’, leaving this task to be taught in
business schools. His concern was more structural than psychological.
However, his management theory points to an important feature of the
ideology of managerialism: the instrumentalisation of emotion. In his seminal
text The Practice of Management, Drucker gives a surprising insight: rather
than instructing readers on how to manage others through manipulation or
guile, Drucker suggests that the manager’s first object should be his or her
self. He writes: ‘The greatest advantage of management by objectives is
perhaps that it makes it possible for a manager to control his own
performance. Self-control means stronger motivation’ (1955: 112). The desires
of the manager must become consonant with the goals of the organization –
they must take on the objectives for themselves. A manager who is managed
by self-control and objectives ‘acts not because somebody wants him to but
because he himself decides that he has to – he acts, in other words, as a free
man’ (1955: 117) – in other words, he has to want it.
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It is easy to see the parallels between MBO and Stanislavsky’s System of bits
and objectives. Both actors and managers begin their planning by identifying
a ‘super-objective’ of sorts, and devising smaller objectives that lead to this
overall goal. Here, the new paradigm of actor training seems to influence
management: while Taylor prefigured Stanislavsky’s analysis of the text into
action, MBO draws on Stanislavsky’s mobilization of human desire through
the analysis of the text in terms of character objectives. While desire is utilized
in Stanislavsky’s system to creative and artistic ends, and in Drucker’s system
to improve the firm’s efficiency, ultimately, the result is the same: desire
becomes part of a new form of labour that is utilized in production, whether
this production is theatrical, physical, or cognitive/immaterial. In other words,
since Drucker demands not only the manager’s intellect but also her desire, by
performing her compliance with the norms and desires of the corporation this
new manager is doing the labour of the actor. In a way, Drucker addressed the
alienation of the work in the Fordist factory. But his work led to a different
kind of alienation – the alienation of the emotions, and of the self. Today, this
alienation is so characteristic of modern work it often goes unnoticed. Jackson
and Carter write that today it is: ‘[…] considered inadequate simply to work
but required that when one worked one should self-actualize […] we are
required to be empowered’ (1998: 59). Tony J. Watson’s ethnographic
research with managers notes that managers use ‘self-concepts’ and
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discursive formations such as ‘the sort of person I am’ (1997: 150) in order to
identify with the organization. In social psychology this is called ‘identity
work’, a performative and discursive construction of the self. The job of the
manager is not only to make the employee or colleague believe in the
organization but to make oneself believe. Only in this way can the manager
‘make clear to the world that there is no division between the manager as a
human being and the manager as a functionary’ (Watson 1997: 150).
Emotion as Material: Strasberg and Carnegie
The increasing emphasis in management theory on the management of one’s
self in order to create favourable interactions with others accompanied the
shift in the economies of the West from the manufacture of goods to the
renting of intellectual property and accumulation of surplus value through
brands and symbolic capital. Drucker predicted this shift by conceiving of the
‘knowledge worker’ and the Italian autonomist philosopher Maurizio Lazzarato
(1996) uses the term ‘immaterial labour’ to describe these new forms of work.
But while immaterial labour does not produce material commodities of the
sort analysed in chapter one of Das Kapital, such as coats or chairs, its practice
certainly involves a familiar material: the body and its affective and emotional
capacities.
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Lee Strasberg, Stanislavsky’s disciple and the originator of what is today
known as American Method Acting, understood that ‘emotion’, or ‘feeling’
was a material that could be worked on and disciplined. Strasberg studied at
the American Laboratory Theatre under the tutelage of Maria Ouspenskaya
and Richard Boleslavsky, both students of Stanislavsky at the Moscow Art
Theatre. As artistic director of the Actor’s Studio, which trained numerous
American actors including Paul Newman, Dustin Hoffman, Anne Bancroft and
Sally Field, Strasberg has had enormous influence on American acting. The
radical departure in Strasberg’s training was ‘the Method actor’s
uncompromising search for “truth” and “authenticity”’ (Counsell 1996: 53).
