Theatre Actors Research Articles

Where are we now? Further thoughts on Ways of Seeing

ABSTRACTJohn Berger, the influential art critic, essayist and novelist died in January 2017. His friend the theatre director and actor, Simon McBurney, said, ‘Listener, grinder of lenses, poet, painter, seer. My Guide. Philosopher. Friend. John Berger left us this morning. Now you are everywhere.’ Berger insisted that observation was key to the project of ‘seeing’ truly. Are we there now? Are these ideas indeed ‘everywhere’? The author examines this view in the light of current developments in observation, in the psychoanalytic field, while reaching out to other disciplines to make closer links. She uses observations from students, comments they have made about the process of observation, and a moving observation of an old lady with dementia. John Berger prided himself on being a ‘listener’ as well as an observer, listening with an ear for everything in the other, not only what was spoken, and I hope that we may indeed listen to one another in the service of moving forward across disciplinary lines.

The Love and Marriage of Psychodrama and Drama Therapy1

The Love and Marriage of Psychodrama and Drama Therapy1

A Performing Library

In November 1969, the Nobel laureate Dario Fo’s collective/company staged the politically dense play The Worker Knows 300 Words, the Boss Knows 1000, That's Why He's the Boss, where a group of proletarian workers have initially dismantled a library of their Casa del Popolo (House of People). The library is not only recreated as the mere set of the unfolding performance, it is part of the performance itself. It is the cause of the theatrical actions on stage and the reason why the workers themselves argue and reflect on their proletarian condition. The library offers them pretexts (as well as texts) to perform and reinterpret crucial episodes of the socialist past and to see if, why and what they can serve to the workers’ cause. The library recreated in this play is therefore not only a simple site for and of performance—is a performing library—it is the symbol of the proletariat emancipation and liberation through knowledge. The library represents the path of the proletarian workers to become new citizens and a new type of self-educated intellectuals.Function, significance and symbolism of the library within a social context where Fo’s audience became theatregoers—in many cases for the first time in their lives—however did not solve the 700-word gap.

Rehearsing Justice: Theatre, Sexuality and the Sacred

The theatre actor’s process in a rehearsal hall is reality and metaphor. It can be a rehearsal for justice, where we can live freely. In this laboratory the actor becomes all of us. Like the actor, we inhabit our bodies and our sexualities, sometimes as spiritual practice, or as sacred and creative, even as incarnations. In particular, women’s bodies remember what it is like to be no-body and what it is like to be a some-body. The texts of women’s bodies contain their history of pain, wellness and illness. In creating a character, the actor creates a biography, an inner life, and the actor’s imagination aligns with the character’s situation. This is the creation of a character’s ‘living story’. Similarly, for all of us, this is akin to self knowledge. When women and sexual minorities tell their stories and listen to each others’ self knowledge, they are reading their bodies as texts. And worlds split open.

Shakespeare’s Infernal Rivers : Topological Space and Dramatic Descensus ad Inferos

Drawing on recent theories of geocriticism and spatial literary studies, mathematics, and cultural geography, this paper traces the courses of five rivers of the underworld in Greek mythology (the Styx and its affluent rivers, the Acheron, the Phlegethon, the Lethe, and the Cocytus) to demonstrate the blurred borderlines, functional relationships and connectivity of Shakespeare’s riverine imaginary spaces as revealed in theatrical action. Articulating notions of topology, this paper approaches space as relational and multi-layered. Early modern English theatre offers a particularly intricate intersection of spaces : the urban space of London, the space of the stage itself, evocations of various settings, more or less fictionalized and geographically and temporally removed symbolic spaces, as well as migrations of motifs from other cultures. The notion of topology conceives of theatrical space in terms of structural links. Consequently, I suggest the related idea of telemesic space, which allows different times, places and modes of representation, such as mythology, to blend on stage, which functions as a nodal point. Rivers of the underworld emerge as particularly resonant in this regard when evoked on stage. They are topological in that they both link and sever, and that they allow for a fluid transfer between early modern geographies and mythological dimensions. Shakespeare’s rivers of the underworld are located everywhere and nowhere— according to dramatic purpose — and their shifting uses reveal the topological homeomorphism of dynamic theatrical systems. Classical, medieval, and Renaissance tropes of descent to the underworld figured by infernal rivers are embodied into the actual descent to the theatre’s hell trapdoor and allegorize images of menace, terror, and dismemberment.

