Rethinking the Actor's Body: Dialogues with Neuroscience by Dick McCaw (review)

Abstract

British acting teacher and theatre practitioner Dick McCaw’s Rethinking the Actor’s Body: Dialogues with Neuroscience is intended as a companion piece to his 2018 movement training manual, Training the Actor’s Body: A Guide. It provides some useful insight into the theories of the body that underlie McCaw’s practices and their attempt to bring the training techniques of Stanislavski and Feldenkrais—rooted in an early twentieth-century understanding of behavioral psychology—in line with contemporary understandings of neurological processes. In undertaking such a project, McCaw also places the book in dialogue with other attempts to define the relationship between the actor’s work and the physical operation of the human brain such as Rhonda Blair’s The Actor, Image, and Action: Acting and Cognitive Neuroscience (2008). Blair argues that there are significant gaps between the techniques actors use to create representations of action onstage and the cognitive processes that actually underlie human behavior. For Blair, those gaps are useful in creating performances that the spectator’s brain can easily interpret. Conversely, McCaw contends that these gaps are not so great and that actor training should be working to bridge what remains of them.