Strasberg stressed the use of ‘affective memory’ (sometimes incorrectly known
as ‘emotional memory’), that is, evoking a specific emotion within the given
circumstances of the dramatic text by remembering a corresponding feeling
from the actor’s own past. All artists, he argues, use their sensual memories of
previous experiences, but only actors must do so ‘in the presence of the
audience at a particular time and place’ (1988: 116). This is a fundamental
transformation to our approach to truth and sincerity. The System and the
Method are means of disciplining and manufacturing spontaneous emotion,
but this is not the same as pretending. No, in fact, both the System and the
Method emphasise the ‘truth’ of the moment, and this discourse is not limited
to theatre professionals; ‘emotional truth’ and ‘believability’ are frequent
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(empty) clichés in the evaluation of actors’ performances by the general
public.
The idea that genuine emotion can be instrumentally manufactured radically
elides false and true, and parallels other ideological changes. While Strasberg
was formulating his Method with the Group Theatre, Dale Carnegie, a former
actor turned self-help lecturer and entrepreneur, published How to Win
Friends and Influence People. He provides advice on interpersonal
communication and leadership, illustrated with anecdotes in an upbeat, folksy
narrative voice. Chapters titles are Machiavellian: ‘How to Change People
Without Giving Offense or Arousing Resentment’, however, Carnegie does not
advise using guile or manipulation. Rather, his advice oscillates between selfinterest and sincerity. One must ‘arouse in the other person an eager want’
(1936: 69) and ‘talk in terms of the other person’s interests’ [in order to get
them to like you] (1936: 110). But at the same time, you must actually mean it.
Honesty and sincerity run through his principles, for example: ‘Make the other
person feel important — and do it sincerely’ (1936: 121). Carnegie doesn’t
resolve the contradiction between authenticity and manipulation – he simply
pretends it doesn’t exist. Both Carnegie and Strasberg effectively give the
same advice: don’t deceive, but engage in a careful process of feeling
management.
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William Whyte’s The Organization Man (1957)[2002], an ethnographic study
based on interviews with top American CEOs, shows feeling management in
action: ‘the calm eye that never strays from the other’s gaze, the easy,
controlled laughter, the whole demeanour that tells onlookers that here is
certainly a man without neurosis and inner rumblings’ (Whyte 1957[2002]:
155-6). Organization Man ‘must not only accept control, he must accept it as if
he liked it’ (Whyte 1957[2002]: 151, my emphasis). This is not the same as
deceit. It is wilful self-deception. Whyte’s ‘as if’ reminds us of Stanislavsky’s
‘magic If.’ Stanislavsky’s fictional surrogate, the acting teacher Tortsov, tells his
students: “‘In this process the magic “if” and Given Circumstances, when they
are properly understood, help you to feel and to create theatrical truth and
belief onstage. So in life there is truth, what is, what exists, what people really
know. Onstage we call truth that which does not exist in reality but which
could happen’” (Stanislavsky 2008: 153). Grisha, a student, challenges Tortsov
by pointing out the contradiction between ‘truth’ and theatre’s fictional
nature. In reply, Tortsov tells Grisha: ‘“Decide what is more interesting, more
important to you, what it is you want to believe, that the material world of
facts and events exists in the theatre and in the play, or that it is the feeling
which is born in the actor’s heart, stirred by a fiction, that is genuine and
true?”’ (2008: 154). Feelings, in other words, are ‘true’, because they arise from
the actor’s self. But this truth can be manipulated through a process of
‘justification’ in reference to the Given Circumstances; this creative work
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‘“satisf[ies] your sense of truth and your belief in the genuineness of your
experiencing”’ (2008: 154). Transposed to the corporate world, this passage
takes on a different cast. As in the world of a play, the Given Circumstances of
the corporation are largely out of the actor’s control. Unlike a play, the actor’s
work of generating true feeling becomes a means for the manager to submit
freely to control.4
Acting styles are never neutral, but reflect and refract ideologies and larger
social and historical changes. The discursive coincidence between actor
training and organizational management is not metaphorical but quite actual.
