Storytelling as a fundamental form of acting.

Abstract

Acting is a process of pretending to be someone whom the actor is not. Whereas acting is often considered to be a specialized skill of trained professionals, a simple and perhaps universal form of acting occurs during oral storytelling, in which the storyteller acts out the characters of the story during the moments of dialogue and self-reflection. To examine this skill experimentally, we had both trained actors and novices read 4 fairy tales aloud. The stories contained a series of contrastive characters that spanned age, gender, and species. The major dependent variables were the vocal parameters of pitch, loudness, timbre, and speech rate. The results demonstrated that participants created distinguishable acoustic profiles for each character within a story, regardless of the story’s familiarity. Monotonic trend analyses revealed the sequential changes in vocal parameters that were produced as a function of the age, gender, and species of the represented characters. Linear mixed-effects models showed a significant effect of acting training on character portrayal, with actors showing more-expansive pitch depictions than novices. We argue that portraying characters during story reading is one of the most fundamental forms of acting in human life.

Character immersion in video games as a form of acting.

“…The informal nature of role-playing during video game play makes it more similar to informal “proto-acting” (Brown, 2017) than to dramatic acting. Proto-acting is a form of brief and casual role-playing that people engage in on an everyday basis, such as when a speaker quotes a coworker in a conversation, or when a parent quotes Mama Bear while reading Goldilocks and the Three Bears to their toddler before bed (Brown, 2017; Matharu et al, 2022). When someone imitates or quotes another person or character, they are temporarily role-playing as that person and are able to easily switch between being themselves and acting as the other person.…”

“…However, we have opted to use "immersion" as an alternative term to describe a player being temporarily engulfed by the thoughts and emotions of the character during gameplay because it is related to the concept of narrative immersion and transportation (Green et al, 2004;Ryan, 2001Ryan, , 2008. role-playing that people engage in on an everyday basis, such as when a speaker quotes a coworker in a conversation, or when a parent quotes Mama Bear while reading Goldilocks and the Three Bears to their toddler before bed (Brown, 2017;Matharu et al, 2022). When someone imitates or quotes another person or character, they are temporarily role-playing as that person and are able to easily switch between being themselves and acting as the other person.…”

The arts and their functions

“…A storyteller reading such a story aloud-for example, a parent reading a bedtime story to a child-would engage in the mimetic process of character portrayal when reading these passages of dialogue. This would be distinct from the diegetic process of third-person narration about the characters that fills the majority of the story (Matharu, Berry, and Brown, 2021). In Chapter 5, I will refer to these transient bouts of character portrayal during storytelling as proto-acting (Brown, 2017), as related to the general human capacity for personal mimicry and role playing in everyday life.…”

Interaction in acting training and its different manifestations in novice and professional actors

“…Studies that have examined vocal parameters during character portrayal show that trained actors have a more expansive repertoire of prosodic expression than novices ( Berry and Brown, 2019 ; Matharu et al, 2022 ), facilitating their characterization of various types of roles with comprehensiveness and fluency. However, for actors to more clearly grasp the situation and emotional experience required of them in their acting work, it is important that they are competent not only in individual role-making and performance but also in stepping into the imaginary situation and interacting with other characters while playing the role.…”