Overview of Culminating Study
The study I am preparing to formally propose emerges from a gap that is both scholarly and practical. While a growing body of research documents the psychological and emotional challenges facing performing artists, much of this scholarship centers professional actors or examines well-being through quantitative measures of stress, anxiety, and burnout. Considerably less qualitative research centers actors specifically within higher education training environments and examines well-being as an evolving, lived experience across the full arc of rehearsal and performance. That gap is where this study intervenes.
My current research question is: How do actors in higher education training programs describe and make meaning of their well-being throughout the rehearsal and performance process? Rather than approaching well-being as a clinical designation or measuring it solely through symptoms of distress, I understand well-being broadly as encompassing emotional, psychological, relational, and embodied experience. I am particularly interested in well-being as something dynamic rather than static: something actors continually experience, negotiate, interpret, and potentially redefine as they move through rehearsal and performance.
Existing scholarship establishes an important foundation for this inquiry. Research suggests that actors and performing artists may experience elevated depression, anxiety, stress, self-criticism, and other threats to psychological well-being. More recent qualitative research has examined character immersion and the strategies actors use to transition into and release characters, suggesting that psychological well-being may be connected not only to what actors perform but also to how they enter, sustain, and leave performance experiences. Within actor training specifically, Hartley calls attention to identity, agency, boundaries, trauma, and institutional responsibility in the development of more trauma-informed approaches to actor training. A significant gap remains between research concerning professional actors and research centered on actors who are still being trained within higher education institutions. My study seeks to contribute to that gap by treating actors in training not simply as recipients of pedagogical practices, but as knowledgeable interpreters of their own experiences.
The study is grounded in a constructivist orientation toward meaning-making. From this perspective, participants do not simply report an objective experience of well-being; they construct interpretations of their experiences in relationship to context, identity, institutional culture, and the language available to them. Hochschild's theory of emotional labor serves as the study's primary theoretical framework, providing language for understanding how performers regulate and manage their internal emotional states in response to the demands of their craft and the expectations of their training environments. In actor training, where emotional expression can become simultaneously personal, artistic, pedagogical, and evaluative, emotional labor provides a way of examining what actors are being asked to manage internally and how they understand the consequences of that work.
I currently envision the methodology as a qualitative, multi-method design consisting of three complementary approaches. Semi-structured interviews will serve as the primary data collection method and will be analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis. Participants will be actors currently enrolled in or recently graduated from university, conservatory, or similar postsecondary actor-training programs who have completed at least one full rehearsal and performance process within their training. A self-study component will allow me to examine my positionality as an actor, registered drama therapist, and educator as part of the inquiry rather than attempting to bracket it from the research. Through reflective writing and documentation, I will consider how my own experiences, assumptions, and responses shape the questions I ask and the interpretations I make. An arts-based research component will create space to examine dimensions of actor experience that are embodied, affective, or performative and may not be fully articulated through verbal interview data alone. The precise form of this component remains intentionally emergent; rather than predetermining an artistic form, I anticipate allowing its development to respond to what becomes significant through the research process. [See Appendix: Qualitative Research Challenge: Research Question Paper]
This study is situated within Educational Theatre because it ultimately asks a pedagogical question: What can actors' accounts of their own well-being teach us about the environments in which we train them? Higher education actor-training programs do more than teach performance techniques. They create cultures in which emerging artists learn what artistic commitment, vulnerability, discipline, risk, boundaries, and rigor are supposed to mean. Understanding how actors experience those cultures may offer important insight into how actor training can maintain artistic rigor while more intentionally attending to agency, identity, and well-being.
The findings from this study may have implications for rehearsal practices, faculty preparation, institutional policy, and the ways higher education programs conceptualize responsibility for actor well-being. My goal is not to argue that difficult artistic work should be made comfortable or that emotional challenge should be removed from actor training. Rather, I am interested in examining more carefully the conditions under which that challenge occurs and learning from actors themselves what supports or threatens their ability to remain well while engaging deeply in the work.
This study does not emerge in isolation from my practice. Performing with Care, the original performer wellness curriculum I have developed across my doctoral work, represents my existing practitioner response to the gap this study seeks to examine. Built from professional observation, clinical training, and artistic experience, it reflects my current practitioner understanding of how performer well-being might be supported across the arc of a production process. The culminating study places that practitioner knowledge in conversation with the lived experiences and meaning-making of other actors. Their accounts may affirm, complicate, challenge, or redirect assumptions embedded within the existing curriculum. In this way, the study and the practice exist in ongoing dialogue. The research does not produce Performing with Care. It interrogates and refines it. What emerges from that process will shape what the curriculum becomes. [See Appendix: Performing with Care]