Musical actors must think much of integrated balance of music, acting and movement due to the nature of the genre. Therefore they should get a combined basic training to portray given characters ideally. To keep the integrated balance, first of all, t...
Musical actors must think much of integrated balance of music, acting and movement due to the nature of the genre. Therefore they should get a combined basic training to portray given characters ideally. To keep the integrated balance, first of all, the actor should possess analytical skills of theater songs and get a vocal training to convey them to the audience effectively. Secondly, a speech training should be done to deliver a line. Thirdly, an actor must have a physical training to present a play by movements. Actors would be at the risk of exposure to high level of skills if they don’t get enough training. Therefore actors must prepare proper physical training prior to this kind of play. Thus the aim of this thesis is exploring the way of training for musical actors of the Shiki Theatre Company as an integrated training program to portray various characters and plays. Firstly, to study the way of training of the Shiki Theatre Company, I translate the company’s instruction for acting, ‘The method of the Shiki Theater’ written by Asari Keita for the first time and refer it. The purpose of this thesis is to inspect closely the Company’s own independent actor training method by this translation.
The training method of the Shiki Theatre Company aims to deliver a line to the audience precisely by integrated training such as physical skills, respiration training through division of beats, and the vocalization the shape of mouth using vowels.
First, programs of physical training for actors are provided variously for a week. Actors get a ballet lesson as a basic training and those lessons are divided into high, medium and low according to each actor’s physical condition. Through this training, the actors’ body become well-balanced. In addition, jazz, hiphop, yoga, traditional dance, and awaking which is helpful for fitness training are provided to cover a wide variety of genres.
Second, the actor training of the Shiki Theatre Company has a the respiration discipline with a division of beats.
This training is done by dividing beats, controlling short or long respiration according to the proper count and repeating them. This one could lay the foundation for an actor’s vocalization, and the ability of delivering a line and controlling the pace of respiration.
Third, the original vocalization training method of the Shiki Theatre Company is the vocalization the shape of mouth. Its own vocalization the shape of mouth is a repetition of vowels in the original beat respiration way. And if actors acclimatize to using vowels, then use consonants in the same way. With this training, actors can produce resonance more effectively and keep a resonant voice.
Lastly, the writer studied establishing characters cases of the license musical, ‘The Lion King’ basing on the training method of the Shiki Theatre Company. For example, in case of ‘Eulogy’ of the Rafiki character, the character’s psychological state and emotional changes can be controlled by the beat division training. And also the character Sarabi’s lines are improved by the vowel training vocalization the shape of mouth. And finally, character Simba’s number ‘endless night’ can be used to understand emotions and change of psychology by analyzing music and lyrics with the integrated training method.
I give significance in introducing the training method for musical actors of the Shiki Theatre Company to Korea and hopes this method could be a stepping stone for establishing physical balance to create one’s own character of a play as the discipline for musical actors.