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Submitted by Colligan88 on October 25, 2005
Category: Philosophy
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Aristotle's Mean Applied to Acting Technique
The Greek word arete is most commonly translated as "virtue." However, it is occasionally translated as "excellence." In the Nicomachean Ethics, virtue is an adequate translation of Aristotle's Greek because it deals particularly with human excellence, but arete can be used to describe other kinds of excellence, such as the accuracy of a marksman, sharpness of a knife, or the quality of acting. Aristotle feels that a person's excellence, or virtue, relies on living in accordance with various virtues and as a method of finding virtue, he gives us the doctrine of means. (Egan) This doctrine of the mean between extremes can also be applied to acting technique in order to attain excellence in performance.
In every scene an actor acts, there is a motivation he must focus on in order to convey the scene effectively. However, an opposite exists to every motivation. One of the keys to excellence in acting is to be sure that not only the motivation, but the opposite of the motivation be brought into the character. According to Michael Shurtleff in his book Audition, "
in all of us there exists love and there exists hate, there exists creativity and an equal tendency toward self-destructiveness
sleeping and waking
night and day
sunny moods and foul moods, a desire to love and a desire to kill," and because these extremities exist in each of us in reality, an actor must bring them into a scene in order to make it realistic. An awareness of extreme opposites allows the actor a wide range of emotion available to deal with in between. This results in the most interesting kind of acting: the complex.
It is established, then, that definite extremes exist in acting. How exactly, then does one find the mean? If Aristotle's three guidelines are followed, a lot comes into the process. The first guideline is to keep away from the extreme that is more contrary to the mean. In acting this means that once one has...
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