Acting

French stage and early film actress Sarah

Bernhardt as Hamlet
Actors in samurai and rōnin costume 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 character
—in 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
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:
ὑπόκρισις, hypokrisis) discuss it as part
of rhetoric.[1]

History of acting
The first actor

One of the first known 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 chorus
and 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 storytelling—enactment and
narration—Aristotle uses the terms
"mimesis" (via enactment) and
"diegesis" (via narration). From Thespis'
name derives the word "thespian".

Professional and amateur

acting
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
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
widespread. These classes introduce
young actors to different aspects of
acting and theatre, including scene
study.

Increased training and exposure to

public speaking allows humans to
maintain calmer and more relaxed
physiologically.[2] By measuring a public
speaker’s heart rate maybe one of the
easiest ways to judge shifts in stress as
the heart rate increases with anxiety . As
actors increase performances, heart
rate and other evidence of stress can
decrease.[3] This is very important in
training for actors, as adaptive strategies
gained from increased exposure to
public speaking can regulate implicit and
explicit anxiety.[4] By attending an
institution with a specialization in acting,
increased opportunity to act will lead to
more relaxed physiology and decrease
in stress and its effects on the body.
These effects can vary from hormonal to
cognitive health that can impact quality
of life and performance [5]

Improvisation

Two masked characters from the commedia

dell'arte, whose "lazzi" involved a significant
degree of improvisation.
degree of improvisation.

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.[6] 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.[7] Stanislavski
would develop this use of improvisation
in his work with his First Studio of the
Moscow Art Theatre.[8] 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.

Physiological effects
Speaking or acting in front of an
audience is a stressful situation, which
causes an increased heart rate[9]
(Baldwin, 1980 [10] Lacey, 1995).

In a 2017 study on American university

students, actors of various experience
levels all showed similarly elevated heart
rates throughout their performances;
this agrees with previous studies on
professional and amateur actors' heart
rates[11](Konijin,1993). While all actors
experienced stress, causing elevated
heart rate, the more experienced actors
displayed less heart rate variability than
the less experienced actors in the same
play. The more experienced actors
experienced less stress while
performing, and therefore had a smaller
degree of variability than the less
experienced, more stressed actors. The
more experienced an actor is, the more
stable their heart rate will be while
performing, but will still experience
elevated heart rates.

Semiotics of acting
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 charmer
affects 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
semiotician Félix 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 circulation 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 drama—a
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 choices—a
process that he describes as
establishing the "not/but" element in a
performed physical "gestus" within
context of 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 claims, 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
demonstrating performer—and, beyond
that, to Denis Diderot's foundational
essay on the art of acting, Paradox of
the Actor (c. 1770—78)—argues that:

Acting was long seen in terms of

the actor's sincerity or
hypocrisy—should 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.[12]

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.[12] 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."[12] 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 artificial 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.[12]
The conventions that govern acting in
general are related to structured forms
of play, which involve, in each specific
experience, "rules of the game."[13] This
aspect was first explored by Johan
Huizinga (in Homo Ludens, 1938) and
Roger Caillois (in Man, Play and Games,
1958).[14] 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 or
catharsis).[13] 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
engage 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)[15]

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 Anglo-Saxon
plèga or Latin ludus) was the standard
term used until William Shakespeare's
time for a dramatic entertainment—just
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."[16]

Resume and Auditioning

Actors and actresses need to make a
resume [17] when they go to auditions,
similarly to when people of other
occupations go into an interview. The
acting resume is very different from the
normal resume, it has a lot less
information on it with lists, instead of
paragraphs and it should have the head
shot [18] on the back.

Auditioning is the act of performing

either a monologue [19] or sides [20] the
casting director either mails or emails to
the actors right before your audition.
Auditioning entails showing the skills the
actors have to instantly turn into a
completely different person within a
two-minute frame period. For theater
auditions it can be longer than two
minutes or they can perform more than
one monologue, each casting director
can have different requirements for
actors. For auditions, actors will have to
go dressed similarly to the character
they are auditioning for to make it easier
for the casting director to visualize them
as the character. For television or film
they will have to undergo more than one
audition, if the casting director chooses
to put them forward into the process.
Oftentimes actors are called into another
audition last minute and will send them
the sides either the morning of or the
night before. Auditioning can be part of
the stressful side to acting, especially if
one is not trained to audition.

