Beckett and his actor’s pedagogy: Exhaustion practices

Abstract

Samuel Beckett’s writings invite the actor to discover unsuspected places in himself. They can be seen as maps that indicate ways of being/doing or, in other words, modes of subjectivation that “mess up” our most immediate ideas/practices of individual, subject, personality, and therefore actor/acting and training of actors. The issue involves new relations among textuality, orality, corporeality, and subjectivation. In this sense, Beckett can be seen as someone that developed an actor’s pedagogy (even though very sui generis). His texts can be thought of as pedagogical, since they teach/call upon “another” way of acting: multiple, dismembered, failed, erased, extremely self-conscious, and which, at the same time, finds it “joyful not to have established what it is with the least degree of accuracy”. One of the central questions of this beckettian pedagogy could be: how to train the actor without producing an individualist reification? How to train him promoting – or starting from – new modes of subjectivation?