Acting

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For the legal meaning, see Acting (law). For the military sense, see Acting (rank).

French stage and early film actressSarah Bernhardt as Hamlet

Actors in samurai and ronincostume at the Kyoto Eigamura film set

Acting is an activity in which a story is told by means of its enactment by an actor or actress who adopts
a characterin theatre, television, film, radio, or any other medium that makes use of the mimetic mode.
Acting involves a broad range of skills, including a well-developed imagination, emotional facility,
physical expressivity, vocal projection, clarity of speech, and the ability to interpret drama. Acting also
often demands an ability to employ dialects, accents, improvisation, observation and emulation, mime,
and stage combat. Many actors train at length in specialist programmes or colleges to develop these
skills. The vast majority of professional actors have undergone extensive training. Actors and actresses
will often have many instructors and teachers for a full range of training involving singing, scene-work,
audition techniques, and acting for camera.

Most early sources in the West that examine the art of acting (Greek: , hypokrisis) discuss it
as part of rhetoric.[1]

Contents
[hide]

1The first actor

2Professional and amateur acting

3Training

4Improvisation

5Semiotics of acting

6Rehearsing

7See also

8References

9Sources

10External links

The first actor[edit]

One of the first actors is believed to have been an ancient Greek called Thespis of Icaria. Writing two
centuries after the event, Aristotle in his Poetics (c. 335 BCE) suggests that Thespis stepped out of
the dithyrambic chorusand addressed it as a separate character. Before Thespis, the
chorus narrated (for example, "Dionysus did this, Dionysus said that"). When Thespis stepped out from
the chorus, he spoke as if he was the character (for example, "I am Dionysus. I did this"). To distinguish
between these different modes of storytellingenactment and narrationAristotle uses the terms
"mimesis" (via enactment) and "diegesis" (via narration). From Thespis' name derives the word
"thespian".

Professional and amateur acting[edit]

Further information: Actor and Amateur theatre
A professional actor is someone who is paid to act. Professional actors sometimes undertake unpaid
work for a variety of reasons, including educational purposes or for charity events. Amateur actors are
those who do not receive payment for performances.
Not all people working as actors in film, television, or theatre are professionally trained. Bob Hoskins, for
example, had no formal training before becoming an actor.

Training[edit]
Further information: Drama school

Members of the First Studio, with whom Stanislavski began to develop his 'system' of actor
training, which forms the basis for most professional training in the West.
Conservatories and drama schools typically offer two- to four-year training on all aspects of acting.
Universities mostly offer three- to four-year programs, in which a student is often able to choose to focus
on acting, whilst continuing to learn about other aspects of theatre. Schools vary in their approach, but in
North America the most popular method taught derives from the 'system' of Konstantin Stanislavski,
which was developed and popularised in America as method acting by Lee Strasberg, Stella
Adler, Sanford Meisner, and others.
Other approaches may include a more physically based orientation, such as that promoted by theatre
practitioners as diverse as Anne Bogart, Jacques Lecoq, Jerzy Grotowski, or Vsevolod Meyerhold.
Classes may also include psychotechnique, mask work, physical theatre, improvisation, and acting for
camera.
Regardless of a school's approach, students should expect intensive training in textual interpretation,
voice, and movement. Applications to drama programmes and conservatories usually involve
extensive auditions. Anybody over the age of 18 can usually apply. Training may also start at a very
young age. Acting classes and professional schools targeted at under-18s are wide-spread. These
classes introduce young actors to different aspects of acting and theatre, including scene study.

Improvisation[edit]
Further information: Improvisational theatre and Devised theatre

Two masked characters from thecommedia dell'arte, whose "lazzi" involved a significant degree
ofimprovisation.
Some classical forms of acting involve a substantial element of improvised performance. Most notable is
its use by the troupes of the commedia dell'arte, a form of masked comedy that originated in Italy.

Improvisation as an approach to acting formed an important part of the Russian theatre

practitioner Konstantin Stanislavski's 'system' of actor training, which he developed from the 1910s
onwards. Late in 1910, the playwright Maxim Gorky invited Stanislavski to join him in Capri, where they
discussed training and Stanislavski's emerging "grammar" of acting.[2] Inspired by a popular theatre
performance in Naples that utilised the techniques of the commedia dell'arte, Gorky suggested that they
form a company, modelled on the medieval strolling players, in which a playwright and group of young
actors would devise new plays together by means of improvisation.[3] Stanislavski would develop this use
of improvisation in his work with his First Studio of the Moscow Art Theatre.[4] Stanislavski's use was
extended further in the approaches to acting developed by his students, Michael Chekhov and Maria
Knebel.
In the United Kingdom, the use of improvisation was pioneered by Joan Littlewood from the 1930s
onwards and, later, by Keith Johnstone and Clive Barker. In the United States, it was promoted by Viola
Spolin, after working with Neva Boyd at a Hull House in Chicago, Illinois (Spolin was Boyd's student from
1924 to 1927). Like the British practitioners, Spolin felt that playing games was a useful means of
training actors and helped to improve an actor's performance. With improvisation, she argued, people
may find expressive freedom, since they do not know how an improvised situation will turn out.
Improvisation demands an open mind in order to maintain spontaneity, rather than pre-planning a
response. A character is created by the actor, often without reference to a dramatic text, and a drama is
developed out of the spontenous interactions with other actors. This approach to creating new drama
has been developed most substantially by the British filmmaker Mike Leigh, in films such as Secrets &
Lies (1996), Vera Drake (2004), Another Year (2010), and Mr. Turner (2014).
Improvisation is also used to cover up if an actor or actress makes a mistake.

