In this section, I will attempt to flesh out the concept of proto-acting and describe its characteristic features compared to both everyday role playing and dramatic acting.
Table 1 serves as a guide for my discussion. As will be clear from the ensuing discussion, I propose the concept of proto-acting as an umbrella term for a very diverse set of phenomena that have, thus far, not been related to one another in any formal manner. Hence, the major goal of the article is to provide a unification for a large number of behaviors—both everyday behaviors and public performances—that involve some degree of character portrayal, even when this occurs very transiently. This has applications not only to cognitive and sociological models of human behavior, but to numerous forms of the performing arts outside of standard dramatic performance.
Whereas everyday role playing is generally about the self, proto-acting is about the “other”, just like dramatic acting. It can be thought of as the most fundamental form of character portrayal in human life. Proto-acting is a process of personal mimicry, and the characters being portrayed are very often familiar people, such as members of one’s social circle or contemporary celebrities, like media figures or politicians. Whereas dramatic character portrayal can be accomplished through either gestural or mentalistic means (
Wilshire 1982;
Konijn 2000;
Zarrilli 2009;
Kemp 2012;
Schechner 2013), proto-acting is firmly focused on the gestural features of the character, since it is principally a form of mimicry. By mimicry I am referring to the voluntary and intentional process of portraying someone during an act of communication, rather than to the involuntary gestural-imitation processes that underlie so-called chameleon effects during conversation, such as when someone unconsciously scratches their head immediately after their conversation partner does (
Chartrand and Bargh 1999).
Role changes can be frequent in proto-acting. For example, if a person describes a recent conversation with two friends by using a serial process of quotation (“And he said ‘I’m not going to that party’, and she was like ‘Oh yes you are’, and so I got frustrated and said ‘Would you two please make up your mind! Coming or going?’”), that person may alternate rapidly between the portrayed characters, as well as between the characters and himself. I label this process as “auto-dialogue” in
Table 1. By this I mean a dialogue conveyed by a single person, as in the example just mentioned here where one person, through serial quotation, speaks the lines of two other people in addition to himself. Mimicry during conversation might even be done for entertainment purposes by invoking the features of a well-known person. For example, in responding to a question about how my day went, I might say “It started out pretty well but ended in a very very bad way” where the phrase “very very bad” was uttered using the voice and gestures of Donald Trump, followed by a return to my regular voice.
The comparable situation of role change for everyday role playing would require that a person switch from one social scenario to another. This would tend to happen on a much slower time scale than the example just mentioned of the conveyance of a conversation using serial quotation. The comparable situation for dramatic role playing is that an actor portrays a single character for an extended period of time and does not come out of character (at least not to the audience) until a performance is over. In other words, there is no alternation between the character and oneself during a performance, which contrasts strongly with proto-acting forms like impressionism or ventriloquism (discussed below), in which there is frequent alternation between oneself and different characters.
Contexts and Forms
What are the contexts and principal forms of proto-acting? Whereas everyday role playing occurs in quotidian contexts, and dramatic acting occurs in the context of public performance, proto-acting straddles the divide between everyday situations and performance contexts.
Figure 2 presents a list of some of the major forms of proto-acting, divided into everyday, performance, and religious forms. The principal everyday form of proto-acting is storytelling. This includes the already-mentioned forms of serial quotation (auto-dialogue) and gestural mimicry that occur quite routinely during conversation. Another form occurs when adults read fairy tales to children. It is quite common for a person to impersonate the characters during moments of dialogue or self-thought. Given that most stories have multiple characters who engage in dialogue with one another, proto-acting during story reading requires rapid and abrupt alternation between contrastive characters, a phenomenon with no counterpart in dramatic acting but that shows similarities to serial quotation in conversation. A well-known example is the following passage from
Goldilocks and the Three Bears:
- ∙
“Somebody’s been eating my porridge,” said Father Bear.
- ∙
“Somebody’s been eating MY porridge,” said Mother Bear.
- ∙
“Somebody’s been eating MY porridge and it’s all gone!” said Baby Bear.
An engaging storyteller would use a low-pitched voice for Father Bear, a mid-pitched voice for Mother Bear, and a high-pitched voice for Baby Bear. The same thing would occur if a person were dressed as the character of Father Bear at a Halloween party. The person might speak in his normal conversational voice during much of the party, but then break into the Father Bear voice from time to time as a form of proto-acting that accompanies the prop of the costume.
Next,
Figure 2 lists pretend play in children as another everyday form of proto-acting (
Walton 1990;
Lillard 1996;
Harris 2000), which I see as the ontogenetic precursor of improvisational acting in adults, mentioned below as a performance form of proto-acting. Unlike proto-acting forms such as quotation in conversation, the character portrayal that occurs during pretend play can span an extended period of time, where each child makes a commitment to a single character. Props are commonly involved in pretend play. One interesting prop that I would like to highlight is the use of a doll or stuffed animal as the child’s interaction partner. While pretend play often involves two children engaged in a dialogue, it can also involve one child interacting with an inanimate object (or a group of them) which becomes personified by the child, for example a teddy bear who is the guest at a young girl’s tea party. This form of proto-acting not only involves role playing (e.g., the girl playing the role of the hostess of the party), but a process of “animation” and/or “personification” of inanimate objects. This latter might serve as a developmental precursor of religious ideas about the animacy and agency of idols and other inanimate objects (
Harvey 2006). Hence, in parallel with role playing per se, we see personification as another component of some forms of proto-acting. Adults too can engage in pretend play, for example fantasy role playing among romantic partners (e.g., husband as delivery man, or wife as naughty nurse). Another everyday context for proto-acting would be the uses of role playing in therapeutic contexts, most notably psychodrama and sociodrama (
D’Amato and Dean 1988;
Kipper and Ritchie 2003).
