Emotion Memory versus Physical Action Towards Anti-racist Pedagogies that Make Way for Critical Praxis

Stanislavsky training has been criticised for assuming a “universality” in the way actors represent characters. The first part of this chapter uses Pierre Bourdieu’s concept habitus to critically analyse how two often oppositional devices – emotion memory and physical actions – problematise anti-racist pedagogies. The second part of the chapter uses the habitus to reflect on exploring emotion memory in a training studio influenced by Yevgeny Vakhtangov, Stanislavsky’s colleague at the Moscow Art Theatre, to argue that the processing of memories as social experiences reveals the actor as a social agent who can instigate social progress through progressive social representations. Throughout, the chapter illuminates post-Stanislavsky thinking concerning how the studio can bring the unconscious dispositions of the actor to consciousness and facilitate a characterisation of resistance, contributing to the decolonisation of performances of problematic scripts.

This is an Accepted Manuscript of a book chapter published by Routledge in Stanislavski and Race: Questioning the “System” in the 21st Century on 22 Sept 2023, available online: http://www.routledge.com/9781032362335