The two practices share techniques and processes, which is demonstrated
through the increasing importance of ‘transferrable skills’ in the prospectus
pages of university drama courses. ‘Acting’ is not simply a useful metaphor for
understanding new forms of emotional and affective labour (cf. Hochschild
1983). In fact, ‘the actor’ is a metonym for the alienation of the self within
work in the 20th century, and prefigures the ideal, self-managed subject: the
freelancer.
Self-Management for Precarious Labour
Arlie Russell Hochschild notes this similarity in The Managed Heart, her study of ‘emotional
labour’ in the service industries (specifically among flight attendants and debt collectors),
making use of Stanislavsky’s theories to conceptualize her distinction between ‘surface’
(feigned) acting and ‘deep’ acting (1983[2003]: 37-38).
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Taylorism sought to separate planning from execution, while the school of
MBO supported by Drucker attempted to reintegrate individual tasks into a
‘job’, which supported personal investment and self-actualization. In the
contemporary firm we see, in the words of Alan McKinlay and Phil Taylor, an
‘emergence of a new language of work [which] has been paralleled by the rise
of teamworking, a form of work organization in which groups of employees
assume responsibility for complete production processes, including
administrative and organizational functions’ (1998: 173, my emphasis). This is
a larger shift from a hierarchical, Fordist model, to a more lateral model of
(self) control. The single manager is no longer solely responsible for ensuring
performance. Rather, each employee assumes a management function; they
must all perform.
As suggested earlier, the creative industries drive this shift. Not only are the
creative industries seen as an ideal area of expansion within the post-Fordist
economy, they also provide a model for organizational management. Thus,
Robert Hewison, John Holden and Samuel Jones engage with theatre practices
in their study of the RSC (2010), and their use of the ‘ensemble’ as both a
rehearsal practice and an organizational tool. More generally, Bilton (2006)
argues that management in itself is a creative act, facilitating the conditions
for creativity and moving the concept away from the Romantic idea of the
individual artist to creativity within systems and organizations. In one sense,
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collective creativity is a positive thing, as are the increasing autonomy and
possibilities for self-actualization to be found within the collective. But within
the new economy, collectives are often arranged around specific projects,
constantly being restructured and rearranged. The value of the creative
collective should be questioned if it is not supported by institutional
structures that give it security and stability.
Hesmondhalgh and Baker argue that creative industries policy does not take
into account the specifics of artistic labour: ‘policies that argue for a radical
expansion of [the cultural industries] under present conditions, without
attention to the conditions of creative labour, risks fuelling labour markets
marked by irregular, insecure and unprotected work’ (2009: 5). While the
‘individualization of work’ (McRobbie 2002: 518) may be perceived as flexible
and exciting, it comes with the removal of forms of labour security enjoyed
under Fordism. Scholars in diverse disciplines have called this precarity, a
pervasive adoption of short- or fixed-term contracts, zero-hour contracts, and
billable freelancing. In an individualized labour economy, success requires
constant self-management: ‘what individualization means sociologically is that
people increasingly have to become their own micro-structures, they have to
do the work of the structures by themselves, which in turn requires intensive
practices of self-monitoring’ (McRobbie 2002: 518).
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Without conflating ‘acting’ with all artistic labour, nor suggesting that actor
training is responsible for today’s freelance economy, it is striking that it
prefigures one key area of this shift: self-exploitation. McRobbie notes the very
high level of self-exploitation in the creative industries, due to a combination
of passion and pleasure. The rewards for creative labour are presented as
‘inherent’; one’s work becomes reconceptualised as one’s craft. The ideologies
become intertwined: ‘self-exploitation’ also doubles as a description of the
actor’s work in Stanislavsky-derived actor training, which asks the actor to
work on her emotions, body, and spirit. In other words, the positive, ‘actorly’
sense of self-exploitation as artistic mining of the self becomes ambiguously
folded in with McRobbie’s usage of the term ‘self-exploitation’ as long hours,
exhaustion, and low remuneration. The training of the actor is also useful for
what we might call acting’s ‘externalities’, that is, the business of it all, in which
the self is packaged and sold in order to find (temporary) employment. Aside
from the minimal amount of time spent actually ‘on-the-job’, acting involves
enormous periods of unremunerated labour, or rather, labour that is paid for
by the promise of eventual remuneration. This includes those performances
that never come to be – auditions and castings, which involve reading from
the sides, but also, networking with casting directors, agents and producers.
