The Aesthetics of Shaping the Actor’s Identity in Theatrical Performance

Abstract

The actor’s identity in theatre emerges as an ambivalent space in which the subjective intersects with the objective, and the authentic confronts the constructed. Performance thus ceases to be a mere enactment of a scripted character; rather, it becomes an act that unveils the latent social and cultural structures embedded within the performer’s being. The body, bearing its accumulated memory; the voice, resonant with layered significations; and emotion, charged with lived experience—all are transformed into reflective surfaces that disclose strata of identity extending beyond the limits of the text, exposing the human presence in its most intense manifestations upon the stage.

This study does not approach performance as a purely technical mechanism; instead, it examines it as an existential practice that interrogates the relationship between actor and role. It explores the moment in which the private permeates the collective, and individual experience is inscribed within the dramatic structure. In this sense, theatre does not merely reproduce the textual character within the discourse of performance; it simultaneously reconstitutes the actor, who oscillates between fusion and detachment, between immersion and estrangement, generating a third identity—one that neither wholly belongs to the self nor is entirely dissolved into the character.

From this perspective, the research offers a critical reading of theatrical performance as a philosophical field that reveals a persistent tension between the individual and the collective, between the references the actor carries from everyday life and the formal demands of the dramatic text. It affirms that identity in theatrical performance is not a fixed given but a dynamic process, continually reshaped on stage in each moment of the theatrical event.