Theater
Acting Theory
This guide helps you get your bearings in Acting Theory before you start exploring the interactive timeline, framework graph, and concept maps.
Before You Dive In
- Acting Theory studies how performance is produced, framed, and received in specific social and political contexts.
- Rough timeline: naturalist/realist acting and directing systems (late 19th-mid 20th c.) -> epic, physical, and experimental theaters (mid-late 20th c.) -> devised, postdramatic, and applied theater frameworks (late 20th c.-present).
- Start with Stanislavski vs Brecht: immersion and identification versus critical distance and estrangement.
- Use Noosaga to compare frameworks by what they privilege: text, actor training, collective process, audience relation, or social intervention.
Key Terms to Know
Stanislavski systemActor-training framework linking psychological motivation, action, and truthful stage behavior.
VerfremdungseffektBrecht's 'alienation effect' that interrupts immersion to provoke critical reflection.
DramaturgyAnalytical and organizational work shaping structure, interpretation, and context of performance.
Postdramatic theaterPerformance forms where text is decentered in favor of image, action, and event structure.
LivenessThe co-presence dynamics between performers and audiences in real time.
Common Confusions
Treating theater theory as only play interpretation; it also includes training systems, spectatorship, and institutions.
Assuming experimental work rejects craft; many avant-garde methods rely on highly disciplined technique.
Reducing applied theater to outreach; it has its own theories of pedagogy, participation, and power.
Recommended Reading
The Empty Space— Peter Brook
1968The Transformative Power of Performance— Erika Fischer-Lichte
2008Postdramatic Theatre— Hans-Thies Lehmann
1999How to Use the Interactive View
1
Explore the timeline
Open the interactive view and scan the framework timeline. Which frameworks came first? Which ones overlap? Where are the big transitions?
2
Read the articles
Click into individual frameworks to read what each one claims, where it came from, and how it relates to its neighbors.
3
Check the concept map
See how the key ideas within a framework connect. This is useful for figuring out what to learn first and what depends on what.
4
Test yourself
Take the quiz for any framework you've read about. It's a quick way to find out whether you actually understood the core ideas or just skimmed them.