I once had the good fortune to hear Peter Brook, the well-known English theater director, discuss his autobiography at the National Theater in London. Someone asked “How do you feel about being cited as the director with the most luck in realizing the famous Stanislawsky method?” Brook’s answer was an epiphany for me. He said that he didn’t set out to realize a theory. The doing had to come first, and then he read the theoretical sources and recognized his own experiences in them. Brook suggested that theory is useless for someone who is not actively practicing whatever craft that theory is trying to describe, but if you come back to the theory after practical experience, then the theory becomes a mirror of your experience and you can begin to use that theory as a guide to further development.

What Brook described so eloquently was his experience of a dialectical process between theory and practice. The human body and the phenomenology of acting change relatively little over time, but to understand those phenomena, you have to begin acting without knowing all of the answers beforehand. You learn the craft of physical acting by engaging in it. But once you take that first step, you start to learn the physical language in which the theories are engaged. Only then can there be eureka moments when you recognize an idea in a theoretical source from your own experience. A dialectical process has begun, going back and forth between physical practice and theoretical source, until that theory is no longer helpful for your own artistic growth.

The physical practice of acting can be described as tacit knowledge: a body of physical knowledge that develops through the repetition and refinement of nonverbalized practical skills. This term, originally used by Michael Polanyi, the British chemist and philosopher, who among other things researched reaction kinetics, can apply to any kind of process that the body can carry out without completely understanding consciously what it is doing.