On September 22, 2024 social media circulated unexpected news that versatile actor, social activist, and author W. Jayasiri had passed away. W. Jayasiri intended to see a change in the current political system, which has been corrupted and spoiled for nearly eight decades. Jayasiri was a supporter of democratic social transformations and a man who believed in a fair and just society. He cast his vote and said goodbye to us.
Seilama
Jayasiri developed his acting career through his close encounters with a group of people in the 1960s, including Dharmasena Pathiraja, Thilak Jayaratne, and Sugathapala de Silva. Jayasiri first stepped into Sri Lankan theatre in the early 1960s with post-independence avant-garde theatre group Ape Kattiya led by Sugathapala de Silva. As a graduate of the University of Colombo, he started working with Dharmasena Pathiraja and supported him to produce his films, first as an assistant director, then as an actor and also a songwriter.
The importance of Jayasiri as an actor and his contribution in the Sinhala-speaking Sri Lankan theatre was immense. I want to discuss and theorise how the voice contributes to generating emotions in theatre acting. The argument is that Jayasiri is an actor who used his voice and non-emotional display of his face to portray deeper characteristics of the roles he played. His theatre and filmography depict this vocal manifestation of character portrayal and further problematise the idea of emotional display of acting through facial expressions.
Emotion and expression
In the Asian aesthetic theory, the emotional display of acting and dance is vital for the performer to engage with the audience member. Various emotions categorised by the Nātyashāstra are identified as key task emotions to be displayed by the actor/dancer during a performance. Despite the complexity of rasa theory and emotions in the Nātyashāstra, current understanding of emotions has come from the misconception that the actor’s task is to display emotions felt in the inner core and expressed through the facial and physical means.It is believed that the actor’s emotions are generated in the inner core and expressed through the body (face).
Visidela
The actor’s emotional engagement in acting was first theorised by French philosopher Denis Diderot. Dederot’s famous treaty, Paradox of Acting (Paradoxe sur le Comdéian), intended to articulate a theory of acting and argued that the actor should not be engaged with the emotion when portraying a character.
This is the paradox that Diderot argued in theorising acting based on his observation of the famous English actor David Garrick. Diderot believed that the artist creates an illusion of nature. He (the artist) does this by selecting details through observation or memory, recombining them in his imagination, and then finally expressing them in the materials of his chosen medium’
Paradox of emotion
In his book, Acting Emotions: Shaping Emotion on Stage, Elly A. Konijn discusses the American dominance of psychological acting and its profound effect on contemporary acting theory. In American theatre and film, the psychological dominance was prominent. Early Hollywood actors were trained by Lee Strasburg and his collaborators to develop a mind-centric actor training system that is widely known as the American Method. Accordingly, in this method, emotion creates action, action creates character, and character creates theatre.
The key assumption of this formula is that the actor possesses emotional content within her/himself and during a performance, this emotional content is stimulated to bring out the expressions to the fore. However, Konijin further complicates the argument. ‘Emotional things happen, yes. But not emotional identification with the character. At least not in performance – briefly in rehearsal, maybe – but not live in front of an audience’
As an actor who worked in the Sri Lankan Sinhala speaking theatre for decades and films, Jayasiri has demonstrated how he crafted his acting through his voice to create the power of emotion and presence on stage. This power of voice and its tonality attracted people who gathered at the theater and conjured the emotional contents to engage with his performance. What I see in him as an actor is that he has a powerful face and a deep voice that combine together to attract his audience members. His face, when he performs on stage or screen, never demonstrates emotions or ‘bhava’ but is an empty slate where his voice brings the emotional content of his character to engage with his audience.
Pranavayu as emotion
Marasad
It is evident that much of the discussion about acting and actors is limited to their emotional engagement and how they portray characters. The discussion about how actors use their voice and tonalities to pursue audiences is a marginal discussion in the current scholarship. However, if one digs into the history of acting and actors’ work in the Greek and Roman eras, the main concern about acting was the rhetor’s delivery and vocal capacities. Aristotle, in his Poetics, dedicated a few sections to discuss the importance of delivery, diction, and voice of the actor. He wrote:
It is essentially, a matter of the right management of the voice to express the various emotions – of speaking loudly, softly, or between the two; of high, low or intermediate pitch; of the various rhythms that suites various subjects
Aristotle’s emphasis on the right management of the voice and its connection with the right management of emotion reveals how the voice carries the emotions. He has seen the direct connection between the actor’s emotions and her/his voice and delivery.
Similarly, Marcus Fabius Quintalian, the Roman orator and teacher, emphasized the importance of the orator’s voice and his gestures. In his treaty titled Institutes of Oratory, he argued, ‘Whenever he has to raise his voice, the effort may be that of his lungs and not of his head; that his gesture may be suited to his voice, and his looks to his gesture’.
As Asian dramatic theory and yoga exclaim, pranavayu (living breath) has a connection to the emotional content of the person. Phillip Zarrilli discusses Indian acting theories and their prominence in the vibratory theories of sound. In this vibratory theory, pranavayu, or wind humour plays a key role in awakening one’s inner energy (kundalini Shakti). This pranavayu animates the inner energy and carries it through the spinal chord by animating the physicality and voicing .
12 Angry men
As the Asian theory of acting suggests, the key to a successful execution of acting is to tap into the actor’s breath energy, which will support the actor in finding the correct voice and bodily posture. Jayasiri’s acting demonstrates such techniques employed in his acting career. Jayasiri’s voice dominates the ambiance of the theatre space and his voice power elevates the audience’s experience of space and the actor’s presence. As Erika Fitcher-Lichte argues, a performance space is never a space for seeing things (theatron), but a place for hearing (auditorium).
In theatre, sound creates spatiality and vocality creates physicality . As Fischer-Lichte shows us, the actor’s vocal work creates three types of materiality in theatre: physicality, spatiality, and tonality (ibid.). If I apply this to Jayasiri’s voice and his vocal work on stage, his voice creates these three types of physicality that penetrates the bodies of the audience. The audience experiences the creation of the spatiality through his voice that resonates in the architectural space of the theatre. The tonality of his voice ignites the emotional contents of the audience. In this sense, Jayasiri’s voice is a unique apparatus of his acting craft, which deepens the theatrical experience beyond text and language.
Vocal work
I have discussed the importance of vocal work in acting and how the voice connects to the generation of emotions in the actor’s art. I extended this discussion to show how W. Jayasiri was a unique actor in the Sri Lankan Sinhala-speaking theatre whose voice and tonality stand out as the acting presence of the roles he enacted on stage. It is a rare and unique quality that an actor possesses who dominates theatre and screen. Jayasiri hypnotised his theatergoers through his voice and his delivery of lines to portray the complex emotions and inner drives of the character he portrayed. Jayasiri’s enacted task emotions are portrayed through his voice, revealing the connection between emotions and the human voice.
About the Author
Saumya Liyanage is professor in Drama and Theatre, currently working at the Dept. of Theatre Ballet and Modern Dance, Faculty of Dance and Drama, University of the Visual and Performing Arts, Colombo, Sri Lanka. Email: [email protected]
