A Glossary of Acting Terms

Vocabulary flashcards covering key acting terms from the lecture notes.

Action

The means of achieving your objective (the how); The physical or psychological activity in which an actor actually engages.

Adjustment

A change in action or objective to fit the changing circumstances of the scene.

Audition

An acting situation in which you try out for a role in a play; You must not only prove that you can act, but you must also convince your auditors that you are right for the role and the production and that you are desirable to work with.

Beat

The smallest whole unit of the play; The section of a script during which a single objective or action is played; also, a short but pregnant pause in the dialog.

Blocking

Arranging the major movements of actors on stage, such as entrances, exits, stage crosses, sitting, standing, going up and downstairs.

Business or stage business

Hand or other small movements that actors make, often with props, that convey lifelike behavior. Examples include putting on reading glasses, lighting a cigarette, and dusting bookshelves.

Cheating out (or cheating)

Angling the body partly toward the audience, while still presuming to face the character you are in conversation with, so the audience can see your face better.

Collaboration

A term referring to the fact that theatre cannot be done alone; it requires a group of artists, onstage and off, who must work together to produce a consistent and shared vision of a play.

Conflict

When two opposing forces collide; the engine of all drama; the first element actors must discover about the story they are telling.

Conventions, theatrical

An accepted set of rules that are applied consistently to theatre in general, or to a particular play or production.

Cue

In general, the line preceding your own that 'cues' you to speak.

Defeats

The moments onstage when an actor as character realizes his or her objective cannot be achieved; This moment will be followed by a transition to a new beat or objective.

Discoveries

Any new information an actor as character learns-information that he or she can and should react to.

Downstage

The front of the stage in a proscenium theatre; that part nearest the audience.

Drama

From the Greek word, dran, which means action; Also refers to a genre of play that is serious and seemingly real.

Emotional memory

Reliving situations in your own life while performing, often with the aid of substitution, in the hope of arousing your own emotions while acting a role; Also known as affective memory and emotional recall.

Endowment

Giving an object specific relationship and historical emotional meaning that can be tapped into for acting purposes.

Expectation

The actor's assumption of his or her character's belief that victory is possible or even certain, even when the actor knows from the script that failure will be the result.

Eye contact

Two actors looking into each other's eyes.

Fourth wall

The imaginary separation between the actors onstage and the audience watching a production; The actors do not acknowledge the presence of the audience.

Given circumstances

The who, what, when, and where of a play or scene.

Improvisation

Acting without a fixed text; playing a character's actions but with your own spontaneously invented words; often used as a rehearsal technique; sometimes used as a theatre form in itself.

Inciting incident (or point of attack)

An event that is the catalyst for the action of a play.

Indicating

Displaying, rather than doing and experiencing, emotion onstage; considered an acting flaw where the audience can see the emotion does not derive from the action of the play.

Inductive tactic (pulling tactics)

An interactive tactic intended to induce a change in another character's (actor's) behavior; Smiling, befriending, seducing, and charming are all inductive tactics.

Inner action

The action of a play that cannot be described simply by recounting the actor's words or outward movements, but are shifts: mental decisions, mood swings, emotional upheavals, and so on.

Intention

Another word for acting objective, or goal, that an actor pursues while onstage.

Listening

A basic requirement for an actor if he or she is to be believed; refers to the need to be connected at every moment with the other actors sharing the stage.

Magic If

Acting tool invented by Stanislavsky in which the actor asks, 'What would I do if I were the character in this situation?' It is the ability to act as if the imaginary dramatic circumstances were real.

Method, the

Internal approach to acting based on emotional truth and sense memory; developed by Lee Strasberg based on early writings of Stanislavsky.

Moment

The smallest unit of dramatic action that can be acted.

Monologue

A sustained speech delivered by an actor without interruption, or a sustained speech delivered by an actor spoken without the physical presence of another actor.

Motivation

The reason a character pursues a particular superobjective; The motivation cannot be played directly.

New information

Anything a character finds out onstage that can change what he or she thinks, feels or does; information that an actor should respond to onstage.

Objective

The character's quest at any given moment; what the character wants to achieve; the goal; also sometimes called the intention or the intended victory.

