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