Performing Ethos: International Journal of Ethics in Theatre & Performance - Volume 6, Issue 1-2, 2015

The article aims at understanding the intrinsic rationality of the psychophysical actor training that director Jouko Turkka exercised in the Theatre Academy Helsinki in the 1980s. Drawing on the testimonies of former students of Turkka, the author reconstructs an idea of the pedagogical body, according to which the transitions between studio and theatre, actor and spectator, individual and society were explained and carried out in practice. What kind of problems and challenges did Turkka’s solutions raise within the psychophysical tradition itself? The way the Turkka actors embodied the ‘stage’ in their performance tended to reestablish psychophysical training as an ethical and political project. As the author argues, the basic problem of this attempt was not only its pedagogical cost but, most significantly, its tendency to retain – heroically – the idea of the integral, or whole body. The deconstruction of this idea sets a challenge for psychophysical training still today.

My article takes exercise as a concept with a historical memory. I will schematically give some attributes to exercise, which I believe have pertained through the twentieth century. These attributes are via negativa and self-penetration. As a more general description, these attributes translate into a diagram of exercise: testing one’s body/life through extreme situations. I localize the origins of psychophysical exercise in the kinaesthetic movement and life philosophy of the early pre-war century. This I see as a biopolitical movement that was radicalized through war rhetoric and war experience to include death in life as a fundamental test for expressive life force (courage and stoicism). I find an aggressive stance against everyday life and everyday body fundamental to both kinaesthetic or physical culture movement and war rhetoric. I also regard today’s exercise markets as part of this biopolitical assemblage. I emphasize the shell-shocked (or physically mutilated) body as a body that has been produced by the sensorial field of the trench warfare. The meaning of this group of damaged male bodies becomes evident when it is connected to post-war reconstruction movements with heightened biopolitics (leading to racial biopolitics and thanatopolitics). I will use some examples of Jouko Turkka’s pedagogical practice and exercises to give evidence of the psychophysical exercise’s modernist and violent memory (vitalist kernel). In the end I will give a schematic description of everyday life and use it as a background to criticize the exercise of ordeal and to give some provisional sketches for a pedagogy taking the everyday life (situationality, kairology, multiple) as its starting point or a working model.

I argue, that in order to create an ideal habitus of the actor, Jouko Turkka’s pedagogy aimed to purify the student from the tensions brought about by urban life and modernization by applying non reflexive body techniques. Turkka’s actor training is contextualized here in relation to similar psycho-physical practices that have developed the methods and practices to counter everyday life. I identify the modern discourses and dominant ideologies of western modernity, such as the concept of vitalism, which influenced Turkka’s pedagogy and were directed towards constructing the actor’s individual habitus as a masculine and heroic self-creating project. On the other hand, I will point out, there was also a collective habitus in Turkka’s pedagogy that could be seen as ‘feminine construction’ and as a resistance to the forced individualization brought about by modernization. Finally, I conclude the article by proposing the development of an actor training pedagogy that, instead of trying to liberate the trainee from one’s social and cultural conditioning, will strive to raise the trainee’s awareness of her existing social and cultural habitus as well as will take a collective habitus as a model for further elaboration.

This article investigates the transitional aspect of actor training, especially the role of transitional turmoil as part of an actor’s training process, and the ambivalences that turn up in training situations that seek to create transitions. Drawing on the psychophysical actor training by Jouko Turkka at the Theatre Academy Helsinki in the 1980s and interviews of his former students the author studies the relationship between the aim to foster the appearance of both the transitional and the creative state and deliberate destabilizing acts that lead to apparent violations of the actor students’ integrity. What features of this kind of training can we adopt and what should we delete in our search for modern, ethically sustainable ways of training? At the same time the author has to ask, are the things that destabilize us, possessing the potential to change us, the things that we truly remember?

The article discusses the relationship between acting, dramaturgy and ethics. This discussion is founded on the historical account of the psychophysical actor training of Jouko Turkka at the Theatre Academy Helsinki in the 1980s. This training entailed an entanglement of the technical, the dramaturgical and the ethical aspects of acting. The article attempts to disentangle this intertwinement on the basis of contemporary dramaturgical and actor’s dramaturgical theories, and finally outlines a dramaturgy of the actor as a medium of ethics and ethical enquiry.