Drawing on scholarship on multimedia performance as well as psychophysical actor training, this paper will present a research project undertaken in November 2014, which explored the use of mobile phones, a. as cameras for the development of a live-feed ‘kinaesthediting’ application and b. as tools that produce quadrophonic sound in response to the actor's movement. As Frank Camilleri has attested ‘psychophysicality, in discourse, if not in practice, is an important battle that has been won’ (2013, p. 30). Spanning the entire 20th century, psychophysical training has become the dominant paradigm that underpins both the theory and practice of contemporary actor training. According to a psychophysical understanding, acting is a holistic activity that involves the actor’s entire bodymind. As a consequence, actor training focuses on enabling the actor to strengthen the ties between her physical and mental resources and respond to the demands of performance by employing a form of imagination/intelligence that is located and realised through the body. Nonetheless, as instances of multimedia performance proliferate, the actor has often to work with or alongside a variety of media, which complicate some of the fundamental concepts that psychophysical actor training takes for granted; for example presence is no longer experienced as only a physical process but also as a virtual/mediated one. Equally, energy may result not only from a form of concentrated bodymind awareness but also from a fragmented or dispersed network. This paper will then discuss how high and low digital technologies may facilitate a practical and theoretical reconsideration of key aspects of psychophysical actor training, such as movement, character creation and relationship to other actors, and how it may offer a new set of terms and understandings that place the psychophysical and the digital on a continuum.
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)