Emotion and Acting Theory Response

Paul Andreas Fischer

7/1/2015

Intro to Acting

With the domination Hollywood and Broadway on discourse about acting it is easy to forget historic recordings of acting methodology and study have existed for millennia. Even the staple of Shakespeare in high school curricula bras the ancient history of acting. Luckily at Patton High School I was able to perform a soliloquy as Agamemnon, a Greek king. At Burlington High School we read the Odyssey in English class, and this lesson highlights such poetic fusion of bard and actor.

This fusion as an inception or flashpoint at the issue of representation. In the lesson this is identified as typical of Diderot and “Renaissance Idealism”, which present a “strong rebellion against the ‘objective’ rationalism of Enlightenment thinking.” Does this show an evolution or devolution of the actor, the move from representation to playing? To resolve this fundamental question further evaluation of characterization will be necessary.

The characterization incorporates rational control into the methods necessitated for effective acting. This means a total control of the character, beyond simple emotion. From speech to movement, all become integrated into acting as espoused by Stanislavsky, who influenced no nation so greatly as the USA. He was cursed by contradiction, however, and the discovery of physical precision was marred by extensive early emphasis on emotion in acting.

The lesson provides, however, I believe a succinct and clear defense of Stanislavsky. By tracing the development of method acting, or living the life of the characters, from Stanislavsky and later Strasberg in New York to ancient debates over 2,000 years old of the role of emotion in acting, the method is spared from accusations of a break in academic integrity or logical rationale. The perpetrators of this train of thought are quite clearly guilty of a break or at least late communication with their archeological, philosophical, or historical academic departments; the paradox Stanislavsky had spent his career elaborating had already been precisely identified in discourse between Socrates and Ion.

After exposing this duplicity in academic procedures, what is left to be made of the “apparently inexhaustible combat between technique and inspiration in performance theory” is a question of considerable heft. In conclusion the lesson refers to the work of the head and the heart. The extension naturally would be the hands. To quote Metropolis, “the heart is the mediator between the head and the hands.” In sum, the next critical acting components are the social and political implications of the acting. The impact of the actor not just on self and the audience, but upon the society which receives the values and beliefs, sarcasm and earnest of the play.