The purpose of this study is to investigate how professional actors create a stage performance. We gave two professional actors the same script, and observed their creative processes. We then examined the commonality and divergence of the two actors’ skills.
An actor’s speech-acting is the central element of a stage performance. “The empty space” (Brook, 1968) is called the naked stage. One crosses over into “the empty space” and another observes him/her. That is all there is to acting. Actors have the skills to establish “a meaningful environment” (Gibson, 1986) on the stage. This meaningful environment is embedded in the actors’ physical movement and hand gestures. Speech-acting is an event in which a person tries to do something in concert with others (Sasaki, 2006). Within this, multi-layered events occur simultaneously.
