theodor adorno on why actors need to be stupid
Gretel asked me how it can be that actors, who are mostly of questionable intelligence and always uneducated, can represent people and deliver lines that convey the most difficult of ideas, as with Hamlet and Prospero, Faust, Mephistopheles. I ventured the reply: every poetic work contains not only the meaningful-significative element, but also the melodic-mimic aspect, tone, speech melody, and manner; and it is a substantial criterion for success how deeply the former is immersed in the latter, i.e. whether the mimetic, ‘magical’ aspect is able to invoke, to force the meaningful one, to such a degree that a tone of voice or gesture itself becomes the allegorical representation of an idea. The actor’s ability is mimic in the true sense: he actually imitates the melodica-gestural aspect of language. And the more perfectly he achieves this, the more perfectly the idea enteres the representation, not least because — and especially when — he does not understand it. The opposite approach would be the explanatory one: but to explain the intention means to kill it rather than invoking it. One could almost say that it is the prerequisite for an actor not to ‘understand’, but rather to imitate blindly…
Adorno, Theodor. Towards a Theory of Musical Reproduction, p. 158-159
Leave a Reply