The End of Acting or The Age of the Über-Marionette

A speciality of working in a field that has isolated itself from the overall advancement of knowledge is that stating things that are common sense in other fields can gain you prophecy credits (in all the ambivalence of prophecy credits). I have been looked at as a strange person for years when I kept on saying that the days of professional acting by humans are counted due to overall technological progress (, this has changed a little bit since people realized that Chat-GPT is a thing, but it actually still goes on). 

“Well, no! – Nothing can substitute the human actor! Nobody would want to see the artificially built character! People want to see humans!” 

Well, no. The things we see on screen and stage are not at all like humans. You might not immediately see that, because they are built in a way that they evoke the same reactions in you as humans do. But they are much more concise than everyday humans, on several levels and in different dimensions. That is why they evoke much more interest than real humans do. That is why we are willing to pay to be allowed to watch them. They don’t give us the same as an observation of the normal life human, they obviously give us more. 

But even if it were true that humans would want to see real humans: It will probably like with artificial breasts, you can only dislike them when you recognize them. 

“Well, no! What about emotions? It needs the inner life!” 

Well, no. Have you not wept seeing little Simba desperately trying to wake up his dead father Mufasa in “The Lion King”? There is no actor there,  there is also no inner life, it is just a simple but concise surface that’s communicating the emotion. It doesn’t seem too much to me that emotion is bound to real humans. It’s just cues and they can be reproduced in various forms unbound from the human flesh.

“Well no! The individual will be lost then!”

Well, yes, at least for the moment on the level of the individual phenotypical image. But also, well, no. Look at screenwriting. The parameters which constitute an individual are many, but not infinite, at least not on the level how differences in individuality can be perceived by a non-specialized audience. We are not so much interested in seeing the average disagreeable man and the a little bit above average disagreeable man fight. Perception is made by differences, and if we pay for it, we want to be served the easily perceivable, concise differences. And, in fact it only needs a few parameters there, some extreme trait, another trait that is in conflict with it, a little subpersonality that pops up in special situations and the individual is there. And the thing with several variables is, that, as soon as they multiply, you are in very large numbers immediately. Screenwriters know that, they call it character-driven writing. The same can of course be done on the level of phenotype, and it is just steps from these artificially built non-moving naturalistic images of individuals to the moving images. 

In terms of better outcome of works machines will sooner or later have all the advantages. We actually already have a quite mixed situation since we have the possibility to infinitely copy actors in 2D-formats, which allows to only choose their best takes, and to throw all human insufficiency and mediocracy away. These are already highly artifical chains of hyperconcise human behaviour. Imagine that instead you would have had to watch “Breaking Bad” in the interpretation of the actors of your local theatre company.

But let’s start to look at it from somewhere else. I would like to go back 2500 years when the cultural practice of Western theatre emerged from other, previous sets of human behaviour. Why did it happen that way? How come humans started to play humans? Isn’t that really strange? I like to take a technological stance. If we ask “How did acting happen?” or “Why did theatre start making use of humans to tell its stories?”, what about answering: Well, they had no other technology available. Had they had some better technology, they would probably have used it. Ancient Greek theatre doesn’t appear to me to look much as if it would have been important to them to have their figures look human-like. Quite not so. Strange oversize figures with over-expressive masks look as if the normal human would not have been concise enough. “Makes sense”, you might say, “their theatres were so big”. Yes, they were, but additionally, from many positions the audience was looking at a human figure in front of a background of many many other human figures (as the amphitheatres were round and there was the audience on the opposite side, which is actually so distracting that one might want to ask, if “watching the fellow citizens how they watch the play” might have been essential part of the game). So, distinctiveness of the figure in the foreground was good, in visual appearance and  probably also in action. So, why not take impressive hyperconcise oversize robots? Ah, well, they didn’t exist. 

They had to take humans and one could easily say that this is how the misery began. I will revise this narrative in the end, but let us follow it for the moment.

The insufficiency of human flesh as the material for the art of acting has been addressed again and again in the history of acting, and everybody who has ever been at a theatre rehearsal understands why. Humans are simply not that perfect instruments. The one who pointed most painfully at it was the British actor, director, woodcarver, stage designer, light artist and overall theatre visionary and enfant terrible Edward Gordon Craig. He was the son of an architect and an actress, and he was a profound visual thinker. Concise imagination and working with exuberant actors implies, as you can imagine, a bit of a conflict. The painter gets already angry when the human object he is painting moves a little bit. Now imagine the director, with his image in mind, and the actor, who, in no moment of a complex chain of actions, does what would be necessary to build a piece of art.

People didn’t want to work with Edvard Gordon Craig, his plans were too big, his views were too angry. He invented the movable stage screen and beautiful lights that would shine diagonally through an air full of chalk dust. He edited a theatre journal called “The Mask” of which he was the only author, which he camouflaged by using dozens of pseudonyms. He founded an acting school in Florence, but World War I put an early end to it. He worked with Stanislavski on a “Hamlet”, that is quite a thing. He is respected among stage designers. He is not among actors. Among them he is either unknown or dismissed or, as in the case of the superficial and non-specific but famous Lee Strasberg, superficially read and admired with blurry awe.

We don’t have too many written sources for acting, Edvard Gordon Craig has written about acting, he is among the few who have at least attempted first steps to systemize acting towards a theory, so why is he not on the bookshelves of the actors? Well, because he insulted them. He had great admiration for great actors like his artistic father, Henry Irving or his mother, the famous actress Ellen Terry. But bad acting, acting that wouldn’t compose the intended image of action, made him angry. And well, that means a lot of acting must have made him angry.

