Developmental Approaches to Theatre

Abstract

The primary focus of both theatre and therapy is the same: human behavior. Dramatic action generally stems from a movement toward or an avoidance of change in behavior—the same process that characterizes a dynamic therapy. The actor and the director confront human action in the text of the drama. In the development of a score for performance, they adapt immediate and ongoing behavior to this action. Behavior is suggested, represented, experienced; the entire range of human response is available as a source for creation and discovery in performance. The function of criticism and acting training is to provide systems to analyze patterns of action—in the text and in the related experience of the performer. Traditional analysis has nearly always been external, treating behavior as an artifact that can be schematized, predicted, fixed, kept in a limbo between past and present.