The Body Doesn't Lie

Or maybe it does, when we teach it badly

By Sergei Ostrenko

I am grateful to Indian student Jay Prakash Tiwari, whose thoughtful questions for his doctoral dissertation helped open the path to these reflections.

I used to say that the body doesn't lie. I don't say it so easily now.

The body lies all the time. It learns to lie. It learns to make beautiful shapes around emptiness. It learns to tremble without danger, pause without thought, collapse without loss. A trained body can lie better than an untrained one. That is one of the things nobody tells beginners, because it ruins the romance of training.

So perhaps the sentence should be uglier:

The unprotected body lies less.

Or: the body lies differently from the mind.

Or: the body exposes the lie eventually, if the teacher does not cover it too quickly with vocabulary.

I don't know. I keep changing the sentence.

What I know is this: the split between body and mind in actor training is not a philosophical problem. It is a classroom problem. A rehearsal problem. A problem you can see in the third hour, when the actor has understood everything and nothing has changed.

The actor says, “Yes, I understand the objective.” Then they do exactly the same thing again. Only now they do it with more intelligence. That is worse.

Stanislavski saw this, though many people who quote him still behave as if he didn’t. The early Stanislavski became too convenient: memory, feeling, inner justification, the actor digging downward in search of truth. It gave teachers something noble to talk about. It gave actors something private to protect.

The later work is less comfortable.

Do the action.

Not “feel more.” Not “find the sadness.” Not “connect to the wound.” Do the action. Under pressure. With resistance. With the body involved before the actor has time to decorate the intention.

This is the part that still embarrasses me, because I also ask for feelings sometimes. Not directly, perhaps. I am too educated for that. I say “the action is not charged enough” or “the stakes are not visible” or “you are not really fighting for it.” Very respectable phrases. But sometimes, underneath, I mean: please become more alive so I can stop worrying that this class is failing.

So I am not outside the problem. None of us are.

Meyerhold is where the problem becomes harder to evade. I can stay polite with Stanislavski. With Meyerhold I become unreasonable.

People reproduce the études as if they were antiques: Dactyl. The Slap. Leap onto the Chest.

Already the names are a trap. They make the work sound like a catalogue of brilliant Soviet physical tricks. Students love them because they are difficult enough to feel serious. Teachers love them because they produce visible discipline. Festival audiences love them because a line of actors moving sharply in unison still has an authoritarian glamour we pretend not to enjoy.

But the études are not the point.

Otkaz, posyl, tochka.

I know the translation. Preparation, sending, completion. It is correct and too clean.

Otkaz is the moment before the action when the body gives something up. Not psychologically. Physically. Balance, ease, neutrality, innocence. Something has already happened before anything has happened.

Posyl is not “sending energy.” God save us from sending energy. It is the action leaving the body with direction and consequence.

Tochka is not a decorative stop. It is where the action becomes accountable.

Accountable - that is the word I keep returning to. Maybe too much. I annoy myself with it.

An actor makes a gesture. Fine. To whom? From where? At what cost? What cannot remain the same after it lands?

It was Cecile. I should say her name, because otherwise the story becomes one of those useful teacher-stories that belong to nobody.

It was at NIPAI’s Berlin campus. I remember the room not as a beautiful rehearsal space but as a working room: the kind where the floor begins to matter after the first hour, where you hear the shoes before you hear the thought. She had been playing pain for days. Not badly. That was the irritating thing. She was good. She knew how to give us the signs: the tightened mouth, the lifted eyebrows, the small noble delay before speaking.

Then something went wrong.

I don’t mean “a breakthrough.” I don’t trust that word. It lets the teacher become important.

Something simply went wrong in the timing. Her body moved before her face was ready. For less than a second she had no expression prepared.

And there it was.

I should have stopped the room. I didn’t. I corrected her foot.

This still bothers me. Not because correcting the foot was wrong. It probably needed correcting. That is the stupid part. The correction may have been technically justified, and still it was a failure.

I saw the thing I claim to care about and continued teaching the exercise.

This is the kind of stupidity technique can produce. You start protecting the form from the event.

And once you do that, the room learns from you very quickly. Faster than from your words. You tell them presence matters, and then you reward alignment. You tell them truth matters, and then you correct the shape. Students are not stupid. They understand the real hierarchy.

