Acting? The Excerpts Which Explore What Is

¶ … Acting? The excerpts which explore what is acting tend to shed light on this often very perplexing issue. While many people can identify good acting vs. bad acting, few people can verbalize what makes some acting better than others. The first excerpt, by Antoine Artaud, fulfills exactly what the title elucidates, it explores acting as a specific form of athleticism: "the actor is an athlete of the heart" (133). The excerpts regarding Stanislavski's system explored much what this system is famous for: the actor being able to control his inspiration (5).

This excerpt covers the Stanislavski system of using a method of physical action to control inspiration and subconscious emotions. The Stanislavski system discusses so heavily finding a way through the method to produce these genuine emotions to give birth to real people on stage, but I still feel that this can be a very opaque process and one which doesn't always have guaranteed success.

What is Spectatorship? The excerpts which truly attempt to explore the conundrum of membership to an audience truly strikes a truthful chord when it asserts, "A play achieves resonance when all its actors are bound together in a common faith and consciousness. A play receives its echo from the audience" as stated by Harold Churman. This is indeed the truth. If anything, theatre is a shared experience. Without members of the audience, there is no theatre.

Members of the audience are needed to bear witness or to receive what is being offered. What is Performance? The excerpts on what is performance view it from a myriad of perspectives, many of which overlap. For example, some scholars view it as cultural phenomenon, present to some extent with all creatures. Other scholars view it as a strictly temporal phenomenon which the audience has the pressure of attempting to fully absorb. Other yet suggest that it's a presentation of imagination that the audience is asked to take seriously.

The excerpts on performance really reveal how in order for performance to be believable, there has to be total commitment from the actor and a total belief by the actor that these are real circumstances and the actor is embodying a real person. What is Design? The excerpts on design truly reveal the transformative powers of even modest design and how in the act of creation of theater -- which involves imagined people and circumstances -- there really is a crucial burden on design.

The burden is not enormous: so much can be done with the simplest items like light and paint. However, design needs to be treated as another actor on the stage as its performance is palpable, visible and felt. Bad design can strip away from the overall vision of the play.