Uncontrolled Habits: Delsarte's System of Expression

Monica Huerta introduces us to François Delsarte’s method of performance instruction, which was known and studied on both sides of the Atlantic even before its American publication. Practitioners of Delsarte’s System of... [ view full abstract ]

Monica Huerta introduces us to François Delsarte’s method of performance instruction, which was known and studied on both sides of the Atlantic even before its American publication. Practitioners of Delsarte’s System of Expression were not limited to actors and actresses; as many as eighty percent of its students were educated, middle-class women with no formal theatrical affiliations. Delsarte’s system, then, points toward intriguing interconnections between social performance and theatrical performance at the turn of the twentieth century. Delsarte’s text understood the actions of actors in terms of an intricate interaction between muscles and nerve-force, not as the pure expression of either emotional content or active volition in the moment of performance. Huerta analyzes Delsarte’s System of Expression for the ways in which his “training” exercises – studied repetitions of incremental movements of specific parts of the body – nonetheless anticipate the limitations of the actor (or the lady at a party) to will themselves into a perfect performance. This was a new sense of a body that could be habituated into expressions, and habituated precisely in order to anticipate how the will was not enough to ensure those expressions were convincing.