This is why I am suspicious when people say biomechanics is about precision.

Yes, precision matters. Of course it matters. Without it, everything turns into expressive soup. But precision is not truth. Precision is only the place where the lie becomes easier to see.

A clean posyl can be dead. A messy one can be true. And then the next day the opposite happens, which is why teaching is humiliating.

The Indian material makes this even more uncomfortable, because it removes some of the West’s favourite drama about discovery.

The Nāṭyaśāstra did not need twentieth-century European crisis-language to understand that inner condition and physical manifestation are not separate departments. Sāttvika Abhinaya is not “showing emotion with the body.” That is too small. It points to a condition in which the signs appear because the state is real enough to disturb the body.

Tears, trembling, sweating, stillness, change of colour - not effects placed on top of feeling, but consequences.

This is difficult to discuss without sounding either colonial or devotional. I dislike both options.

The lazy Western move is to say: “Ah, look, this confirms Grotowski.” No. Maybe Grotowski confirms a question already asked elsewhere with more patience.

The other lazy move is to romanticize the East as if old traditions automatically solve what modern institutions have broken. They don’t. Traditions can also become dead, decorative, authoritarian, empty. A codified form can preserve knowledge. It can also preserve obedience after the knowledge has gone.

Still, the challenge remains. Somebody had already thought about this with terrifying seriousness. Long before our avant-garde discovered its own exhaustion.

That should change how we speak. It usually doesn’t.

Brook keeps getting in the way here. I try to remove him, and then I cannot, because the question matters even when I distrust the frame.

Is there a physical language beneath culture?

Twenty years ago I would have said yes too quickly. Now I pause.

I have seen “universal” used as a polite word for “legible to Europeans.” I have seen intercultural work where the Western artist travels, absorbs, arranges, and returns with a vocabulary of openness that somehow leaves the old hierarchy intact.

But I have also sat in rooms where actors from different countries understood each other physically before they understood the words. Weight, distance, threat, invitation, refusal — these things travel. Not untouched by culture. Nothing is untouched. But they travel.

So I don’t know what to do with Brook.

Maybe the useful part is not universality. Maybe the useful part is the question itself, if we ask it with less innocence.

And this is where Barba enters, whether I want him or not, because pre-expressivity gives a name to something I have seen too often to dismiss.

The performer before expression. The body already altered before it communicates role or narrative. Extra-daily balance. Organized energy. Presence before message.

Yes.

And yet.

I have watched students become very good at looking pre-expressive. The spine wakes up, the gaze sharpens, the feet become important, the pauses acquire weight. Everything says: trained performer.

Nothing says: necessity.

This is the place where my teaching splits against itself. I tell students that presence can be trained. I believe this. I must believe this, otherwise half of my work collapses.

Then I watch a student do every exercise correctly and remain absent. Then another student enters late, ashamed, carrying some stupid real-life irritation from the corridor, and for ten seconds the room changes.

So what was trained?

No, that’s not fair. The second student also had training. The accident could land because there was a body available to receive it. Without training it would only be mood. With training it became event.

Maybe that is the closest I can get.

Training does not create presence. Training prepares the body so that presence has somewhere to go.

That sounds too neat. I don’t fully trust it. Leave it for now.

Zarrilli understood something institutions still avoid: time is not a detail.

Kalaripayattu is not a metaphor for actor training. It is not an inspiring influence. It is practice. Daily, repeated, corrected, endured practice. The body reorganizes itself because it returns, not because the mind has grasped the concept of integration.

This is where schools lie most efficiently.

At NIPAI, too, we have had to translate living training into institutional language. Hours. Modules. Outcomes. Assessment. Evidence. Certificate wording. A clean educational structure around something that is not clean at all.

I have written that language. I know why it is necessary. I also know where it begins to lie.

Because yes, you can introduce principles in ten weeks. You can open a door. You can give students a vocabulary and a few experiences that may trouble them in a useful way.

But you cannot reorganize the actor’s body in ten weeks. Not deeply. Not honestly.

The institution wants the language of transformation with the calendar of administration. So we produce documents that make the impossible look well managed.

By week four the student will demonstrate embodied awareness.

