Representation and the Internal View of the Instruments of Scenic Creation

The actor, through his/her memories, images and own representations, will confer the perfect resonance to his/her gestures and scenic actions. Linked to the performance, the representation, the mental images and the internal view give life, uniqueness, beauty and truthfulness to the part, construct the scenic imagery in an expressive and original manner. The actor, in his/her creation, uses on one hand his/her memory (sensorial, visual, auditive, gustatory, olfactive, kinesthetic, imagistic, voluntarily cognitive, involuntary and affective) and his/her past experiences and, on the other hand, sensations, perceptions, representations and reproductive imagination. Memory and imagination, the representations and mental images, thus become primordial tools in scenic creation, having the extraordinary power of updating on an intuitive level, relevant and significative, the actor’s experiences. If through memory the actor has the possibility of reproducing, evoking and experiencing sound, image, situations, spaces, circumstances and relations from his/her prior experience, through representations, images and his/her reproductive memory, he/she detaches him/herself from this concrete reality and is able to create a new world, imaginary and fantastic. The actor has to be aware of the tools he/she works with, has to develop his/her flexibility and the mobility of his/her imagination through the reconstruction and recombination of certain representations, by elaborating images: evoking an image, studying it in detail, completing, developing and direct influence of the image through subtle intervention, suggestion and collaboration, as to incorporate it in his/her scenic performance.

Against the Sartrean Background: Ricoeur’s Lectures on Imagination

The paper addresses Ricoeur’s critique of Sartre in light of Ricoeur’s unpublished Lectures on Imagination. I argue that Ricoeur’s critique is twofold: hermeneutical and phenomenological. The hermeneutical critique relies on two central claims, namely, that Sartre fails to distinguish productive and reproductive imagination and that this distinction is language-based. I argue that neither claim is justified. The phenomenological critique casts doubts on Sartre’s sharp distinction between the real and the imaginary. It relies on Ricoeur’s phenomenology of painting, which offers an alternative way to distinguish productive and reproductive imagination. In place of a conclusion, I inquire into the reasons why Ricoeur, who considers imagination a theme of central philosophical importance, never wrote a separate book on imagination. I maintain that the reasons are methodological: the phenomenological and hermeneutical approaches to imagination are irreconcilable since the first one relies on the primacy of pre-predicative experience, while the second one is based on the primacy of language.