Acting is the art of performing in theatre, especially using the actor’s voice and body: it is both intentional and theatrical, whereas other forms of performance, such as participating in ritual or protest, may be neither. The intentional nature of acting means the actor will be self-reflexive about his or her craft, its practice, and its aesthetic and social functions. Because it is theatrical, acting happens in a social context and can have significant social effects; further, it often aims to be mimetic – to copy a recognizable reality. These three features of acting as intentional, social and mimetic are not only descriptive. They are also at the core of arguments about whether acting is an innate and spontaneous or learned and mechanical skill, the social and ideological effects it can have, and how it performatively produces the world. Actors are generally expected to convey emotion and to empathize with the characters they play, especially in naturalism. Thus, many analysts in the West have wanted to see the emotional link between actor and character as natural. Writing in the late eighteenth century, Denis Diderot went against this prevailing opinion to argue that it was in fact necessary for actors to maintain an objective distance in order to control their own emotions, the better properly to portray those of their characters. Diderot called this dependence of emotion on technique the ‘actor’s paradox’. From the late nineteenth century on, the recognition that what we perceive as good acting usually depends on intellectual and physical training and discipline has gained wide acceptance. Nevertheless, the continuing value placed on the actor’s quality of presence and liveness reveals a residual ideological investment in understanding acting as spontaneous, inspired and somehow natural. From the RCTP
Image: Courtesy of Niamh Dowling