Skådespelarens praktiska kunskap

Summary
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Skådespelarens praktiska kunskap – Maria Johansson
The basis of this dissertation is my own experience as an actor. I have shared parts of this
experience as well as some of the questions that have arisen through my active years with a
group of professional actors with different backgrounds and levels of experience. The ensuing
discussion is analysed through four main sections, entitled: intuition, courage, anecdotes, the
creative process. The main thesis is that the actors’ knowledge is embodied and based on
situation.
In the first chapter I try to describe my path toward becoming an actor. It starts with my own
experience of being a child-actor in television and film and leads on to my education and my
becoming a professional actor. What to me as a child seemed to be concrete and simple in
many ways changed through the years. My experience of acting as a teenager in a drama-class
in school, combined with my work as a dresser at the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm,
had created a desire for acting as well as a great interest in the actor as a person. When I
entered the Stockholm academy of dramatic arts, things started to change. What I had
believed to be the art of emotions and expression seemed to be the art of calculation. The
central teaching-theory at this time was called “The Penka method”. This method had roots in
the theories of both Konstantin Stanislavskij and Bertolt Brecht. One central part of the
method was the questions every actor had to ask him or herself while working with a
character. It was called “The five W:s”. Who am I? Where am I? Why am I here? What time
is it? What do I want? These questions were then combined with a careful, thorough and
conscious awareness of the turning points development of the character and the play. Our
teachers focused strictly on the method and its regulated use while we as students constantly
struggled with transforming these rules into something more common, physical and, for us,
workable. This later proved to be not just the struggle of students, but a constant principle for
the actor; theories and methods are useful only if they allow themselves to change with the
situation.
The actors in my reference group eschewed a fixed method, and considered themselves to
work better without one. They were all sceptical towards theories imposed on them by other
people. Of course, in a manner every actor works with a method of their own, but what these
actors stressed was the importance of being adaptable. Every new production means a new
play, different people to work with; it becomes a universe of its own. The actor relies on
his/her previous experience and preference but has to adapt actively to the collective work
process that each production represents. At the same time the actor is aware that s/he is the