A STUDY ON ACTOR-ACTOR PERFORMANCE CONNECTION
There is a story I want to tell but I struggle to find the words. The intricacy of the subject tempts me like dryness in the mouth and makes me stand in silence. “When you think too much about how to play it ceases to be playing”, a long-lost friend told me on the train. I think he is right, but I have walked all this way down into a research gap. And now I’m stuck here and the thing I chose to research turns out it behaves like a firefly. I cannot catch it and am troubled by the seemingly contemptible fleetingness of my progress. I would have liked to progress in straight lines with a clear aim (like plough horses moving to the other edge of the field). Instead, I have been drifting, flitting, flapping, sipping, resting and taking off again. I observed how the flitting and flapping had some points in common, rather, some dots or, better said, some contours, some negative space. Alright. Imprecise points of repetition. What I mean is… Spring-cleaning the house only works with all manner of pauses, interruptions caused by old memories or love letters, and every other instant the silence, overgrowing, in between the chatting to neighbours or looking out of the window. Yet, by the end of the day, the house might be properly spring-cleaned. A painter does not need to draw every single tree of the forest to capture an essential experience of the forest. I wonder... Why you would follow me through these pages? I know you did not expect me to address you like this. What kind of introduction is this? I imagine your restlessness. I am tempted to apologise, to erase the whole thing and start all over again. Sorry for putting you on the spot, a black dot in vast amounts of negative space. An introduction should go like this -> |
In September 2019, I started a practical research (PhD) at Queen’s University Belfast on the topic of actor-actor performance connection, funded by Norther Bridge Consortium. My research looks at how performers connect, how they can connect better and what kind of different theatre can be made from a radically changing methodology that puts interconnectedness to a co-performer at the heart of the creative process. During the following four years, I embarked on an exploration on the functioning of connection between actors, co-performer empathy principles and how to create theatre from those principles.
The inroad for this research project, dates back to a theatre production of King Lear in 2015. The production, performed by twelve actors from different nationalities, ethnicities and theatrical backgrounds, made me experience large amounts of actor-actor performance connection, intense interpersonal relations with co-actors onstage in the presence of a collective object: the audience (Stanislavski, 193-222). Coming off that experience, the next two projects I was involved in where of a completely different caliber. My intention for doing this project was originally to become able to feel connectedness more often in performance. I wanted to crack the mysteries about it. Especially when I realised that there is a lot of ambiguity around the interrelation of actors in Western acting theory and I personally was trained in two different acting schools to understand this interrelation as something that can happen but not be created. It triggered an idea about a radically different theatrical creativity and a new acting method that has actor-actor connection as a core fundament.This portfolio contains the documentation of the practice I used to investigate my three primary research questions:
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