Paradigms of education in the art of acting

Cătălin Codreanu

Authors

Cătălin Codreanu Faculty of Theare and Film, Babeș-Bolyai University, Romania

Abstract

Embedded in interculturality and transculturality, this paper focuses on the actor’s training, on facing, understanding and assimilating the theater lessons of the Far East, especially those of the Nō theater, based on the constructive encounters with them by practicing the Tadashi Suzuki (b. 1939) method, Japanese martial arts, researching Zen philosophy and the writings of Zeami Motokiyo (1363-1443). This article points out the similarity between certain paradigms of the Western theatricality with those of the Far Eastern one (holism, body-mind, now and here, flow, imaginary) as well as their fusion with other paradigms due to the interdisciplinary transfer existing between martial arts (aikidō and iaidō), Japanese culture, and the art of acting (shin-waza-tai, shoshin, ichigo ichie). The way in which fixed forms relate to imagination (kata), specific to both Far Eastern theater and martial arts (aikidō and iaidō), is also very important. This research highlights the essential nature of the fixed form for the impulses of imagination and creative freedom.

Author Biography

Cătălin Codreanu, Faculty of Theare and Film, Babeș-Bolyai University, Romania

CĂTĂLIN CODREANU, PhD, is an actor at the “Lucian Blaga” National Theatre and a professor specialized in acting, martial arts, fencing. His area of research focuses on interculturality, transculturality, Eurasian theater. He is interested in both traditional Japanese theatrical forms, especially Nō theater, but also contemporary ones, like the Tadashi Suzuki method. He is a practitioner of the Japanese martial arts aikidō and iaidō. These concerns are reflected in his doctoral dissertation The influence of the Japanese Nō theater on the training methods and techniques in the art of acting. The paradigms of his teaching practice were first and foremost Zeami’s poetics and poetry, the Tadashi Suzuki method, and the interdisciplinary transfer between Japanese martial arts (aikidō and iaidō)
and the art of acting.