Strategies for enhancing stage presence in theatre today : an actor-director’s perspective

This thesis presents research in creative practice that explores how directorial approach and staging strategies influence stage presence. It focuses on the actor’s experience in devising contemporary theatre for an international audience. My solo performance, A Snail on the Morning Glory, and this dissertation serve together to provide insight into the phenomenon of stage presence from an actor-director’s perspective. This study aims to provide theatre practitioners with strategies that can enhance stage presence in performance, and assist in forging new audiences for theatre today. The research applies a hybrid methodology, combining creative practice and qualitative methods. These methods include phenomenological thinking, the first-person account, the vocative description, the enquiry cycle of action research, and strategies for the devising process that are generated through rehearsal and performance. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception, I define stage presence as a phenomenon achieved by the synergy between the actor’s drawing power and the audience’s perceptual activity. Stage presence should neither be regarded as just an illusion that denies the actor’s credit, nor received in a manner that isolates the actor from a perceptual relation with the audience and the surrounding environment. This study develops a phenomenological view of stage presence derived from actor-director Joseph Chaikin’s idea of ‘heightened awareness’. For the actor and spectators to obtain the heightened awareness that enhances stage presence, a directorial approach to staging is required to place them into each other’s perceptual focus. This research develops a series of strategies for enhancing stage presence through practice-based inquiry into performing and rehearsing. As a Chinese actor, my experience of observing performances as well as making theatre in Australia and China reveals that strategies for enhancing stage presence can be applied in devising theatre for an international audience