Semiotics of acting[edit]

Antonin Artaud compared the effect of an actor's performance on an audience in his "Theatre of
Cruelty" with the way in which a snake charmeraffects snakes.
The semiotics of acting involves a study of the ways in which aspects of a performance come to operate
for its audience as signs. This process largely involves the production of meaning, whereby elements of
an actor's performance acquire significance, both within the broader context of the dramatic action and
in the relations each establishes with the real world.
Following the ideas proposed by the Surrealist theorist Antonin Artaud, however, it may also be possible
to understand communication with an audience that occurs 'beneath' significance and meaning (which
the semioticianFlix Guattari described as a process involving the transmission of "a-signifying signs").
In his The Theatre and its Double (1938), Artaud compared this interaction to the way in which a snake
charmer communicates with a snake, a process which he identified as "mimesis"the same term
that Aristotle in his Poetics (c. 335 BCE) used to describe the mode in which drama communicates its
story, by virtue of its embodiment by the actor enacting it, as distinct from "diegesis", or the way in which
a narrator may describe it. These "vibrations" passing from the actor to the audience may not

necessarily precipiate into significant elements as such (that is, consciously perceived "meanings"), but
rather may operate by means of the circulaton of "affects".
The approach to acting adopted by other theatre practitioners involve varying degrees of concern with
the semiotics of acting. Konstantin Stanislavski, for example, addresses the ways in which an actor,
building on what he calls the "experiencing" of a role, should also shape and adjust a performance in
order to support the overall significance of the dramaa process that he calls establishing the
"perspective of the role". The semiotics of acting plays a far more central role in Bertolt Brecht's epic
theatre, in which an actor is concerned to bring out clearly the sociohistorical significance of behaviour
and action by means of specific performance choicesa process that he describes as establishing the
"not/but" element in a performed physical "gestus" within context of the the play's overal
"Fabel". Eugenio Barba argues that actors ought not to concern themselves with the significance of their
performance behaviour; this aspect is the responsibility, he feels, of the director, who weaves the
signifying elements of an actor's performance into the director's dramaturgical "montage".
The theatre semiotician Patrice Pavis, alluding to the contrast between Stanislavski's 'system' and
Brecht's demonstating performerand, beyond that, to Denis Diderot's foundational essay on the art of
acting, Paradox of the Actor (c. 177078)argues that:
Acting was long seen in terms of the actor's sincerity or hypocrisyshould he believe in what he is
saying and be moved by it, or should he distance himself and convey his role in a detached manner?
The answer varies according to how one sees the effect to be produced in the audience and the social
function of theatre.[5]
Elements of a semiotics of acting include the actor's gestures, facial expressions, intonation and other
vocal qualities, rhythm, and the ways in which these aspects of an individual performance relate to the
drama and the theatrical event (or film, television programme, or radio broadcast, each of which involves
different semiotic systems) considered as a whole.[6] A semiotics of acting recognises that all forms of
acting involve conventions and codes by means of which performance behaviour acquires significance
including those approaches, such as Stanislvaski's or the closely related method acting developed in the
United States, that offer themselves as "a natural kind of acting that can do without conventions and be
received as self-evident and universal."[5] Pavis goes on to argue that:
Any acting is based on a codified system (even if the audience does not see it as such) of behaviour and
actions that are considered to be believable and realistic or artifical and theatrical. To advocate the
natural, the spontaneous, and the instinctive is only to attempt to produce natural effects, governed by
an ideological code that determines, at a particular historical time, and for a given audience, what is
natural and believable and what is declamatory and theatrical.[5]
The conventions that govern acting in general are related to structured forms of play, which involve, in
each specific experience, "rules of the game."[7] This aspect was first explored by Johan
Huizinga (in Homo Ludens, 1938) and Roger Caillois (in Man, Play and Games, 1958).[8] Caillois, for
example, distinguishes four apects of play relevant to acting: mimesis (simulation), agon (conflict or
competition), alea (chance), and illinx (vertigo, or "vertiginous psychological situations" involving the
spectator's identification orcatharsis).[7] This connection with play as an activity was first proposed by
Aristotle in his Poetics, in which he defines the desire to imitate in play as an essential part of being
human and our first means of learning as children:
For it is an instinct of human beings, from childhood, to enage in mimesis (indeed, this distinguishes
them from other animals: man is the most mimetic of all, and it is through mimesis that he develops his
earliest understanding); and equally natural that everyone enjoys mimetic objects. (IV, 1448b)[9]
This connection with play also informed the words used in English (as was the analogous case in many
other European languages) for drama: the word "play" or "game" (translating the AngloSaxon plga or Latin ludus) was the standard term used until William Shakespeare's time for a dramatic
entertainmentjust as its creator was a "play-maker" rather than a "dramatist", the person acting was
known as a "player", and, when in the Elizabethan era specific buildings for acting were built, they was
known as "play-houses" rather than "theatres."[10]

Rehearsing[edit]
Rehearsal is a process in which actors prepare and practise a performance, exploring the vicissitudes
of conflict between characters, testing specific actions in the scene, and finding means to convey a
particular sense. Some actors continue to rehearse a scene throughout the run of a show in order to
keep the scene fresh in their minds and exciting for the audience.