I was once told that a professor in discourse analysis – who shall go nameless – said routinely that literary studies had no concepts. I think of this professor often, which is to say every time that I come across a new or interesting literary concept.

This week has been particularly good for this, because I’ve spent it reading a lot of twentieth-century theory and instruction for actors. As I consider ‘literary’ to be a very broad category, this the concepts put forward in these books definitely qualify as literary concepts in my eyes. Maybe that nameless professor would disagree, but, regardless of that, this post will be about a few of the concepts I found in the course of the last few days.

First, there is HO JO KYU which Yoshi Oida uses to explain how to manage the rhythms of a line, speech, scene, or play. The phrase comes from Buddhist teachings, and describes a kind of universal movement pattern: first slow, then accelerating, then climaxing, and then slow once more. This pattern is found everywhere, including – obviously – sexual intercourse, but it here becomes an aesthetic quality: good writing and good acting of that writing will produce this pattern, both on the stage and in the bodies of the audience.

Second, there is TRANSPARENCY, a term used by Oida’s colleague, Peter Brook, to describe actors’ ability ‘ to articulate the trajectorises of inner impulses, conveying these impulses in external forms with clarity and immediacy’. My thanks to Lorna Marshall for the phrasing.

Third, there is ECOS, which is central to Staniewski’s thinking about acting. Ecos is a state the actor must search for, one in which he ‘can connect with ancient and traditional practices, using powerful physical and vocal techniques to construct a visceral performance language which is metaphorical, urgent and passionate’. These are the words of Alison Hodge, and her writing on Staniewski made me realize how much this Polish theorist’s writings were for our time: the underlying urge to reconnect to the planet is valid for us all, as it is not just the thespians who have catastrophically lost touch with the earth.

Fourth, there is CONJUNCTIO OPPOSITORUM, Grotowski’s way of describing how the mastery of established structure paradoxically frees the actor. This concept is dear to me, because it is an eighteenth-century one also, summarized by Pope in the Essay on Criticism:

The winged courser, like a generous horse,

Shows most true mettle when you check his course

There are more things to add to this list: noble masks, ma, affective memory, double agency, atmosphere, emploi, affective cognition, and others still. But I’ll leave it here for now, and let my brain digest these new ideas a little further.