A thing that isn’t well understood in the field of acting is that the giants of those who tried to formulate acting technique were almost never actors and they were never acting teachers. They were directors. Stanislavski, Craig, Brecht, they were unique and exuberant artists themselves, they had their visions, and they developed the way they worked with the actors based on what they needed from the actors in order to tell what they wanted to make visible and audible with their overall performance. They didn’t need “expression” from the actors, they needed something specific. That is how they had to think and try hard, that is where their insights came from. A lot of damage has been done to the idea of acting by loosing that embedding in a higher artistic goal, in which the actor is only the servant, serving with his artistic individuality, for which he hopefully was chosen to take part in the artistic process, but clearly serving.

Craig came from the architecture, from the image, from the figure, from the image that says more than 1000 words. He needed actors that were 1. willing to 2. able to serve the art that was bigger than them. Many of them didn’t even want to. Gordon Craig invented an image, his “Über-Marionette”, a human-like figure, that could do acting in a way that it would allow to build great art and that would never not want to. “Übermarionette”= the actor + fire – egoism” was his formula. For the Über-Marionette it would always be out of question, that it would do what needed to be done to serve the higher goal. There would be no self-interest, it would surrender itself completely to the higher purpose. More so, it would, on contrary to the common actor, be able to serve the higher purpose. Neither its egoism nor its dysfunctions, for example in terms of non-controllable emotions would get into conflict with the higher goal. It would have control over its actions, control in the very basic cybernetic meaning of the word. His article about the Über-Marionette is from 1907. Looking back one could see him as a proto-cybernetician, in a line with Leibniz. The sad thing about that is, that in the rest of the 20th century, instead of building on that kernel, acting regressed back to blurry concepts like “dreams of passion”. I personally will never come over the fact that Lee Strasberg is more known than Edvard Gordon Craig.

The interesting thing is that he did not give up on the humans. He went a bit into puppetry, but not too much. He remained with the humans and there is actually no reason for actors to dislike him. He offered them an ideal, a goal worth striving for. But there might be a common pattern that the one who demands improvement from humans is easily perceived as opposed to humans. We don’t seem to like being addressed in our mediocracy. But acknowledging what is might be the only chance for starting to improve.

In doing art actually two things are built, of which the second one we usually don’t see: The work of art and the worker of art, who refines himself with every piece he produces. The question is: If doing acting as an art of behavioural self-control were an interesting opportunity for humans to improve themselves and therefore maybe a useful constituent of a flourishing human culture, what would be the sufficient conditions that people who would want to do that, could do that, even if a demand for the products they would create would, due to substitution by technology, be actually very low?

Let’s go back to the image of the Ancient Greek robots. I wrote that if these Ancient Greek theatre guys had had an Über-Marionette, they would probably have used it instead of the humans. But, as I promised, here comes the revision: maybe not. In the early stages of Greek theatre there were no professional actors. People were not trying to outsource the production to the most capable functional tools. That came, but it came later. In the beginning it was the most honourable citizens that wanted to act, invest their time and struggling and all of that, voluntarily. The egoism pointed out by Edvard Gordon Craig will for sure have played a role. We would probably call that narcissism today. But narcissism alone isn’t a guarantee for pleasing the audience and it isn’t sufficient to put a play on stage. There is work to be done, at least if you want to be able to compete with others. These Ancient Greek theatre guys obviously wanted to do the work and they wanted to stretch towards some ideal. They had to work on their processes of self-control that would enable them to do that work. They were not even paid (that also came later), there audience was not too big, they could win a prize but, as it is with prizes, mostly they didn’t. There must have been something intrinsically motivating. Could that have been the delight of the building of the worker during the building of the work? Could it be that this, the delight personally taken in  the building of oneself as the worker, is a nucleus of doing acting that has survived over 2500 years and is still intact today?

There are many aspects of theatre that people claim to be worth conserving which I actually don’t care for too much. I am not so sure if people used to gather in theatres because humans like gathering. To me it looks more so that they gathered because there was not yet a TV at home. It also doesn’t look much to me that people used to watch movies till the end because they wanted to watch them to the end. It looks more to me that people watched movies till the end because they couldn’t influence the plot. Consumer’s behaviour changed as soon as you could turn left on your way through the movie. There is a deep question behind that and that is, if humans will be happy, if, in the end, the user surface called their life is so optimally customized to their needs that they will never have to do something they don’t want. Probably not, so it might have to become part of an optimal user surface to add a degree of disturbance. But that is another discussion.

It does not make much sense to insist on that a way of doing art should continue to exist and this claim is never done by real artists of their time, because they have long moved where the real stuff happens. I am more interested in vital nuclei that empirically show up as survivors despite apparently huge changes all around. There is a claim behind that, and that is, that what functions in changing conditions does survive and that it might be human essential and worth to know what that is. 

In terms of the product, the work, we human actors cannot win the game. But, maybe, there are still the people, the honourable citizens, who want to do it, who want to act, who want to stretch towards the ideal, towards the achievement of self-control, serving the higher purpose of an overall theatre piece and reaching for their own personal Über-Marionette that, exactly for the reason that it will never be reached, offers endless resource for self-improvement. If yes, this can be easily done. We just have to go back to the Ancient Greek model.