Action as a term in Western
theatre
Theatre or theater is a collaborative form of performing art that uses live performers, usually actors to present experiences of a real or imagined event before a live audience in a specific place, often a Stage (theatre), stage. The performe ...
practice refers to a principle from
actor
An actor (masculine/gender-neutral), or actress (feminine), is a person who portrays a character in a production. The actor performs "in the flesh" in the traditional medium of the theatre or in modern media such as film, radio, and television. ...
training first developed by Russian actor and theatre director
Konstantin Stanislavski in the first half of the 20th century at the
Moscow Art Theatre
The Moscow Art Theatre (or MAT; , ''Moskovskiy Hudojestvenny Akademicheskiy Teatr'' (МHАТ) was a theatre company in Moscow. It was founded in by the seminal Russian theatre practitioner Konstantin Stanislavski, together with the playwright ...
. It forms part of his overall structure of systematized acting training, most frequently called the System, which in its turn gave rise to
Method Acting
Method acting, known as the Method, is a range of rehearsal techniques, as formulated by a number of different theatre practitioners, that seeks to encourage sincere and expressive performances through identifying with, understanding, and expe ...
.
In his writings on theatre, Stanislavski states "The basis of theatre is doing, dynamism.
..In Latin, the corresponding word is actio, and the root of this same word has passed into our vocabulary, "''action''", "''actor''", "''act''". So, drama is an action we can see being performed, and, when he comes on, the actor becomes an agent in that action" and "acting is action - mental and physical." Jean Benedetti understands action in a Stanislavskian context more simply as "What is done in order to fulfill a Task," a Task in its turn referring to "What a character has to do, the problem he has to solve."
Action as a term in theatre practice derived from the Stanislavski System therefore refers to that which a
character undertakes in order to achieve a goal.
References
{{Stanislavski system
20th-century theatre