Archetype Work gives an actor a way to explore different physical, vocal, emotional, and imaginative states of being. You can develop a more varied library of qualities for your work: different rhythms, values, attitudes, voices, relationships, and ways of occupying the world.
The aim is practical. A role may require a point of view you understand as an idea but cannot yet experience imaginatively. Another may ask for tenderness, authority, playfulness, or impersonal precision that your ordinary persona rarely allows. Archetype Work provides one route for investigating those possibilities.
In Jason Bennett Actors Studio, JBAS training, it is a plug-in to acting craft. It belongs alongside script analysis, sensory process, imaging, externals, improvisation, rehearsal, and the obligations of performance. It is not the whole acting process.
What the terms mean here
An archetype, as the term is used in this teaching approach, is a recognizable pattern or way of being that you can explore through imagination, body, voice, feeling, and point of view. A nurturer, a critic, a warrior, a playful child, or a ruler may each make different qualities available.
The labels are starting points. They are not fixed character recipes or a map of separate anatomical compartments in the brain. “Warrior” does not tell you everything about a person, and two actors may experience that image very differently.
Archetype facilitation is a guided exploration of such qualities. The facilitator helps you notice how a way of being expresses itself and what happens when you experience it more fully. You also need opportunities to step back, reflect, and choose how to use what you discover.
The Psychology of Selves and Voice Dialogue, developed by Hal and Sidra Stone, are important sources for this work. Voice Dialogue has its own method and the related Aware Ego Process. My application to actor training draws on that lineage while serving the particular task of preparing and performing a role. Not every exercise involving a character or an inner part is Voice Dialogue.
Familiar selves and less familiar possibilities
Consider how differently you may behave on a first date, at work, with a parent, or among old friends. Different capacities, habits, and ways of attending can become prominent in different relationships.
The Psychology of Selves uses “primary selves” for ways of being with which a person is strongly identified. “Disowned selves” names less accepted or excluded possibilities within the model. These concepts give an actor a way to ask questions about habitual range.
Perhaps you were rewarded for smiling and thinking logically. Those capacities may have become important parts of how you present yourself. Perhaps direct anger, silliness, vulnerability, or a willingness to receive help was discouraged. The familiar qualities may be highly useful while other possibilities remain difficult to explore.
The actor's task is not to condemn the familiar self. It is to develop more choice. You can value your discipline and also investigate play. You can value your warmth and also explore distance, authority, or reserve.
Imagine Susan, who is detached, logical, perfectionistic, and absorbed in work. An actor exploring that pattern might also investigate warmth, intuition, vulnerability, and a capacity to rest. These are imaginative possibilities to test, not a diagnosis of every person who works hard.
For a role, you need to respond to imaginary circumstances as well as the situations that already bring out different parts of you in daily life. Training can help make the unfamiliar more available.
Judgment can become a question
When you strongly judge a character, ask what quality you are finding difficult to encounter. Is it cruelty, dependence, pride, sexual freedom, restraint, ambition, or a belief you reject? What would it take to imagine the character's experience without approving the behavior?
We can explore judgment and attraction through primary and disowned selves. That can be a useful lens. It should remain a question, rather than a rule that every person you dislike secretly represents a rejected part of you. Sometimes a judgment concerns actual harmful behavior. An acting exercise does not remove your right to recognize it.
Similarly, attraction may help you notice a quality you would like to develop, but it does not prove a predetermined psychological mechanism. For performance, the useful test is what the exploration opens in relation to the script.
Characters often contain competing impulses, and relationships can bring those impulses into conflict. Stanley and Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire, or Felix and Oscar in The Odd Couple, offer rich material for studying clashing ways of being. An archetypal reading can illuminate that material, but the characters remain more specific than a pair of opposing labels.
Archetype Work gives an actor a way to explore different physical, vocal, emotional, and imaginative states of being.
Jason Bennett, Intro to Archetype Work, original article.
A vocabulary to explore
The following groups overlap. A label may belong in several groups, and you may need a more precise word for your own experience. These are imaginative prompts, not a universal personality test.
Power and protection: protector, warrior, leader, aristocrat, boss, star, survivor, rebel, controller, judge, manipulator, hero, traditionalist, matriarch, patriarch, and the person who must feel special. Fictional material may also require an exploration of cruelty or destructive power within agreed performance boundaries.