Actors Excluded from the Business

This enquiry is focused on the situation of ordinary artists; it is based on the observation of the trajectories of professional actors in France who have been affected by a prolonged, or even definitive, loss of the right to regular unemployment compensation. The focus is thus on the ordinary disqualification and professional devalorization that occurs in the job market for actors. The cases of these individuals are indeed exemplary of a lack of financial recognition of artistic activity except in the most institutionalized realms of the theatrical space. This phenomenon contributes to a professional destabilization for the actors concerned here, and thus to a deterioration in their working conditions and degradation of their artistic practice. While the job market for theatre actors indeed appears to be flexible and deregulated, publicly-funded jobs, which are ultimately those where salary standards are completely respected, have become rare and coveted situations—lack of access to which tends to determine a form of professional disaffiliation.

Vocal Quality in Theater Actors

The purpose of this study was to investigate vocal quality, vocal complaints, and risk factors for developing voice disorders in theater actors. Secondly, the impact of one vocal performance on the voice was investigated by comparing objective and subjective vocal quality before and after a theater performance. Prospective study of the actors' voice prior to and after a performance METHODS: Speech samples of 26 theater actors (15 men, 11 women, mean age 41.9 years) were recorded before and after a theater performance of one and a half hour and analyzed using the software program Praat. Speech samples consisted of the combination of sustained phonation and continuous speech. For each speech sample, the Acoustic Voice Quality Index was calculated. Auditory perceptual evaluations were performed using the GRBASI scale. Questionnaires were used to inventory vocal symptoms and influencing factors. Acoustic analysis showed a mean Acoustic Voice Quality Index (AVQI) of 3.48 corresponding with a mild dysphonia. Fifty percent of the theater actors reported having (sometimes or regularly) vocal complaints after a performance. The questionnaire revealed a high presence of vocally violent behavior and poor vocal hygiene habits. Objective vocal quality, measured by the AVQI, did not change after a theater performance. The auditory perceptual evaluation of the overall grade of dysphonia showed a subtle amelioration of the vocal quality. The results of this study showed the presence of mild dysphonia, regular vocal complaints, and poor vocal hygiene habits in theater actors. A theater performance did not have an impact on the objective vocal quality.

To the last breath

Abstract While still a student of sociology, Damir Domitrović co-founded Club B-51 on Gerbičeva Street, a nexus of the subculture in Ljubljana. In 1991, during the beginnings of the wars in former Yugoslavia, he conceived the B-51 Cultural Society, then two years later started the EX PONTO festival as a sort of creative-spiritual meeting point of refugee artists from the Balkan Wars. In the 22 years since, it has grown into an important international festival of the performing arts. He supported the Rajvosa project, which was dedicated to the Bosnian minority community in Slovenia, was an instigator of the Kluže festival at the tri-border of Slovenia, Italy and Austria, and in 2005 co-founded the New European Theatre Action (NETA), the largest theatre network in South-Eastern Europe, which today encompasses 68 festivals and theatres in 20 countries.

Actors in Search of Theatre’s Quintessence

Abstract At the border between the fields of anthropology of theatre and phenomenology, this article presents and analyses the answers given by a sample of French theatre actors to an apparently simple question: How would you define your art? One could have been expect a wide range of answers, which would have reflected the infinite multiplicity of perspectives about that subject. Yet unexpectedly, the author deduces from the field investigation she conducted, a common and almost consensual vision of theatre expressed by these actors: an art in which practitioners are in the poetic quest of themselves, in their most accomplished humanity, in harmony with the self, the Other and the life (le vivant).

