Acting Theories and Theorists

          For acting and performance, I used to know a little bit about the acting technique.  I knew that theater acting and movie acting requires the different technique.  For theater, people have to raise their voice and exaggerate their action and emotion.  The reason behind is that the people who perform on the stage should transport the message or information of the play to the audience who are far away from the stage.  I believe Shakespeare's era was the origin of the theater technique.  However, I do not extremely love this technique because I used to think the performance is too fake.  Therefore, I love movie acting technique better.  The movie acting asks actors and actress to act like they are not acting.  They are creating the characters that not only appear on the screen but also the living people who really exist in this world.  The famous book that related to this naturalism, An Actor Prepares, could be described as a Holy Bible for the actors and actresses in the modern world.  I heard about the book, but I did not know who wrote, and what specifics that the book mentioned.  I rarely know the acting technique until these acting theories and theorists presentations.

          We picked some theorists, did research on them and their theories, and then we presented the research result to the class.  We learned a lot of theorists and theories, such as Konstantin Stanislavski, Lee Strasberg, Viola Spolin and Peter Brook.  I would love to introduce Konstantin Stanislavski because he played an important role in the acting history.  He was a pioneer developing the acting theory of naturalism.  An Actor Prepares was written by him.  His idea was that the great actors and actress do not imitate figures but become the figures. Lee Strasberg also emphasized that realistic was the main acting method for actors and actresses.  He specifically recommended actors to recall the similar memory that they can show the emotion that is similar to the emotion that the play has.  Besides, Lee Strasberg also underlined the importance of method acting.  He advocated that actors should build a close relationship with directors so that they could have more communications and make the play better from the script, staging to acting.
          Lee Strasberg was more declined to let the director take the main charge.  However, Peter Brook's directing style is really dependent on the actors themselves.   Therefore, Pete hated the acting school.  He thought the school framed students' creativity and specialty; the school gave students a function or rules to follow so that they lost their deep thinking of acting.  In a conclusion, he wanted to liberate the actors from methods and formats, which went against Lee Strasberg's idea.  In addition, I love the idea of Peter Brook's four ways of splitting the word "theater".  He split the theater into "deadly", "rough", "holy", and "immediate".  Particularly, when I saw the definition of "deadly", a type of commercial drama, motivated only by money, the popcorn movie came out of my head.  Marvel, for example, is one of the commercial drama, and it successfully earns countless fans and a lot of money but their plots are quite simple and predictable.   
          I searched Viola Spolin.  She made a big effort at the improvisational theater.  Consider the practical skill of improvising theater, she wrote a book which contained two hundred and twenty games.  The games are for students to develop their creativity on different perspectives, such as sensory, the stage space feeling, the storytelling, and the relationship between the actors and the characters.
          After learning different acting technique and having many activities, I think I would like to have the naturalism as my main acting standard.  I would like to recall the similar memory and emotion when I speak some specific lines, and I would like to practice the pace of speaking before the final recording.  I would love to follow those great acting theories, and I am also excited to the combine the ideas with my own thoughts.