Vulnerable and child qualities: vulnerable child, magical child, playful child, lonely child, insecure child, abandoned child, shy child, rebellious child, wonder, spontaneity, and the part that asks what other people will think.
Parental qualities: nurturing, responsible, critical, controlling, withdrawn, protective, tyrannical, or punishing ways of parenting. Explore the specific quality rather than assuming a parental role has only one emotional life.
Being and rest: beach bum, meditator, relaxed self, contemplative self, sensuality, the part that wants to escape responsibility, and the part that is able simply to be present.
Personal connection: pleaser, lover, empathic self, affectionate self, joker, and the part that wants to belong or submit to another's wishes.
Impersonal attention: analytical mind, organizer, judge, business person, the part that can make a practical decision without seeking personal approval, and the part that dismisses a relationship altogether. These possibilities should not be confused with one another.
Inner critic: the voice that evaluates, warns, compares, or attacks when you fall short of an internal rule. Notice both its concerns and the effect of how it speaks.
Perfectionist: the part that wants the work to be exact and may find incompleteness difficult to tolerate.
Pusher: the part that says, “Let's go. Do this. Do that. Do more.” It can bring considerable drive and may have difficulty allowing rest.
You may also encounter masculine and feminine labels. Their meanings vary across traditions and cultures. In an acting exercise, identify the actual qualities you mean rather than assigning a fixed set of capacities to a sex or gender. Tenderness, authority, analysis, sensuality, and play are available for exploration by any actor.
Sexual qualities can also be explored when appropriate to the role and the agreed training context. An actor's boundaries and consent remain part of the work. No particular sexual behavior or identity is proof that an actor has more or less artistic range.
Use the work in preparation
Regular instrumental training can make a wider range available before you receive a particular role. This is part of the value of the work: you are developing capacities, not merely collecting labels for a script.
Once you have a role, use the exploration in relation to a complete acting process. The following sequence offers one way to begin.
Read the play. Receive the story before deciding what every character means.
Read it again. Notice images, impulses, questions, and relationships that arise. Let the writing work on your imagination.
Use your established craft tools. Investigate circumstances, objectives, obstacles, actions, relationships, structure, and the particular obligations of the text.
Describe the character's familiar ways of being. Use evidence. A character may be controlled, dutiful, traditional, analytical, protective, or concerned with respectability. Ask when those qualities appear and when they change.
Explore the less visible possibilities. What does the character struggle to permit? Play, dependence, compassion, rebellion, sensuality, or uncertainty may become important. Do not assume a hidden trauma or a secret behavior merely because it fits a theory.
Develop experiential access and rehearse. Work with an appropriate image, movement, voice, or facilitated exploration. Bring the discovery into the scene. See how it affects action and relationship, and keep testing it against the writing.
The character is not finished when you have named a few selves. A unique person emerges through history, circumstances, relationships, language, behavior, and the changes the story demands. Archetype Work supports that construction.
Explore relationships and dreams
The Psychology of Selves describes relationships in terms of interactions among different selves, including bonding patterns. For an actor, this can offer a way to investigate how a person becomes more parental, dependent, controlling, affectionate, or defensive with a particular partner.
Read Hal and Sidra Stone's Embracing Our Selves and Embracing Each Other to understand their formulations. Preserve the distinction between what the source model proposes and what you discover in a particular scene. A relationship may support several useful readings.
Dreams can also offer images and qualities for exploration. Write down what you remember. Notice the figure or atmosphere that interests you, and investigate its possible use in the role. You can work creatively with an image without deciding that every dream has one interpretation.
More range, more choice
The purpose is to develop an actor who can respond more fully to different stories. A wider range may expand what you can offer in an audition or performance, but no exercise guarantees casting or a career.
Your attention in performance still has to reach the other actors and the world of the story. The preparation should make that possible. You are not required to monitor an internal catalogue while you act.
Approach the work with curiosity, precision, and respect for your own boundaries. You can pause or decline an exploration. Actor training is not a substitute for psychotherapy or medical treatment, and a class should not use a diagnostic label to explain an ordinary difficulty with a role.
Archetype Work is one way of making more of your imaginative range available. Learn it experientially, integrate it with craft, and use the freedom it gives you in service of the story.
