Talk:Acting

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment
This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 20 August 2019 and 2 December 2019. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Abibatoudia.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 13:21, 16 January 2022 (UTC)

Professional Actor & Training/System
The info under the Professional Actor was about training/system/courses. It's better under a heading that says something like that. I decided to Be Bold and change it. That leaves the Professional Actor heading, which I haven't taken out yet. I added a definition, along with the existing line about not all being trained and added an example (Bob Hoskins). (I believe he could be well known some other placed than England, as I believe he may have done a couple of films, as well as the TV we all know him for!!!!) Dannman (talk) 11:31, 30 May 2015 (UTC)

Woefully limited and perhaps outdated
This article seems to conceive the subject as limited to conventional Western illusionistic speaking theatre. No epic theatre, no Asian theatre traditions ... The section on "Semiotics of Acting" is either fluff or BS; it's best to throw it out completely until the structure of this article somehow does justice to the broad field of theatre aesthetics. Wegesrand (talk) 10:48, 28 July 2015 (UTC)
 * Wikipedia has been accused of having a systemic bias. Frequently, the articles are written from a modern, Western viewpoint, as this reflects the background of the majority of its editors.  Google Books might be a good place to search for sources to expand the article.  Beyond that, I'm not exactly sure what to suggest, as I'm not overly well-informed on the topic. NinjaRobotPirate (talk) 19:57, 28 July 2015 (UTC)
 * In addition to the Western bias, I suspect a certain amount of pop-culture bias is at work here too. Wegesrand (talk) 14:51, 14 August 2015 (UTC)
 * It's a mess from start to end. I've trimmed away some of the most obviously incorrect material, but it all needs substantial work.  • DP •  {huh?} 17:14, 30 August 2016 (UTC)

I've made a start on improving the article, spending a few hours cleaning up what was here, rephrasing for a more encyclopaedic tone, and adding material on the history of improvisation (it was sounding like Spolin was the fountainhead before, which would be a considerable stretch) and the different kinds of physical approaches most likely to be encountered in training in the West. I've organised the "See also" section into two parts: articles on specific methodologies first, followed by a list of major practitioners. I have selected practitioners on the basis of their development of a unique approach to actor training, rather than the more prosaic sense of "anyone who practises". I used those who appear as the subject of articles in the volume Actor Training (second edition) as the basis for that list, thus excluding other who tend to recycle (usually Stanislavski or Strasberg) other's ideas as their own (however fashionable they may or may not be). I started by making an attempt to replace the embarassing section on "theatre semiotics" that was in place before I began, which clearly hadn't grasped what semiotics is all about. I didn't get very far--just outlining how a semiotics of acting might relate to Stanislavski, Brecht, Artaud, and then relating it to Play (activity), but it was already beginning to dominate the article, so I stopped at that. Needless to say, sections on the various global approaches to actor training and performance in India, China, Japan, etc. are still the most glaring omissions. If you've come here looking for that, please do feel free to grab a reliable source and start paraphrasing it for whichever areas most interest you. The article would certainly benefit from all the help it can get. Happy editing,  • DP •  {huh?} 21:14, 3 September 2016 (UTC)

Differentiating the articles: Acting vs. Actor
Looking at the content of the two subject articles, it appears that the article [Acting] has more content relevant to the topic of actors (e.g., Resume and Auditioning, Stress, Training), while the article [Actor] has more content relevant to acting (History, Types, media). I'm not sure how to address the problem. Maybe a merge? Rewrite each? Swap content? I don't know, but if the two are articles are kept, I think at least there should be some kind of understanding about the scope of each.  Sparkie82 ( t • c ) 20:44, 8 May 2018 (UTC)