The last thing I list in this part of
Figure 2 is a recent surge of interest in role-playing-based games, including board games, live action role-play (LARP) games, and massively multiplayer online role playing games (MMORPGs) (
Tychsen et al. 2006;
Hitchens and Drachen 2009;
Leménager et al. 2014;
Shulman 2017). They differ from one another in that board games and LARPs take place in the physical world, while MMORPGs take place in a virtual world. Hence, while LARPs involve overt role playing by the player, MMORPGs may not involve direct acting by the gamer, but instead a type of vicarious acting by means of an avatar. All of the acting is channeled into the avatar, rather than into one’s own voice and body. To the extent that people associate themselves to these characters, this practice is a form of role playing. Moreover, it is most likely a vicarious form of proto-acting.
Moving on now to look at the performance types of proto-acting listed in
Figure 2, professional storytelling is a common form. Practitioners include not only those individuals who perform at storytelling evenings, but stand-up comedians, who often use auto-dialogue in conveying their personal stories (e.g., a conversation between the comedian and his ex-girlfriend). Impressionism is another interesting form, where an impressionist engages in short bouts of portrayal of multiple characters, doing so in alternation with a return to oneself. Voice actors, such as Mel Blanc, often have to alternate in real-time among numerous characters, such as when Bugs Bunny converses with Daffy Duck in cartoons. Likewise, a ventriloquist undergoes rapid and abrupt alternations between the self and a character through an unusual kind of auto-dialogue with the dummy. In all of these situations, the performers have to rapidly disengage from one character and seamlessly transition to another character, with virtually no carry-over from the previous character.
I would put improvisational acting in this category as well, since there is not the same type of commitment to a character as in dramatic acting, and since the actors tend to engage in short, unscripted bouts of character portrayal no longer than the length of a skit. The same would apply to sketch actors who perform scripted sketches, as these are typically only several minutes in duration. I might even include fashion models in this category, since “striking a pose”, either on a runway or during a photo shoot, might be a simple form of character portrayal. Finally, I would put mime theatre here, although character portrayal in pantomime is often indeterminate. Mime theatre is unquestionably a rich example of personal mimicry, but the problem relates to identifying who is the self and who is the character in pantomime theatre, if there indeed is a self. In other words, it is not always clear what is first-person vs. third-person in the mime’s actions. Mime theatre often plays out as short segments of actions, punctuated by a return to some baseline condition, be it the self or some baseline character. Interestingly, the historical record indicates that pantomime was one of the earliest forms of theatrical acting, in which a single masked dancer performed multiple roles. In ancient Greece, the
pantomimos performed “all the important roles in each story, changing his mask for each one; this was how he derived his name as the one who mimed all (
panta) the roles or ‘everything in the story’” (
Hall 2009, p. 3). This again reflects a key feature of many forms of proto-acting, namely frequent role changes by a single person, in this case accompanied by the ancient prop of the mask.
The last items listed in
Figure 2 are religious applications of the proto-acting concept. In possession trance, a person becomes possessed by a god or spirit, often in the context of an initiation rite (
Rouget 1985). It would probably be insulting to practitioners of these rites to call this a form of acting. However, it might actually be a form of proto-acting, in which a character takes over the self. Given the fact that possession rituals can be as long as, if not much longer than, dramatic performances, possession trance does not fit the pattern of short bouts of character portrayal that other proposed forms of proto-acting do. However, to the extent that the person undergoes a temporary process of transformation, it does fit the pattern of proto-acting.
Finally, personal prayer in many world religions, especially the Abrahamic religions, takes a form not very different from the one mentioned above of a young girl hosting a tea party with a teddy bear. An interaction is established between the praying person and a non-human—though often personified—partner. While this interaction may be purely monologic, some people report hearing their god speak back to them as well, just as the young girl might imagine the teddy bear making a request for more tea. Hence, to the extent that there might be an auto-dialogue taking place in personal prayer, I would classify it as a loose form of proto-acting.
Having explored the contexts and formats of proto-acting, we can now return to the last rows of
Table 1 and consider that proto-acting often consists of short bouts of character portrayal, is generally unscripted, and can sometimes make use of props (as in costume parties, children’s pretend play, and ventriloquism). To summarize this section, proto-acting is a process of character portrayal that occurs via personal mimicry, generally of familiar contemporaneous people, often involving short bouts of unscripted, prop-less alternation between a character and oneself. There are many exceptions to this definition, and
Table 1 and
Figure 2 provide a means of showing not only the general nature but also the wide diversity of forms of proto-acting.