Acting: Overview and History

Acting Overview

• Common perception of actors involves glamorous award shows, public attention, and high salaries.
• The reality is different, especially in live theater; overnight successes are rare.
• Actors spend years auditioning and facing rejection, continually honing skills through classes and coaches.
• Actors support themselves with other work due to the difficulty of finding lucrative, stable acting jobs.
• Acting provides a unique emotional and connective rush that other mediums don't offer.
• Professional theatre demands the ultimate test of ability and courage, enticing film and TV actors back to the stage.

History of Acting Theory

• The debate presents is an actor a craftsman or artist.
• Craftsmanship involves using skills to build a character by interpreting the playwright's lines.
• Creating a truthful performance for the audience depends on interpreting the lines set forth
• Artistry applies creativity and imagination to transcend the page and create something individual.
• Acting is paradoxical, demanding emotional exploration and technical mastery simultaneously.
• The technicals aspects include articulation, projection, appropriate voice and physicality, and following directions.
• Reacting to mishaps and audience responses also are a component of acting.
• A "special gift for double-consciousness" separates competent actors from great ones.
• Schools offer various acting classes, but there is no singular teaching method.
• Common questions debated include:
  • What should get the most emphasis, technique or emotion?
  • Should the actor truly feel the emotions or simulate them?
  • What is the necessary personal investment to make the same character feel truthful every night?

Greeks and Romans

• Aristotle believed playwrights should become actors to write persuasively and affectingly.
• Romans adopted the idea that actors must feel emotions.
• The social status of actors was low, as acting was left to slaves and noncitizens, which explains why the topic was not debated.
• Public speaking was important for Roman men entering politics, administration, or law.
• Quintilian, a teacher, advocated feeling emotions first before impersonating them later by recommending physical movements.
• Bodies believed to be affected by imbalances in the body.

Decorum & Shift

• Modulating performance was vital to avoid excess, mainly when switching quickly from one emotion to another.
• The advice of Hamlet suggests a natural delivery of lines and concern for personal safety.
• 18th-century physiology saw the body as a natural machine generating emotions under stress.
• Actors would observe "nature" to create characters, suggesting a universal code of emotions.
• Finding the correct set of movements would represent a characters emotions.
• François Delsarte (1811-1871) took this idea to an extreme, creating "Science of Applied Aesthetics."
• Positioning and movement noted to indicate anyones emotions.
• Delsarte wanted emotional connection to words, but his system was bastardized.

Stanislovsky

• Constantin Stanislavsky went against mechanical and unrealistic performances.
• Stanislavsky's techniques would revolutionize 20th-century acting including in Western training
• He kept notebooks with serious questions, experimenting with acting.
• Stanislavsky created the stage name Stanislavsky over his family name Alekseyev.
• In 1888, Stanislavsky formed the Society of Art and Literature rejecting the "star system" to strive for a sense of ensemble.
• In 1897, in Moscow he and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko created the Moscow Art Theatre (MAT) to overturn the previous artificiality of Russian theatre

System of Acting

• The Seagull was the Moscow Art Theatre’s (MAT) first success in theatre by Anton Chekhov
• Chekhov's plays had characters were human unlike other melodramas
• Later Stanislavky would rely less on external methods for the plays and create the role around inner feeling.
• Common for theatres to present plays for a number of years and Stanislavky believed his work was lifeless.
• Stanislavsky realized his best performances came from "creative mood" or "creative state of mind."
• From 1909 until his death in 1938, Stanislavsky experimented.
• International MAT tours elevated popularity
• An Actors Work on Himself a book by Constantin divided into An Actor Prepares (1936), Building a Character (1948), and Creating a Role (1961).
• Early system inspire relaxation, concentration, naïveté, and imagination.
• Concentration developed ability to focus on objects and sensations
• Naïveté & imagination create childlike belief

Affective Memory

• Affective memory produced appropriate emotional states for a scene.
• Emotions not to be directly accessed, actors would do sensory details.
• Stanislavky considered to only use is as a last resort which led to the method of physical actions.
• The link between the mind and body is inseparable
• Deciding what character wanted overall (the super-objective) and then wanted in each scene (objective).
• Action-based instead of emotion
• Actors would ask "What would I do if I were this character? What actions would I take to reach my objectives?”
• Generations refine Stanislavsky's work & American teachers such as Lee Strasberg emphasized affective memory techniques.
• Michael Chekhov and Vsevelod Meyerhold developed of some techniques.
• Influencers include
  • Rudolf Laban
  • Frederick Matthias Alexander
  • Moshé Feldenkrais
• Vocal innovations
  • Kristin Linklater
  • Arthur Lessac
  • Catherine Fitzmaurice
  • Cicely Berry

Reading Plays

• Reading a play helps build actor understanding of a dramatic text.
• Actors treat each character like a riddle to be solved based on clues provided by the playwright
• To start
• the character's name by looking up its etymology.
• if it accurate or ironic?
• Consider Tennessee Williams's play, A Streetcar Named Desire
• Blanche, derived from the French word blanc, meaning the name eventually came to mean fair or pure.
• Stella, derived from the Latin meaning "star."
• Movements toward realism, influences of Charles Darwin and Sigmund Freud, characters are shaped by environment.
• Its helpful to Construct a backstory for characters based on the text
• Language can tell a character's nature along with word choice & use of grammar reveals volumes on how they relate to the world.
• Special attention to stage directions because "Buyers are liars because customers often lie.
• We wont wont but we have to be open about in real life
• Understanding their objective profound changes a performance.