No, they won’t. They may begin to notice that they do not have it. That would already be a serious result, but it sounds too modest for a brochure.

I am also tired of the word embodied.

I know, everyone is tired of someone being tired of a word. Still.

Embodied practice. Embodied cognition. Embodied pedagogy. Embodied research. After a while the word becomes a warm cloth thrown over weak thinking.

Where is the body? Whose body? How long did it train? Who corrected it? What did the correction cost? Did the person change the way they stand, or only the way they describe standing?

I read articles where “embodied” appears fifteen times and I cannot find one actual shoulder, one failed breath, one correction that made someone angry. Not always, of course. There is serious work. But there is also a lot of writing that approaches the body like a concept with limbs.

Less library, more studio - I used to say that. It is a good line, which is why I now distrust it.

The problem is not library versus studio. The problem is consequence. A book can have consequence. A studio can be vain. I have seen both.

But if you write about training and nothing in your own body has ever been reorganized by training, there should be some visible hesitation in the prose. Some limp. Some shame. Something.

Maybe this is ungenerous. I don’t care much today.

There was an actor who once did a Meyerhold sequence beautifully and falsely. I have already told versions of this story too many times, so now I don’t know what actually happened and what I have polished through repetition.

That is another problem with teaching stories. They become obedient.

The first time, the action was clean. The timing worked. The form was readable. I should have been pleased.

I wasn’t. The room wasn’t either.

The next day he did it worse. Tired, angry, probably bored with me. Less elegant. Less correct.

And suddenly the action had weight.

Not because anger is truth. Actors love that misunderstanding. “I felt something real, therefore it was good.” No. Most real feeling is theatrically useless. Private emotion can sit in the room like a wet coat.

But this was different. The action cost him something. It disturbed his wish to remain composed. It used the training against his self-image.

That may be what I mean by cost. I keep using that word because I have no better one.

What did the action cost the actor?

Balance? Speed? Dignity? Beauty? The right to be clever? The right to be liked? The right to remain hidden behind competence?

If nothing is lost, why should anyone watch?

This is not about suffering. I am not interested in suffering as proof. Theatre already has enough priests of suffering. I mean transaction. Something must be spent. The body must enter a condition from which it cannot return unchanged, even if the change is tiny.

A hand reaches.

Fine.

What has the hand risked?

A person turns away.

Fine.

What became impossible because of that turn?

There is something here about shame that I have not sorted out.

Not shame as humiliation. I don’t mean that. I don’t want actors humiliated. That old cruelty still disguises itself as rigor in too many rehearsal rooms. But there is a kind of shame that appears when the actor realizes the body has been pretending more efficiently than the mind. Not moral shame. Technical shame, maybe. The shame of being caught by your own gesture.

I don’t know what to do with that yet.

Because if you touch it badly, you damage the actor. If you avoid it completely, the actor keeps lying.

This is where most polite pedagogy goes soft. Mine too, sometimes.

I’ll leave this unfinished because I don’t know how to finish it without making it safer than it is.

This is why “physical acting” is such a bad phrase sometimes. It makes people think the body is the solution.

The body is not the solution. The body is where the problem becomes visible.

A body can lie through virtuosity. Through softness. Through violence. Through spiritual availability. Through perfect alignment. Through “presence,” whatever the student thinks that means this week.

Mind can lie too, obviously. That is its profession.

The work is not to choose body over mind. The work is to make the split less useful to the actor as an escape route.

When action, attention, thought, breath, resistance, and necessity become one event — not harmonized, not balanced, not beautifully integrated, just forced into the same room — then something begins.

Sometimes. Not reliably.

I wish it were reliable. I used to want a method that could guarantee it. A sequence. A progression. First this, then this, then presence.

Now I think the honest work is smaller and meaner.

Train the body so it has fewer excuses. Train attention so it cannot drift without being caught. Train action so expression has to answer to something. Build situations where the actor cannot easily admire themselves.

Remove a few lies. Not all. Never all.

And then wait, though “wait” sounds passive and it isn’t. It is active waiting. The kind where you are watching the actor, the room, the timing, the small falsehood that appears just before the interesting thing.

Some days nothing happens. Some days you correct the foot. And only later understand what you interrupted.

Sergei Ostrenko