Институционалният натиск върху актьорското тяло

Abstract

The article shows how the figure of the actor, legitimately bridging the fictional and the real world according to the theatrical convention, becomes a focus of the aesthetic experience (the methods of acting before and aft
er 1944), the biographical experience (living through the communist coup d’êtat in 1944 and its aftermath), and the institutional discourse attempting to ideologically embrace and master the former. The actor’s biographical body is regarded as a relation between the aesthetic experience and the actor’s behaviour beyond the stage in order to explore how the newly
constructed communist institutional discourse exerts direct pressure on the actor’s body and makes it adapt. Based on Roland Barthes’ idea of the body as a ‘sum of bodies’ (The pleasure of the text) the chapter analyses the ‘Stamatov case’ of 1951 using the minutes of the general assembly of the National Theatre that ostracised Stamatov. The analysis demonstrates how the new disciplining practices of the communist regime imposed a paradigm, which formed another type of institutional body and called for a change in the cultivation of the body for the stage.