Interrogating Modalities in Higher Education Performance Training

This Practice-as-Research PhD examined performance practices in higher education performance training. It is analysed through a lens of musical theatre training, exploring the performance of songs in the era of megamusicals (1971-1997) to contemporary musicals (1998 – present). This study aimed to determine whether there are recurring physical gestures and facial expressions in musical theatre performance practices. If recurring gestures did exist, I would have investigated how these gestures have been standardised over the course of the evolution of performance training. This thesis studied actor training methods typically used in British drama schools and literature on actor training for performing in musical theatre. I intended to explore these conventional practices using a practice-as-research methodology to reveal new findings contributing to the discourse on traditional actor-training methods in Britain, such as the Stanislavskian training method. I have focused my PhD thesis on acting in songs, where I discuss the various acting techniques used and applied by actors to create performance pieces.

The first step in identifying these gestures was to examine the different performances of solo songs throughout the history of musical theatre. I looked to see if there were recurring gestures and compared these gestures to previous iterations of songs that other performers had performed. One of the methods I used was to devise a series of practical workshops with performers in training to act in musical theatre, where I observed similar gestures in different performances of key songs from the repertoire of pre-megamusical, megamusical, and post-megamusical performances. After facilitating these workshops and observing that the performances included repeated physical gestures, I developed a notation system for documenting the use of physical gestures in the performances through further workshops in which audiences were asked to write down their immediate emotional responses to the performance.

This notation system indicated that canonical gestures were developed during the megamusical era. In contemporary musicals, these recurrent gestures have become fixed with reliance on these gestures from both creative teams and performers to create a performance in a song. The second stage of my research used the notation system of graphic scores and applied physical gestures linked with symbols to a series of workshops in a live-performance setting with an audience. The gestures were taught to the performers, who then reproduced these gestures during the song’s performance. Through these practical workshops, I also taught performers psycho-physical actor training based on the work of Stanislavski and observed the actors' own practice to see if the performers were also producing these recurrent gestures. During the study's second phase, a live audience was asked whether the performance of a particular song in a specific way created an emotional resonance. A survey assessed live audiences’ emotional responses to nine songs. The data concluded that audiences recognised recurrent gestures and responded strongly to certain gestures, suggesting that audiences had become familiar with standardised performance practices in musical theatre. In the third phase, audience data were collected via online recordings, allowing a more comprehensive range of information to be compiled regarding recurrent gestures in the songs staged to them. I intended to uncover the roots of these gestures and offer potential alternatives for training musical theatre actors by examining these practices.