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The Institute of Internet, Broadcasting and Communication (한국인터넷방송통신학회)
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The Embodiment of a Performer and Character: Psychophysical Pathway to the Practical Attunement of a Performer's Body

  • Received : 2024.03.15
  • Accepted : 2024.03.27
  • Published : 2024.05.31
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Abstract

This thesis explores the embodiment of a performer and a character/role specifically by examining what the term character is associated with and implies in a sense of the performer's bodily training through which what happens to their body. First of all, this research begins to investigate the relationship between a performer and a character centred on the performer's bodily experience through training and/or studio work. From a perspective of a performer, the concept and practical approach of a character itself essentially includes and signifies all the given circumstance of a specific play which has to be acknowledged then inhabited through the performer's body. That is, the internal structure of the text parallels with articulating and developing the spine of a specific character which take place as the substance leads the performer's body to an organic action and/or that of way corresponding to what the character needs and wants to obtain through a series of moment on stage. Here, we argue that the purposeful action as a process and result of applying/inhabiting the substance enhances the performer's body as the whole being participates in the given environment within which his/her body can also work or function by means of the integrated oneness. Second, in a manner of the most fundamental level, both the ethic of acting and the central task of a performer remind us the significance of allowing therefore experiencing subtle bodily movement, namely, responses to stimulus from in/outside of his/her body either visible or invisible on the one hand. At the same time, such a journey of self-discovery empowers the performer to explore new potential possibilities on the other. Finally, as the research finding suggests that these practical insights are necessarily need to be acknowledged as a point of the departure through which the quality of a performer's body is also cultivated by means of the changeable wholeness in order to being on stage.

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