Practice, Constraint, and Affordance

The core principles of major acting practitioners such as Meisner, Strasberg, and Adler have proven formative and inspiring to generations of western realist screen actors. It is essential to any study of acting as a practice, however, to frame these principles as idealistic suggestions to guide an actor’s work, as opposed to requisite assembly instructions for compelling performances. For all of their internal disagreements, Meisner, Strasberg, and Adler all viewed their Methods as practices for actors to work with: to embody, to experiment with, and to enact, and not to be pondered as abstract philosophies. As such, the insistence on practical application emphasizes how actors adapt these teachings as required to their own tastes and to the needs of a given role. Since each Method’s core techniques prompt different approaches to soliciting empathetic connections and moving across selves, the ways in which actors blend and adapt canonical techniques requires an understanding of acting practices alongside the creative principles behind those practices. The empathetic solicitations framework provides a useful analytic vocabulary for both the theoretical components of Method techniques and their practice-driven applications.

The next three chapters will trace how some idealistic principles of realist screen acting manifest in the messiness of screen acting practice, where they are invoked when deemed useful without any pretense of correctness or attributable fidelity. The industrial pragmatism of a film set is a fundamentally different creative environment than the insular seclusion of an actor’s training studio, and so it should be of no surprise that actors adjust their technique to accommodate the needs of the film production at hand. My contention across the next three chapters is that the industrial culture that frames screen acting’s empathetic work is an ongoing balancing act between collaboration and the actor’s individual agency to control as much of her work as possible. Creative training and industrial logistics will be treated as enculturing forces that the actor’s malleable bodymind meshwork will navigate in order to solicit empathetic connections when creating a screen-specific verisimilar performance.

In order to ground this theoretical analysis in screen acting as it is practiced, Chapters 4 through 6 will draw heavily on my interviews with fifteen professional and frequently working Anglophone Canadian screen actors during the summer and fall of 2016.