The S Word, in partnership with the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts of the Edith Cowan University, Perth/Boorloo, Western Australia

Abstract

Stanislavski was clear that the actor must take their place in the theatre. His writings are full of injunctions to reflexively situate oneself with respect to the stage, set, actors, objectives, and so on. Echoing Stanislavski’s conceptual and physical praxis, modernist performance makers such as Meyerhold and Schlemmer went on to postulate that the actor brought their own sense of place onto the stage, shaping the performance space and enabling performer to align themselves, their attention, and their movements to a range of axial placements and combinations, as in Laban’s kinesphere. Later theatre makers as varied as David Donnellan and Suzuki Tadashi have suggested that the theatre is a place of life-and-death struggle, a site where a battle for survival is conducted by both characters and the actors themselves.