Steiner's name for complete self-renunciation on stage: the actor stops being himself and lets the role, built from the whole play, speak through him.
The Actor's Art of Transformation in Anthroposophy is the capacity of the true actor to renounce his own personality completely so that another being can speak through him. Rudolf Steiner worked out the idea in his drama criticism of the 1890s, collected in Collected Essays on Drama 1889-1900 (GA 29), above all in an 1896 review of Dr. Wüllner's Othello at the Court Theater in Weimar. The genuine actor renounces being himself, puts aside his own nature, and creates the role out of the whole of the play. Steiner set this against Schablone acting, the template that forces every individual character into stock figures such as the schemer or the naive. Shakespeare is his archetype, the true chameleon who speaks to us only in roles, as Hamlet, as Lear, as Othello. Actor training in the Stanislavski and Michael Chekhov lineage still rests on exactly this power of self-renunciation.
For Steiner, the actor's art of transformation begins where the private self ends. In his Weimar and Berlin years as a drama critic he judged every performance by one measure: does the actor step aside so the character can appear, or does he show us himself in costume? The power he named Selbstentäußerung, self-renunciation, separates the true actor from the technician, and Shakespeare stood before him as its purest case.
In Steiner's Own Words
It is part of the essence of such a nature that it can, with complete denial of its own personality, immerse itself in other characters. The actor renounces being himself. He is given the opportunity to speak out of other beings. And the more malleable, the more transformable he is, the more of an actor he is. It has a deeply symbolic meaning that we know next to nothing about Shakespeare as a person. What is he to us as a person? He does not speak to us as a person; he speaks to us in roles. He is the true chameleon. He speaks to us as Hamlet, as Lear, as Othello. Shakespeare plays theater, even when he writes plays.
What it Means Today
Two years after Steiner reviewed that Weimar Othello, in 1898, Konstantin Stanislavski and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko founded the Moscow Art Theatre, and the battle Steiner had been fighting in print became the founding program of modern actor training. Stanislavski's art of experiencing, set out in An Actor Prepares (published in English in 1936), asks the actor to live the role from within; his name for the enemy was the shtamp, the rubber stamp, the ready-made gesture of grief or jealousy pulled from stock. Steiner's Schablone and Stanislavski's shtamp describe the identical failure, observed independently in Weimar and Moscow within the same decade. The lineage then loops back into anthroposophy through Michael Chekhov, Stanislavski's most gifted student, who joined the Anthroposophical Society, brought Steiner's speech work into his studio at Dartington Hall in the 1930s, and condensed his method in To the Actor (1953). Chekhov's central instruction, that the actor build an imaginary body for the character and step into it, is a practical exercise in the self-renunciation Steiner described in 1896. The Thalira synthesis: the actor's transformation is the I rehearsing its own highest discipline, holding itself so still that another being can borrow the body, which is why Steiner treated a theater review as a study in the mobility of the self.
The distinction can be tested from any seat in any theater. Watch whether the grief on stage looks like this particular person grieving, or like grief in general. The general version is the template; the particular one is transformation.
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