Christine Brubaker - proposal for Pure Research 2012
Nightswimming/Pure Research April 30, 2012
Dear Brian and the Selection Committee: I’m a professional actor working in theatre, flim, television and voice for over 20 years. For the past 10 years I have been teaching post secondary performer training for both theatre and screen performance at Humber College and a number of private schools in the Toronto area. Most recently I have begun directing. Presently, I am pursing my MFA in Interdisciplinary Studies through a low-residency program in Vermont and am currently midway through the first of five terms. My major area of inquiry is in actor and audience relationships. My proposal for Pure Research is to measure the physiological, emotional and cognitive responses of actors as they perform within a series of controlled variables including material selection and audience types. I am interested in the conscious and unconscious adjustments that actors make in response to audience in the absence of outside direction. As an actor and teacher, I’ve always been intrigued with the ways actors adjust their performances based on the contexts in which they perform. Theatre demands the story reaches many people in the telling. A performer must vocally and physically fill a space that can include an audience in the tens to the thousands. There is an immediacy and ephemerality in live performance. Actors tell a story in it’s totality on each occasion without interruption. In screen performance, our audience is primarily one - the camera. The story is parsed into smaller units. There is the opportunity to repeat, to correct. Order of the story telling is not important. Actors relinquish a certain control over which parts of their performance are used. The story is surrendered to the art of editing. Our training in both mediums puts emphasis on the acquisition of specific techniques designed to address these demands. Theatre training involves developing the body and voice as instruments of endurance. Camera technique involves understanding proximity, shot size and the nuances of playing the frame. With these techniques in hand, actors learn how to adjust their skills as story tellers to best serve the performance context. However, the development of these techniques does not take into account an analysis of how the performance context may or may not affect the actor’s emotional and physiological experience as story teller and as a result, her relationship to that story in that context. My intent is to conduct an actor/audience relations lab where an actor performs the same material in front of various audience permutations in order to measure physical and emotional responses in each context. The goals of the experiment are to increase
Christine Brubaker - proposal for Pure Research 2012
my understanding of how actors are affected by audience and what, if any changes they consciously or unconsciously make in the story telling based on the audience relationship. My methodology will be to use four to six professional actors hired on an Equity contract for two days. Estimated expenses for the workshop would be: 6 Actors 8 hours/day x 2 days Monitor/Camera Rental 2 days Heart Rate and Blood Pressure Purchase/Rental
$ 1400 $ 500 $ 150
My time in October 2012 is flexible and any of the posted dates on your website will work. My cv as requested is attached. My potential collaborators/actor participants (based on availability) are as follows: Martin Julien, Raven Dauda, Leah Pinsent, Eric Woolfe, Kelli Fox, Vivien Moore, Karin Randoja. The creation and analysis of the Visual Analog Scales (see Project Description) would be done in collaboration with Dr. Rachel Tyndale, CAMH scientist and Head of Pharmacogenetics in the Neuroscience Department at University of Toronto. Please don’t hesitate to call me if you have any questions at all. This particularly methodology is new for me and outside my regular scope of work. I’m very excited about it’s possibilities, but I recognize my brief description may elicit more questions than answers. Yours,
Christine Brubaker
Christine Brubaker - proposal for Pure Research 2012
PROJECT DESCRIPTION HYPOTHESIS The type of audience she is performing for and communicating with alters an actor’s experience of performance and the story she tells physiologically and emotionallly. RESEARCH QUESTIONS What happens in the actor’s experience of inhabiting, connecting to, and relaying that story when told in different mediums and in front of different audience permutations? Are there different levels of pleasure and/or anxiety? Are these expressed physiologically or as psychological indicators? Does the actor’s understanding of the story change? Does the actor’s telling of the story change? GOALS AND PLANS FOR THE RESEARCH I plan to use the data we collect from this experiment as the basis of a research paper for my graduate studies on actors and audiences. My hope is to gain further insight into the conscious and unconscious changes that actors make in response to different audiences and to identify if there are any predictable reactions that trend beyond an individual and that can be used to inform training and performance. The other outcome will be to determine if this set of measurements and variables are useful as data collection of this highly subjective experience and if so is there potential to expand the data set. THE EXPERIMENT I will work with a scientific model of data collection incorporating baseline and interval measurements of excitement, pleasure and anxiety. The three tools of measurement will be blood pressure, heart rate and VAS (visual analogue scales). The VAS is a questionnaire designed to track subjective experiences such as pain, pleasure etc. The Scenarios Each actor will have set performance material (5-10 minutes) that he/she will perform in four different audience scenarios: a. 40 person live audience - (participation by the graduate students) b. 5-6 person camera and crew - (participation by graduate students) c. Camera only d. Empty space The Performance Material a. Actor A will perform a monologue from traditional theatrical text i.e: Shakespeare b. Actor B will perform a movement piece, no text c. Actor C &D will perform a scene from a film script d. Actors E&F will perform a scene from a theatrical script
Christine Brubaker - proposal for Pure Research 2012
The actors will be very familiar with their performance material, perhaps to the extent where they have performed it within a previous professional context in order remove the variable of nerves associated with unfamiliarity. Test Groups Performers are divided into two test groups consisting of three actors each. The groups will experience the audience variations in different orders in an attempt to preserve randomness. The Timeline Day One a.m. Multiple baseline testing: and desensitizing. Familiarization of the space, other participants and material Day One p.m.:
1st test group (3 actors) will perform for 40 person audience 2nd test group (3 actors) will perform for empty space
Day Two a.m.
1st test group will perform for empty space and camera crew 2nd test group will perform for 40 person audience and camera crew
Day Two p.m.
1st test group will perform for camera only 2nd test group will perform for camera only Wrap up and discussion
* This time line is tentative and of course will rely on the live audience’s availability. Evaluation The actor’s experience of each of these different audience states will be measured numerous times during the course of the two days. We will be testing blood pressure, heart rate and filling out the VAS. The VAS will consisting of 10-15 questions asking actors to report on variables such as: mental and physical pleasure, self-consciousness, happiness or sadness; isolation; nervousness; connection to audience; etc. In addition, actors will be asked to respond to their relationship to the story and their experience of telling that story with similar variables from the VAS questionnaire such as: believability, focus, connection to story, faith Data Collection Actors’ physiological and VAS measurements will be taken to establish: a. Baseline data taken outside the proximity of performance b. Performance data at the following intervals: 1) Immediately preceding performance 2) During performance (if feasible) 3) Immediately after performance 4) 15 minutes after performance (to compare to baseline)
Christine Brubaker - proposal for Pure Research 2012
Reporting The results of the data will be compiled and analyzed with the assistance of Dr. Rachel Tyndale and other outside eyes who have observed the process.