Proto-Acting as a New Concept: Personal Mimicry and the Origins of Role Playing

Abstract

Proto-acting is introduced here as a new concept that refers to a set of processes that are intermediate between everyday role playing (in the Erving Goffman sense) and dramatic acting. Its most characteristic process is the voluntary act of personal mimicry, which can occur in everyday contexts, such as quoting someone during conversation, or in performance contexts, such as impressionism. Proto-acting involves character portrayal, but on a much simpler and more transient scale than in dramatic acting, where a person may portray a character for an extended period of time during a stage performance. For example, this might involve impersonating the characters while reading a bedtime story to a child, or children themselves portraying characters while engaging in pretend play. Other key features of proto-acting are that it tends to be driven by gesture, have minimal scripting, and involve short bouts of alternation between the self and characters. Proto-acting, as based on personal mimicry, might provide a cognitive foundation for dramatic acting in human development. Moreover, proto-acting itself might be underlain evolutionarily by the process of pantomime, which often involves intentional mimicry of the actions of other people. Hence, the proto-acting concept is able to shed light on processes relevant to cognition, development, the performing arts, and human evolution.

The neuroscience of Romeo and Juliet : an fMRI study of acting

“…The most surprising finding of the study was that a gestural change to one's accent while still maintaining the self-identity led to a qualitative pattern of deactivations similar to that for acting, suggesting that changes in embodiment can lead to neural changes in networks associated with perspective taking and role change. The results of this study provide a first step towards establishing a cognitive neuroscience of acting and role playing, one that considers the full gamut of processes from everyday role playing to dramatic acting [53].…”

How Pantomime Works: Implications for Theories of Language Origin

“…Despite these complications, personal mimicry is a highly significant cognitive and behavioral process that is ignored in all gestural models of language. Brown (2017) argued that personal mimicry via egocentric pantomiming provided the foundations for role playing and character portrayal in human life, leading ultimately to various forms of proto-acting and theatrical acting, including their expression as pretend play (Carlson and Taylor, 2005). Hence, we propose that egocentric pantomimes emerged initially as self-pantomimes and only later evolved as other-pantomimes through personal mimicry and character portrayal.…”

“…For example, a male mime actor could pantomime a man who was momentarily mimicking the gestures of a woman he had seen. We will return to this general issue in the Discussion section, since mimicry has important implications for the origins of role playing in human life (Brown, 2017) as well as for the origins of language. It is important to point out that the concept of a "character viewpoint" in the gesture literature is based on studies in which participants are explicitly asked to convey the actions of characters, for example cartoon characters (Beattie and Shovelton, 2002;McNeill, 2005).…”

A Unifying Model of the Arts: The Narration/Coordination Model

“…In theatrical forms of the narrative arts (including narrative dance), performers embody the characters on stage and work to expressively convey their emotions to audience members through modulations in their vocal prosody, facial expression, and body gesturing (Berry & Brown, 2019; Kemp, 2012; Konijn, 2000). There are a number of interesting everyday behaviors outside of the arts that I have referred to elsewhere as “proto-acting” (Brown, 2017)—including pretend play in children (Harris, 2000; Walton, 1990) and role-playing-based video games (Hitchens & Drachen, 2009; Shulman, 2017; Tychsen et al., 2006)—in which people have the ability to cross the threshold and serve as active participants in fictional storyworlds, in contrast to the outsider role that they more typically play when they are readers, film viewers, and theatre goers.…”

“…Functional roles are typically organized along the lines of a social hierarchy that reflects the division of labor necessary to collectively produce a group activity. Whereas role playing of the character type occurs uniquely in the theatrical arts and related everyday forms of character portrayal (Brown, 2017), functional roles are found prominently in both branches of the arts, although they emphasize different types of roles within the social systems that they represent. According to the dramaturgical perspective in social psychology (Goffman, 1959; Shulman, 2017), people adopt different “personas” while performing different functional roles.…”