Steiner's 1898 thesis that acting is a productive art in its own right: the actor transforms drama as the playwright transforms nature.
Definition
Acting as an Independent Art in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's thesis that the art of acting is productive, not reproductive: the actor stands to the written drama exactly as the playwright stands to nature, raising the text into a new artistic sphere with its own technical means. Steiner argued the position in 1898 in the Dramaturgische Blätter, the theatre journal he co-edited in Berlin, collected in Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Dramaturgie (Collected Essays on Dramaturgy, GA 29). Writing before his Anthroposophical period, he insisted that the performed stage work is a drama seen through the temperament of the director and the actors, and that even a single hand movement belongs to the style of the whole. The claim later flowered in the Goetheanum's stage work and in speech formation. Today the Michael Chekhov technique carries the same conviction into professional actor training worldwide.
Acting as an Independent Art names the position Steiner defended in his years as a Berlin theatre critic: the actor is not a servant who reproduces a script but an artist who creates with it. In the essay Das Unbedeutende (The Insignificant, 1898) he ranked no gesture as trivial, since every hand movement either serves or disturbs the completed style of the stage work.
In Steiner's Own Words
It is ridiculous to call the art of acting a reproductive art. Drama is for the true actor what reality, nature, is for the playwright. As productive as the dramatist is towards nature, so productive is the actor towards drama. He elevates the drama into a new, special artistic sphere. If the drama is a piece of nature, seen through the temperament of the playwright, then the performed stage work is a drama, seen through the temperament of the director and the actors. If we do not want to willfully lower the status of dramatic art, we must accept it as an independent art and reflect on its peculiar technical means, then it will present itself to us as an independent art that is similar to the other arts.
What it Means Today
The clearest modern carrier of this idea is the Michael Chekhov technique. Chekhov, nephew of the playwright Anton Chekhov and a leading actor of the Moscow Art Theatre's First Studio, embraced Steiner's work in the 1920s and rebuilt his craft on it, first at Dartington Hall in England from 1936, then in Ridgefield, Connecticut. His handbook To the Actor: On the Technique of Acting (1953) turns Steiner's claim into a working method. The psychological gesture at its centre assumes precisely what the 1898 essays argue: that a movement of the hand is never insignificant, and that the actor composes with gesture the way the playwright composes with plot. The Michael Chekhov Association (MICHA), founded in New York in 1999, still trains professional actors in the method, and Chekhov's students ranged from Yul Brynner, who wrote the preface to To the Actor, to Marilyn Monroe.
Thalira synthesis: Steiner's theatre criticism is the seed form of his later anthropology; the conviction that performance is productive prefigures his teaching that the human being is not a finished creation but an artist's material, and the stage was the first place he said so in public. Anyone who wants to test the term can watch a single scene twice, played by two casts, and ask what the second performance created that the first did not. Whatever answers that question is the independent art Steiner meant.
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