Abstract
This work is a meditation on
kabbalah and theatre. It engages with theoretical, methodological and
anthropological aspects of practice and performance theories as they are rooted
in active performance that encourages social change. This is a conceptual
exploration of kabbalah and theatre which aims to verify the assumption that it
is possible to extract a psychophysical training/acting system out of the
kabbalah. By constantly juxtaposing kabbalah with theatre as a way to reveal
the shared concepts they possess, this work hopes to demonstrate that a
progression into a practice-based examination is feasible.
A psychophysical understanding of
the sfirot (emanations) is key to any future attempts at extracting a
kabbalistic psychophysical approach to actor training. Consequently, the sfirot
are used as a point of departure from which two cyclical prototypes emanate.
Both the “Body-Soul” prototype and the “Language” prototype stem out from the
comprehensive cycle of “nothing-something-nothing” which this work supposes to
be the core of Beckettian plays, psychophysical actor training approaches and
the kabbalah.
