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BONUS Performance of your life: Is acting inherent to being human? Sophie Fiennes, Declan Donnellan, Nick Ormerod, Macbeth
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This is an impromptu bonus episode previewing the NYC premiere of Sophie Fiennes’s documentary film Acting, which follows the celebrated theatre company Cheek by Jowl through their production of Macbeth. Andrea is speaking with her this week in NYC.
Andrea introduces the ideas of director Declan Donnellan, whose book The Actor in the Space (2024) helps us get some insight into the film.
Subjects: the philosophy of performance to spatial cognition, presence, and what it means to be truly alive on stage — or anywhere.
Perhaps this is a good moment to revisit the themes of Macbeth.
Come Saturday April 11th at 6:45pm for the film and Q &A with Sophie Fiennes (and Andrea): ️tickets at https://quadcinema.com/film/acting/
Declan Donnellan: "Human beings are actors. It is hardwired into our DNA — from toddlers playing make-believe to old-age pensioners sharing jokes in the pub. We need to perform. It’s an essential part of being human. Acting starts early. We use it to develop our relationship with our mothers. We watch her and wonder, mirror her smiling, repeat the sounds she makes. We learn things by performing for her, and she performs for us. Does that mean we are lying to each other? Of course not. Performance is woven into the fabric of our lives. It’s as natural and important to us as breathing. Performance is not merely a habit that humans keep repeating across millennia, languages and cultures. It is more fundamental than that. Performance is what it is to be human. It is the operating system for life."
The episode previews a bonus conversation with filmmaker Sophie Fiennes ahead of a screening of her film "Acting," about the London theater company Cheek by Jowl, co-founded by director Declan Donnellan and designer Nick Ormerod. Andrea introduces Donnellan’s ideas from his books "The Actor and the Target" and "The Actor in the Space," emphasizing that performance is fundamental to being human and that acting depends on creating the conditions—especially the space and context—where a character can exist and feel alive, rather than forcing meaning or emotion. The script contrasts older, space-oriented filmmaking with faster kinetic editing, highlights the importance of giving audiences room for their own cognition, and includes clips from Macbeth rehearsal discussing dread, avoidance, and the challenge of convincing the audience. It ends with details about attending the New York screening and future posting of a longer conversation. All links to books and notes are here.
00:00 Love and Dread
00:11 Macbeth in Fragments
01:00 Creative Risk and Space
02:59 Audience Cognition and Care
03:55 Art Beyond Meaning
04:58 Bonus Episode Intro
06:39 Performing Everyday Life
08:11 Who Is Declan Donnellan
10:25 Performance as Human OS
12:12 Why Acting Is Hard
14:20 Alive in Rehearsal
16:24 Space That Supports Life
18:30 Care and Plugging In
21:43 Avoidance and Reacting
24:44 Philosophy and Presence
26:34 Macbeth Actor Dialogue
27:35 Closing Macbeth Beat
📍 Hey, everyone. You're listening to Love and Philosophy. This is Andrea Hiott. I'm a philosopher. I'm a professor. a student. I'm a walker. Every now and then, I'm even still a poet. I'm trained in neuroscience, and I love the hippocampus, which is a little seahorse-shaped area of your brain known for memory and movement. For over a decade, I've been working on a philosophy of mind that's navigational, in a nutshell, that means minds are...
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