Acting Style

Wayfinding: Spotlights > The Performers' Experience > Acting Style

Performers with film experience may be more interested and accepting of second wave digital theatre. As Peter J. Kuo told me: ‘It's like when you watch a Marvel film and someone is doing a superpower. Gosh! They're acting their butt off because nothing's happening. But for us, we're just like, there's a whole hurricane happening now’. A performer able to engage with the imaginary narrative world without direct feedback from the audience or other onstage performers might be better suited to second wave digital theatre media.

on the problem of stage vs. screen acting in digital theatre:

He suggests that just as a film actor must perform with an awareness of the camera and the scale of the medium he is acting in, so too must the cyber-performer when creating online theater. … The old rules and languages of theater and video are inappropriate, and simple conversion of traditional theater forms into virtual environments is pointless.

Natasha Rickman of Creation Theatre told me that digital performers have to strengthen their listening skills, since they could not rely on audience feedback or, often, even the other performers’ facial expressions: ‘Actors also really had to listen to one another, particularly if their eyeline was away from the screen showing the other actor, so all they had was an aural connection’. This might be similar to parts of the rehearsal process, like table reading or the early days of staging, when performers still have their scripts in hand; eye contact in these moments might detract from quickly responding with your line.

Some theatre makers found that instructing the performers to focus on their fellow actors, particularly when streaming over Zoom, increased the sense of ‘theatre-ness’ and presence in the performance. Michael Deacon noted: ‘what they can do is, or if they're playing a scene, and they're not talking, they can have a little look at the other person on the screen. So at least they're getting some sort of interaction’. Holly Champion told me that Streamed Shakespeare always used Gallery View to give the audience a sense of stage perspective, in which they could see all the actors at once rather than just seeing closeups of individual actors; this also benefitted the performers, who could see everyone they were performing alongside: ‘it allowed us to show reactions. And we found that to be really engaging for the actors and engaging for the audience’. But, Champion noted that this was a particular problem with acting over Zoom; even using Gallery View so the actors could see everyone onstage with them at the same time, the ‘flatness’ of Zoom along with the typically small spaces that actors worked in caused problems, requiring a more filmic approach to performance.

For Champion, this worked fine since Streamed Shakespeare often cast actors with both stage and screen experience; for Carmel Clavin, though, working in a webcam medium did not translate her performance skillset.

None of us were being honest with ourselves about the reality of changing the format being so drastic and so impossible in some situations; I learned that I'm not good on camera. I'm just not. I am much better suited to in-person, but I also learned that, or was led to confront the fact, that that's a skill. There are many people who are really good on camera and absolute garbage in-person.

On the other hand, in Cinematic Theatre, actors best serve the new medium by keeping their theatrical performance style, and not modifying it for the intimacy of film; this is because Cinematic Theatre aims to translate the experience of being in the theatre with the performers to the cinematic audience. Australian Theatre Live, for example, told me in our interview: ‘The actors don't change their performance. That's one thing. Some actors come up to me and say, “Oh, the camera's only just there will I change it to …?” No. no, no, because we're in a theatre, and the viewing public understand that. So, whatever your performance is for the theatre, is what it is’. Matthew Jameson of The Space in the UK said similarly: ‘They've never acted for camera. And we specifically say, “Don't feel as though you're acting for camera, you're doing a theatre show”. We are there to mitigate that difference and to convey the theatrical experience rather than shoot a pro-shot movie’. It can be tempting to actors to worry about the grandiosity of their acting for a smaller performance space like a laptop screen, especially if they cannot sense reaction from the audience; it is up to you, as a theatre maker, to determine the form of performance required and rehearse with your performers well enough that they feel comfortable.