The Art Of Acting

Acting is the work of an actor or actress, which is a person in theatre, television, film, or any other storytelling medium who tells the story by portraying a character and, usually, speaking or singing the written text or play.

Most early sources in the West that examine the art of acting discuss it as part of rhetoric.

Definition and history

One of the first actors is believed to be an ancient Greek called Thespis of Icaria. An apocryphal story says that Thespis stepped out of the dithyrambic chorus and spoke to them as a separate character. Before Thespis, the chorus narrated . When Thespis stepped out from the chorus, he spoke as if he was the character . From Thespis ' name derives the word thespian.

Acting requires a wide range of

The audience no longer sees the actor as a performer, but sees a character as a completely different being. Once this shift occurs, the actor becomes a semiotic device communicating a set of signs to the audience. A character’s signification can represent a multitude of different meanings to the audience. This may or may not be intended by the actor, who has limited control over how the audience will “read” the character. For example, if the actor is playing a character diagnosed with cancer, the audience may not just see a cancer patient, but may instead see a character similar to other cancer victims or survivors they have known. The actor’s performance, like any text, must be read by the

The actor’s performance is mediated by particular semiotic signs including facial expression, emotion, and vocabulary. All these examples are known as performance signs. Performance signs are simple codes that the audience must decode during the actor 's performance. It is the actor’s job to deliver those codes effectively to the audience. If the audience does not find the character believable, then the actor has failed in their performance. Like other forms of communication, non-verbal or visual clues are tremendously important. Acting teacher Sanford Meisner once said, “An ounce of emotion is worth a pound of words.” Great actors master performance signs in order to win over an audience.

Acting involves two forms of communication: intrascenic and extrascenic . Both intrascenic and extrascenic communication must work in order for the audience to read the semiotic signs of the actor’s performance. The characters must have intrascenic skills – “good chemistry” – in a scene in order for the audience to understand the