Rehearsing
Rehearsal is a process in which actors
prepare and practice 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.

Audience and the actor

A critical audience with evaluative
spectators is known to induce stress on
actors during performance,[21] (see
Bode & Brutten) and an actor will
typically rate the quality of their
performance higher than their
spectators.[22] Heart rates are generally
always higher during a performance
with an audience when compared to
rehearsal, however what's interesting is
that this audience also seems to induce
a higher quality of performance. Simply
put, while public performances cause
extremely high stress levels in actors
(more so amateur ones), the stress
actually improves the performance,
supporting the idea of "positive stress in
challenging situations"[23]

Heart rate while acting

Depending on what an actor is doing,
his or her heart rate will vary. This is the
body's way of responding to stress.
Prior to a show one will see an increase
in heart rate due to anxiety. While
performing an actor has an increased
sense of exposure which will increase
performance anxiety and the associated
physiological arousal, such as heart
rate.[24] Heart rates increases more
during shows compared to rehearsals
because of the increased pressure,
which is due to the fact that a
performance has a potentially greater
impact on an actors career.[24] After the
show you will see a decrease in the
heart rate due to the conclusion of the
stress inducing activity. Often the heart
rate will return to normal after the show
or performance is done;[25] however,
during the applause after the
performance there is a rapid spike in
heart rate.[26] This can be seen not only
in actors but also with public speaking
and musicians.[25]

Stress

There is a correlation between heart-

rate and stress when actors' are
performing in front of an audience.
Actors claim that having an audience
has no change in their stress level, but
as soon as they come on stage their
heart-rate rises quickly.[27] A 2017 study
done in an American University looking
at actors' stress by measuring heart-rate
showed individual heart-rates rose right
before the performance began for those
actors opening. There are many factors
that can add to an actors' stress. For
example, length of monologues,
experience level, and actions done on
stage including moving the set.
Throughout the performance heart-rate
rises the most before an actor is
speaking. The stress and thus heart-rate
of the actor then drops significantly at
the end of a monologue, big action
scene, or performance.[28] This idea of
getting stressed during the anticipation
period for any big moment happening is
applied throughout the performance.
Stress, therefore, has a bigger impact
on the actor's overall performance
whether motivating or pressuring them
to give a more proficient end
performance.

See also
Biomechanics
Meisner technique
Method acting
Presentational and representational
acting
Stanislavski's system
 Viewpoints
Lists of actors

References
1. Csapo and Slater (1994, 257);
hypokrisis, which literally means
"acting," was the word used in
discussions of rhetorical delivery.
2. Zuardi; Crippa; Gorayeb (2012).
"Human experimental anxiety: actual
public speaking induces more intense
physiological responses than simulated
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248–253. doi:10.1590/1516-4446-
2012-0930 . Retrieved 2017-03-13.
3. Mesri, Bita; Niles, Andrea; Pittig,
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Craske, Michelle (2017). "Public
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Journal of Behavior Therapy &
Experimental Psychiatry. 55: 66–72.
doi:10.1016/j.jbtep.2016.11.010 .
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Amit (2012). "Explicit and Implicit
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5. Sonia, Lupien; McEwen, Bruce;
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"Effects of stress throughout the lifespan
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7. Benedetti (1999, 203-204) and
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8. Benedetti (1999, 204) and
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9. Baldwin, Clevenger, T (1980). "Effect
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11. Konijin. "What's on between the
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12. Pavis (1998, 7).
13. Pavis (1998, 8-9).
14. Pavis (1998, 8).
15. Halliwell (1995, 37).
16. Wickham (1959, 32—41; 1969, 133;
1981, 68—69). The sense of the creator
of plays as a "maker" rather than a
"writer" is preserved in the word
"playwright." The Theatre, one of the
first purpose-built playhouses in London,
was "a self-conscious latinism to
describe one particular playhouse"
rather than a term for the buildings in
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68).
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18. "Headshots: Everything You Need to
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19. "the definition of monologue" .
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20. "What Are the Sides for Acting
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25. Wells, Ruth (October 4, 2012).
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