My body taught me how to act: towards an epistemology of actor learning and apprenticeship

The background to this paper is the researcher’s own apprenticeship training as an actor in Sri Lanka. The paper will examine a paradigm of actor learning through the performing – and apprenticed – body. Recent studies have focussed on the performer’s embodiment within dance and acting (Sheets-Johnston, M. 1966, Parviainan, 1998, 2003, Klemola, 1991, Zarrilli, 2004, 2008, Kissel and Block 2001, Barbour, 2006) This paper will build upon such work in conjunction with Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of the subject as a “being-to-the-world” (1962, p.xiii) to consider the actor’s “bodily being in the enactment” as a “knowing process.” Particularly within the context of apprenticeship training, and in contradistinction to traditional understandings of learning which are rooted in language and cognition, the paper will demonstrate how such training embeds actor learning within (iterative and incremental) corporal enactment.