Acting

Acting is the art of telling a story by embodying a character, using performance in theatre, film, television, radio, or any medium that relies on imitation. The craft draws on a wide set of abilities: a strong imagination, emotional range, physical expressiveness, clear vocal projection, precise speech, and the skill to analyze dramatic material. In early Western thought, acting was primarily examined as a branch of rhetoric.

History

The first known actor in the Western tradition was Thespis of Icaria, a Greek performer from Athens. Aristotle, writing about two centuries later in his Poetics, proposed that Thespis stepped out from the dithyrambic chorus and addressed it as a separate character. Before this shift, the chorus narrated events in the third person (e.g., "Dionysus did this").

Thespis instead spoke as if he were the character (e.g., "I am Dionysus, I did this"). Aristotle distinguished these two modes of storytelling as mimesis (enactment) and diegesis (narration). The word "thespian" comes from Thespis’s name.

Training

Training in acting typically takes place at conservatories and drama schools, which offer two- to four-year programs, or at universities, which usually offer three- to four-year programs where students can specialize in acting while also learning other aspects of theatre. Approaches vary, but in North America the most common method is based on Konstantin Stanislavski’s "system," later developed into method acting by Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler, Sanford Meisner, and others. Other approaches emphasize physicality, as seen in the work of Anne Bogart, Jacques Lecoq, Jerzy Grotowski, or Vsevolod Meyerhold. Classes may cover psychotechnique, mask work, physical theatre, improvisation, and acting for camera.

Regardless of the school, students receive intensive training in textual interpretation, voice, and movement. Admission to drama programs and conservatories usually requires extensive auditions, and anyone over 18 can apply. Training can also begin at a very young age, with acting classes and professional schools for those under 18 offering instruction in scene study and other aspects of theatre.

Increased training and public speaking experience help actors maintain a calmer physiology; measuring a public speaker’s heart rate is a simple way to assess stress changes, as heart rate rises with anxiety. As actors perform more, their heart rate and other stress indicators may drop. This is crucial in training, because adaptive strategies gained from frequent public speaking can regulate both implicit and explicit anxiety. Attending a specialized acting institution, with its greater performance opportunities, leads to a more relaxed physiology and reduced stress, with effects ranging from hormonal balance to cognitive health that influence quality of life and performance.

Improvisation

Improvisation has been a key element in some classical forms of acting, most notably in the commedia dell’arte, a masked comedy tradition from Italy. As an approach to training, improvisation became important in Konstantin Stanislavski’s "system," which he developed from the 1910s onward. In late 1910, playwright Maxim Gorky invited Stanislavski to Capri, where they discussed training and Stanislavski’s emerging "grammar" of acting. Inspired by a popular Neapolitan performance using commedia dell’arte techniques, Gorky suggested forming a company modeled on medieval strolling players, where a playwright and young actors would devise new plays through improvisation.

Stanislavski later expanded this use of improvisation with his First Studio of the Moscow Art Theatre. His students Michael Chekhov and Maria Knebel further developed the technique. In the United Kingdom, improvisation was pioneered by Joan Littlewood from the 1930s, followed by Keith Johnstone and Clive Barker. In the United States, Viola Spolin promoted it after studying with Neva Boyd at Hull House in Chicago from 1924 to 1927.

Like the British practitioners, Spolin believed that playing games was a useful training tool that improved performance. She argued that improvisation allows expressive freedom because the outcome is unknown, requiring an open mind to maintain spontaneity rather than pre-planning. In this approach, an actor creates a character, often without a dramatic text, and a drama emerges from spontaneous interactions with other actors. British filmmaker Mike Leigh has developed this method extensively in films such as Secrets & Lies (1996).