Obstacles

The things in a scene or play that keep a character from fulfilling his or her objectives; They provide conflict and heighten the stakes of a situation.

Operative words

Words in dialogue that are intentionally stressed to make a line's context or subtext clear.

Pace

The speed at which you pick up your cue and deliver your next line of dialogue.

Physical action

The actual things a character does onstage; They demonstrate what a character is thinking and feeling as well as make the story clear to an audience.

Presentational

Refers to a style of acting or theatre in which the performers onstage acknowledge that the audience is present.

Props or properties

Small, usually hand-carried objects-for example, combs, pistols, pocket watches, telephones-used by actors during performance.

Psychological action

Refers to the thought process of a character, the internal 'doing', sometimes expressed through what that character says, that must be somehow translated into tangible action so that the audience watching will understand what those thoughts are.

Relationship

An acting tool to help define the connection between characters onstage, to get insight into the dynamics that affect the way a scene might work.

Representational

Refers to a style of acting or theatre that does not acknowledge the presence of an audience and that tries to create the illusion of reality onstage.

Result

Often used to indicate the outcome of a drama and what the actor should avoid playing before it occurs. 'Don't play the result' means to play like you're going to win even if the play dictates that you will eventually fail.

Sense memory

The use of our strong powers of recall relating to smell, sound, taste, touch as well as sight to enhance the emotional power of an acting moment or situation.

Score and scoring

A map of an actor's role in a play, or the process of developing such a map, composed of the sequential listing of actions and objectives to be played, along with all other pertinent information.

Soliloquy

A speech given directly to the audience, ordinarily with no one else onstage; usually played as a direct address to the audience, sometimes played as a character thinking aloud in the audience's presence.

Stage left

In a proscenium theatre, the actor's left, while facing the audience.

Stage right

In a proscenium theatre, the actor's right, while facing the audience.

Stakes

The emotional level of an acting performance. 'Raising the stakes' in acting means that you have more to lose and more to win; thus you will be led to a greater emotional commitment to achieving your goals.

Stanislavsky, Konstantin

Russian theatre director, actor, and teacher (1863-1938) most responsible for the manner and technique in which acting craft is taught; Co-founder/director of the Moscow Art Theatre in 1897, creator of the world's first systematized study of the acting art.

Strasberg, Lee

Austrian-born acting teacher (1901-1982), artistic director of the Actors Studio, and developer of what came to be known as 'Method acting,' an approach based on the early teachings of Stanislavsky.

Substitution

Consciously imagining a person or event from your real life in the place of your actual acting partner, or the situation of the play, in order to stimulate real emotion; often used in the emotional memory technique.

Subtext

The hidden meanings of a dramatic text, comprising its inner actions and the unstated goals of the characters.

Superobjective

Stanislavsky's term (svekhzadacha, or 'superproblem') that represents the character's long-range goal for the entire play; The overall need that an actor as character pursues during the course of a play; Also sometimes called the spine of the role.

Suspension of disbelief

The term referring to the fact that an audience never completely forgets that what they are watching is fictional. Yet, when the performance is working, the audience will pretend that it is real.

Tactics

The means by which a character seeks to achieve his or her goal. Tactics can be inductive or threatening. These tactics can be quickly replaced by the actor if they prove ineffective.

Targets of attention (point of attention)

Persons, places, or objects the actor as character focuses on.

Threatening tactics (pushing tactics)

Tactics a character may use to achieve a goal by implying force, violence, intimidation.

Three-quarters

A stage position in a proscenium theatre, where the actor is facing halfway toward the actor to her or his side and halfway toward the audience. Thus the audience is essentially seeing a three quarter view of the actor.

Transitions

The actable moments when one objective is given up and replaced with a new one; This transition occurs when an objective is won, lost, or abandoned because of a discovery, an interruption, or the arrival of new information.

Upstage

The opposite of downstage; the back part of the stage in a proscenium theatre; the part farthest from the audience; derives from the eighteenth century, when the stage was slanted ('raked') toward the audience.

Upstaging

To deliberately go upstage of an actor with whom you are sharing a scene, in order to make that actor face upstage to maintain the illusion of eye contact, or even a genuine conversation; considered selfish behavior.

Victories

The actable moments when objectives are obtained.