| This cross-disciplinary examination investigates the three separate and distinct arenas in which "acting" and "actors" are constitutive elements: Theatre, Film and Media Studies and Performance Studies. Primary research consisting in interviews with professional actors, stage practitioners and tapings of rehearsal and production meetings are related to secondary research to reconcile the conflicting and incongruous ways in which performance scholarship and practice in various performance domains have rendered understanding and teaching acting opaque.;Following the lead of mid-century scholars who posited shifts in cultural textual practices as directly related to shifts in perception, acting is situated as a cultural and textual practice and its representation is examined through various stage-types in history. Five "times-of-truth" are identified in relation to how representation factors in the construction of perception and are used as a frame for assessing the types of conflict occurring in the three domains. Further, informant perceptions on current performance practices are analyzed and categorized via Bordwell's methodology for assessing "cinematic tendencies." Finally, the results of this study are used to formulate a new model for understanding and teaching acting in the age of the camera that accounts for: (1) ways that the separate and distinct performance domains of Theatre, Film and Media and Performance Studies reflect texts and textual practices, (2) ways to situate acting as representation and as a cultural practice, in which the three domains interact dynamically to comprise both the world of the actor and the world of performance, (3) ways to view the extent to which poststructuralist conceptions of "human identity" and "human nature" can be used to assess what acting means in terms of how truth is constructed via perception, and (4) ways that this new model relates the textual practice of acting to how we might assess the process of culture. |