Shadow theatre

Shadow theatre is a genre of performance art in which the actors are only visible as shadows projected on the screen. The goal of this study is to generate animated characters, the shadows of which match a sequence of target silhouettes. This poses several challenges. The motion of multiple characters are carefully coordinated to form a target silhouette on the screen, and each character's pose should be stable, balanced, and plausible. The resulting character animation should be smooth and coherent spatially and temporally. We formulate the problem as nonlinear constrained optimization with objectives, which were designed to generate plausible human motions. Our optimization algorithm was primarily inspired by the heuristic strategies of professional shadow theatre actors. Their know-how was studied and then incorporated into our optimization formulation. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach with a variety of target silhouettes and 3D fabrication of the results.

East West Players and After: Acting and Activism

“Where are all the Asian actors in mainstream New York theatre?” What began as a plaintive status update on Facebook launched a full-scale investigation by Asian American actors that culminated in a report titled “Ethnic Representation on New York City Stages” and the formation in the fall of 2011 of an advocacy group, the Asian American Performers Action Coalition (AAPAC). AAPAC's findings were disheartening. In the preceding five years, Asian Americans had received only 3 percent of all available roles in not-for-profit theatre and only 1.5 percent of all available roles on Broadway. The percentage of roles filled by African American and Latino actors, in contrast, had increased since 2009. According to the report, “Asian Americans were the only minority group to see their numbers go down from levels set five years ago.” The data AAPAC compiled were both surprising in their concreteness and unsurprising in their bleakness. The Facebook query sparked an active digital conversation that touched a collective sense of discord just below the surface for many Asian American theatre artists, especially actors. Ralph Peña, artistic director of Ma-Yi Theatre Company, invited key Facebook commenters to hold a more formal conversation about access, embodiment, and Asian American representation. This group, many of whom were artists in midcareer, trained at top conservatories, and fostered in New York City's vibrant Asian American theatre community, became the Steering Committee of AAPAC. The members of the Steering Committee channeled their frustration and anger into archive fever by researching and documenting ethnic representation on Broadway and in sixteen of the largest not-for-profit theatres in New York City over a five-year period. In front of an audience of three hundred, members of AAPAC presented their findings at a roundtable at Fordham University on 13 February 2012 that included prominent artistic directors, agents, directors, casting directors, and producers and was moderated by David Henry Hwang. With the report in hand, AAPAC members roused the New York theatre community with a series of town hall–style meetings and urged theatrical production gatekeepers to do, if not better, then, something.

A Study on the Awareness of Major in Students from Dept. of Theatre at a University

The purpose of this study was to improve and guide the education policy for actors of theater through a study in awareness of their major, Theatre at a University. A survey was cosnducted to 61 males and 62 females(43 freshmen, 38 sophomores and 42 juniors), sum to 123 students. IBM SPSS 21.0 static program was used for analysis the data and significant level was p<.05 statistically. Students awareness of their major was evaluated with five categorized items; the awareness of curriculum contents (five questions), practical contents (four questions), level on education courses (five questions), professors teaching (four questions) and social awareness (four questions). The results showed that it was the highest in the awareness of curriculum contents (3.60±0.90) and the lowest in the awareness of practical contents (3.34±1.01). In general, the degree of awareness for male students was more higher than female students. In term of the grade, the degree of awareness was the highest for sophomores. It was also found that students who have a good academic achievement, and considered their talent before the entrance of university showed higher awareness of their major. Based on this study, it was concluded that it is necessary to develope various programs which help students to establish their identities as students majoring in Theatre and enhance the awareness of their major.

Non-Cinema, or The Location of Politics in Film

Philosophy has repeatedly denied cinema in order to grant it artistic status. Adorno, for example, defined an ‘uncinematic’ element in the negation of movement in modern cinema, ‘which constitutes its artistic character’. Similarly, Lyotard defended an ‘acinema’, which rather than selecting and excluding movements through editing, accepts what is ‘fortuitous, dirty, confused, unclear, poorly framed, overexposed’. In his Handbook of Inaesthetics, Badiou embraces a similar idea, by describing cinema as an ‘impure circulation’ that incorporates the other arts. Resonating with Bazin and his defence of ‘impure cinema’, that is, of cinema's interbreeding with other arts, Badiou seems to agree with him also in identifying the uncinematic as the location of the Real. This article will investigate the particular impurities of cinema that drive it beyond the specificities of the medium and into the realm of the other arts and the reality of life itself. Privileged examples will be drawn from various moments in film history and geography, starting with the analysis of two films by Jafar Panahi: This Is Not a Film (In film nist, 2011), whose anti-cinema stance in announced in its own title; and The Mirror (Aineh, 1997), another relentless exercise in self-negation. It goes on to examine Kenji Mizoguchi's deconstruction of cinematic acting in his exploration of the geidomono genre (films about theatre actors) in The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums (Zangigku monogatari, 1939), and culminates in the conjuring of the physical experience of death through the systematic demolition of film genres in The Act of Killing (Joshua Oppenheimer et al., 2012).