Actors also self-manage their life-narratives and personal portfolios, mining
aspects of their personal history and image in order to present a flexible but
unique and hire-able self. In a typical audition, an actor must ‘slate’
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(USA/Canada) or do an ‘Ident’ (UK), stating their name and agent, give
‘profiles’ (the casting equivalent of a mug shot), and usually summarize
themselves in a few pithy sentences. At the same time as an actor is meant to
mine their inner self for emotional truth, they must also create an attractive
packaged self that can be sold. This, we should make no mistake, is another
form of labour, but it is not remunerated as such. Rather, actors are happy to
take it on. These externalities increasingly resemble the work freelancers must
do. But the insecurity and self-exploitation of the job have long been accepted
as part of the actor’s lot. The actor is at the vanguard of the new economy.
Conclusion: Reviving the Naturalist Project
Our citational network between Stanislavsky-derived actor training and
organizational management is now complete. By comparing similarities
between features of practices I have looked for shared ideologies. This process
of ‘reading together’ draws attention to the way in which positive aspects of
one field (the liberation of the actor’s creative potential, for example) may at
the same time support exploitative or damaging aspects in another. While my
aim has been primarily critical, having drawn attention to the ideological
overlaps between actor training and organizational management, a number of
possibilities for action emerge that could have positive benefits both for
actors as well as creative industries workers.
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Firstly, by pointing to actor training’s overlap with the world of business
management, the citational network I have drawn demystifies the craft and
demands we consider acting labour as labour. Without denying the ‘art’ of
acting, a critique of actor’s working conditions is essential at a time when the
profession is more precarious than ever. We might draw attention to the
discursive way in which unpaid labour is accepted and naturalized in the
profession (when Sanford Meisner calls line-learning and substitution
exercises ‘homework’ (1990), he blurs labour and leisure). An investigation into
unpaid or poorly paid working conditions might have implications for arts
funding policy as well as Actor’s Equity guidelines.
Furthermore, Hesmondhalgh’s suggestion (2010) that creative industries
policy requires detailed empirical analysis of individual creative industries
should apply to the special case of acting. Actors do not work in one creative
industry, they work across many (theatre, film, television, music, publishing,
advertising), their underemployment marking them out as what Marx calls an
‘industrial reserve army’ (Marx 1867[1976]: 784). Why actors would accept
these precarious conditions would best be ascertained through empirical
research, which might demonstrate the way desire and passion are
increasingly mobilized in the creative industries as a means of control.
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Finally, I agree with Jonathan Chambers’ call for more ‘historical thinking’ in
acting (Chambers 2010). Academic theatre departments, by integrating
practice and theory, are best placed to lead here. Naturalism was intended to
depict the human within the larger social and historical forces that determine
his being: this was the aim of Zola, Ibsen, and Chekhov in the late 19th and
early 20th century, which was carried into Strasberg and Meisner’s work with
the Group Theatre in the 1930s, which staged Clifford Odets’ seminal piece of
trade union theatre, Waiting for Lefty, in 1935. But as Colin Counsell (1996)
suggests, the process of creating realism on the stage, as interpreted by
Stanislavsky and his inheritors is bound up in an ideology of bourgeois
individualism. The notion of ‘realist drama’ is a historically and culturally
constructed synthesis. The root of drama is ‘action’, and ‘realism’ is meant to
reflect life. But life is not constant action in pursuit of objectives. Realist drama
therefore reflects life as defined by productivity, managerial ideology at its
purest. Perhaps by re-evaluating the ideology of naturalism we might inject
some ‘idleness’ into the theatre. Instead of succumbing to the relentless drive
of productivity, perhaps the stage is the place where the actor might down
tools, and go on strike.
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