The Actor in Flux: Transforming Acting Techniques through Individuality

• Main Author: Tolentino, Christian Gabriel
• Format: text
• Published: Animo Repository 2024
• Subjects: acting techniques; fluxed acting; performance; autotheory; Acting; Art and Design; Art Practice; Theatre and Performance Studies
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/akda/vol4/iss1/5; https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/context/akda/article/1069/viewcontent/4_Tolentino.pdf
• Institution: De La Salle University

Most young aspiring actors are searching to ground themselves to begin their acting journey, to define, understand, and apply “acting” in their careers. Through this paper, I will attempt to formulate a personal approach to acting with the data gathered anchored in autotheory. The study does not want to dictate an appropriate approach for all actors but rather gives a chance for actors to reflect on their individuality as actors/artists. The meat of the text will include a brief history of acting techniques from Europe, to America and eventually the Philippines and see how these techniques/processes/methods converse. I will delve into two different acting workshops I participated namely Angeli Bayani’s Meisner Acting Workshop rooted in Sanford Meisner’s The Meisner Technique and Dr. Anton Juan’s Actor as a Portal which is framed with four elements, will, action, imagination, and memory. In the process of defining acting and grounding ourselves as actors through techniques and processes in history and in practice, I discovered that actors should continuously rediscover and redefine what is acting for them and produce truthful characters on stage. The Actor in Flux relies on the openness to the truth and demands of the character and collaborators. It also requires the actor to be knowledgeable about different acting styles to formulate a process/es that match/es their individuality. Beyond that, I also witnessed how being in flux could also germinate not only onstage but through identity/ies and sensibility/ies that continuously transform the fluxed artist.