Overcoming Blanking: Verbal and Visual Features of Prompting in Theatre Rehearsals

Abstract In theatre rehearsals, actors can occasionally be seen getting stuck in the play text, which is called blanking. To overcome such textual difficulties and continue with given a prompter verbalize line question, thus contributing to an actor’s word search by prompting. The paper focuses on interactional practices prompters interactionally resolve blanking situations. This study’s data comprises case collection of 67 prompting situations, are taken from 200-h video corpus rehearsal process at professional theatre. These cases demonstrate how professionals organize situations they negotiate/sanction actions as when there was no but dramatic pause or performance interrupted due missing prompt. addition audiovisual recordings, eye tracking person also used describe coordination visual resources context multimodal interaction analysis. analysis suggests that persons interactively blankings help verbal markers.