Playback Theatre: the art of being oneself. A tool for empowerment and real change for individuals and communities

This article presents the application of a theatrical technique—Playback Theatre, which was developed in the United States during the 1970s—to social intervention, as a narrative and listening space that confers value and dignity upon the person and the unique and distinct individual experiences that facilitate their social and relational integration. This art of being oneself, as the author states, uses the oral tradition and spontaneous and creative communication of psychodrama and combines them with theatrical expression. This technique has been shown to be pertinent to both community social work and support groups for persons in problematic situations. The aim of this is to celebrate some specific moment of their lives, as individuals or as a community, and to define strategies for improving living conditions or resolving or alleviating conflicts. It is also used to assess the achievements of the proposed objectives, to strengthen the motivation to change and to transform existing relationships into collaborative ones. This is possible not only owing to the participation of persons, but also to the assumption of different roles that can permit the overcoming of certain traumatic events.In addition to support groups, it is used for the training and supervision of social work professionals. The theatrical technique in question allows them to assume roles as diverse as narrator, audience or actor, whether simultaneously or successively. Taking the role of «performer» or guide to the theatrical action requires prior preparation in order for the group of participants to be able to pool their individualities and their emotions and reflect on them. The participatory methodology that Playback Theatre proposes is important in community social work and is posed in a new and transformative key.

Beyond sincerity and pretense: role-playing and unstructured self in the Zhuangzi

ABSTRACTThis article engages with a recent view that the Daoist Classic Zhuangzi advances an alternative to the Confucian role-ethics. According to this view, Zhuangzi opposes the Confucian idea that we should play our social roles with sincerity and instead argues that we should take the liberty to detach ourselves from the roles we play and ‘pretend’ them. It is argued in this article that Zhuangzi’s ideal of role-playing is based neither on sincerity nor on pretense. Instead, it is akin to the excellence of theatre actors when they enact a role: they are able, for a limited time, to restructure their personality into a particular role, but de-structure it again when the performance is over. The prerequisite for this ability is to keep one’s self fundamentally unstructured, or, as Zhuangzi puts it, ‘empty’ (xu 虛). This reading of Zhuangzian role-playing provides a fresh perspectives on ‘playing’ or ‘rambling’ (you 遊) as the central philosophical concept in the Zhuangzi.

Stanislavski’s system in musical theatre actor training: anomalies of acting song

The principles underpinning current acting approaches in musical theatre are primarily based on, and indebted to, Stanislavski’s acting ‘System’. Though the musical theatre acting literature fails to formally explain the modes of appropriation or varying legacies of Stanislavski’s tenets (a task I will briefly cover), the pervasive reception given aspects of his systematic preparations may rest, in part, on the apparent logic of a methodology that enables actors, during the process of preparing for a role, to approach a song and its lyrics as though they would a play and its spoken text. Moreover the holistic way Stanislavski perceived the actor’s process (particularly in the latter part of his career), reinforced the intrinsic coalescence of psychophysical work and active engagement with emotions (or broadly, components of affective and sense memory), and this approach resonates with the integrationist ideals in modern musical theatre actor training which seek to combine, in an emotionally invested way, the essential elements of acting, singing and movement. However, when preparing to act through song, the integrationist stance of psychophysical characterisation may be challenged by the vocal technical requirements of learning the music, which alongside musically affective experiences, may not necessarily cohere with a monological acting exercise of, say, speaking the lyric-text. I will stage a critical discussion around such song acting anomalies and develop my reflections as I consider the function of breath as a lynchpin in song acting. If arousal of, or engagement with, emotion, through a combinatory sequence of analytical and physical action, is fundamental to psychophysical work, in song acting that process is exponentially problematized, generating a complex relationship between technical mastery and emotional availability.

