School
of Creative
Industries
Daniel Jenkins
An actor, director and educator, Daniel Jenkins’ qualifications include a Diploma in Acting, a Licentiate in Drama Teaching, a BA Honours Degree in Theatre, and an MA in Arts Pedagogy and Practice. Daniel has taught acting for over 20 years and has been an adjunct lecturer at LASALLE College of the Arts for the last 10 years. His professional acting and directing work has encompassed theatre, television and film, having worked for all major theatre companies in Singapore. He has twice won the Straits Times Life Theatre Award for Best Supporting Actor and is Associate Artistic Director at Singapore Repertory Theatre.
Work
Success is generated from knowledge, critical thinking, and curiosity. Knowledge to understand the world as well as ourselves, critical thinking to incorporate knowledge and apply it, and curiosity drives us to acquire additional knowledge. Daniel wants to stimulate and encourage thinking rather than provide answers and resolve problems, to give students professional competency, excellence, energy, and fair treatment, provoking imagination, confidence and self-learning. Research interests include actor training, emotional creation and a music-inspired approach to imaginative creativity.
Thesis abstract
A music-inspired strategy as an actor training technique: a study into the use of music to access emotional memory
Acting and music have a lot in common and often share similar terminology. From rhythm, tempo, beats and tone, there is a musicality to language, text, physicality and emotion, and yet a focused music-inspired strategy for actor training has not been explored. My thesis attempts to fill this gap.
By introducing music within the actor training classroom my research looks at what music can do to aid an actor in their search for emotional connection and physical and imaginative freedom, through the creation of memories both real and fictitious. I explore how music can build character, place, and history, whilst quietening the actors’ self-judgment. Supporting this research is an exploration into actor-training, both from a historical and a contemporary perspective, focusing on the use of music within the acting studio.
The research was conducted with the help of 9 students of acting at LASALLE College of the Arts in Singapore, and 6 professional actors. These 2 groups were chosen to form a comparison between actors-in-training and professionals, and their differing approaches, experiences and results. A qualitative approach to recording and analysing data through observations, participants' reflections and interviews was employed. The results showed a strong potential for the use of music-inspired exercises within actor training and encouraged further research.
Keywords: music, subconscious episodic memory, emotion, BRECVEMA, freedom, flow, Stanislavski, Chekhov, Csikszentmihalyi