The Actor's Awareness: An Empirical Examination from the Survey of the Actor's Experience

From September 2005 to June of 2007, I conducted an on-line international survey entitled The Actor’s Experience. In it, I asked actors to describe their experiences when performing. It asked for their ideas about characterisation, emotion, awareness, even what they do after the show. Similar in approach to William Archer’s 1888 survey described in Masks or Faces, my study made use of both a questionnaire and in-person interviews. In examining the data, I observed that many of the respondents repeatedly described a kind of multiple-consciousness wherein they say they are performing a role in a very deep and engaged way – feeling real emotions, yet they are always monitoring what is happening around them on stage and in the audience. The following will examine this by using data from specific questions asked in the survey as well as the responses of actors that volunteered to be interviewed.