The Significance of a Performer’s ‘Unpredictability’ and ‘Immediacy’ to Enhance His/Her ‘Identity’ as a Doer on Stage

Abstract

This thesis discusses a performer’s unpredictability and immediacy as a prerequisite quality and/or ability to facilitate his/her professional identity as a doer on stage. To examine the key principles and approaches, this research focuses on addressing a specific aspect of the performer’s transformative experience from those, directors, and practitioners’ concepts that inform and enhance the performer’s passive readiness on stage. To be precise, this research attempt to interrogate and articulate the place and role of a performer’s internal readiness and/or that of inner looking. The performer’s inner intensity as seed of action signifies that his/her body is being in a state of listening to every tiny moment with his/her heightened awareness which in turn lead the performer’s body to meet the demands of theatre, the whole-body engagement. Here, this thesis argues that the key principles of acting/training underlies the importance of a performer’s ethical attitude and at the same time his/her responsibility for what the performer’s choices and experiences within the performative involvement, that is, a process of preparation, are not technical matter but rather, the concepts, and/or approaches from those theatre artists’ practical assumptions highlight a process of thorough encountering and/or listening to his/her body. Inhabiting and/or obtaining the principles through the performer’s body means being free from his/her unnecessary trait(s) which in turn initiate and then move the whole body according to what is happening in the series of moment(s) on stage. What is more, such an appropriate psycho-physical order reminds us of the significance of the nature of human/performer’s body, namely, to being in a state of one’s ‘own’ body as oneness. From this perspective, this thesis further argues that the performer’s body necessarily need to be affected and/or triggered in a sense of responding to the given circumstance where the performer is working on in the here and now.