Film actors, theatre actors? The Polish actors’ market in recent years

Film actors, theatre actors? Th e Polish actors’ market in recent years The author of the paper analyzes the career paths of Polish film and theater actors in recent years, taking account of social and institutional changes in Polish theater and cinema after 1989. On this basis, current three strategies present in the acting profession are identified: Courtier, Byplay and Celebrity. These three groups are highlighted depending on actors’ artistic achievements and accu- mulated symbolic capital. The main thesis of the article is that leading film actors, who are most successful on the big screen, forsake engagement in theater. While describing this regularity, the author provides specific examples of actresses and actors - eg. Magdalena Cielecka, Andrzej Chyra, Jacek Poniedzialek and Agnieszka Grochowska. The article concludes with considerations about the various reasons why Polands market for film actors and the theater market have split in recent years.

Comparison of Supraglottic Activity and Spectral Slope Between Theater Actors and Vocally Untrained Subjects

The present study aimed to assess supraglottic activity in theater actors and to observe whether they present differences compared with subjects with no voice training. Acoustic and perceptual analyses were also performed. A total of 20 participants were divided into two groups: an experimental group of trained theater actors, and a comparative group of subjects with no voice training. Absence of laryngeal pathology was confirmed by rigid videostroboscopy. Flexible laryngoscopy was performed to assess supraglottic activity during speaking phonatory tasks. Voice recording was also carried out. Four blinded judges were asked to assess laryngoscopic and perceptual variables using a visual analog scale. A comparison between groups, phonatory tasks, and loudness levels was performed. Multivariate linear regression showed that trained participants had a higher degree of both laryngeal and pharyngeal activities compared with untrained participants. Moreover, phonatory tasks at high intensity showed higher activity than those at medium and low intensities for most phonatory tasks and laryngoscopic parameters. Vocally trained participants evidenced higher values for all spectral variables compared with untrained participants. Actors have a greater degree of both laryngeal and pharyngeal activities than vocally untrained subjects. Apparently, this higher activity is associated to speaking voice training and not to a hyperfunctional vocal behavior. Anterior-posterior laryngeal compression is greater than medial compression. Intensity and phonatory tasks have an effect on all laryngoscopic variables. Supraglottic activity during professional speaking voice may be not necessarily a hyperfunctional behavior, but a strategy to avoid vocal fold damage while producing the desired voice quality.

Occupations and Professionalism in Art and Culture

The article introduces the topic of this special issue on artists and professionalism from the perspective of the sociology of the arts and culture, in order to demonstrate how the contributions significantly develop studies of professions in general. Some theoretical concepts are defined and discussed: culture, arts, occupations, professions, status, field, symbolic and social capital, emotional labour, and reversed economy. An illustration is used to demonstrate pricing in arts and what may explain it. There is a focus on the field of art with a brief comparison to the academic field. In this issue we find studies on artists, authors, and theatre actors, which provide significant contributions to these themes in theories and studies of professions.Keywords: creative industries, creative occupations, professions, status, field, symbolic and social capital

Professional Emotion Management as a Rehearsal Process

The work of stage actors has long been used as a simile for every day role playing, generating theoretical concepts to describe how people work to present themselves in general and how they manage their emotions in particular. Building on this tradition, this article analyses professional stage actors’ deliberate emotion management as an embodied professionalisation process, focusing the relation between emotional experience and expression through the concepts of decoupling, double agency and habituation. Observations and interviews with theatre actors rehearsing for a role revealed how they gradually develop a capacity for double agency, decoupling the experience from the expression of emotions, which are eventually habituated in a form adapted to the role character. This process of professionalising emotion management is beneficial to the presentation of role-appropriate emotions and furthers the ability to cope with the endeavour of managing emotions at work. Implications for professions outside the artistic domain are discussed. &#x0D; Keywords: decoupling, deep acting, embodiment, emotion management, habituation, stage actors, surface acting&#x0D;