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Welcome to Michael’s ‘Intimate With Strangers’ Page 1
WHAT IS ACTING?
Acting is of all the arts the most purely imitative. In this respect it stands at the opposite pole from music, with sculpture, painting, poetry, in intermediate positions.
Music deals almost entirely in what may be called sound-patterns, which have no prototypes in external nature.
Poetry, and indeed all literary art, leans in the same direction. Its matter may or may not be imitative; its medium must be a more or less rhythmic succession of sounds, which does not depend for its attractiveness on its resemblance to anything under the sun.
Painting, in these latter days, tends more and more to the condition of colour-music, the very vocabularies of the two arts being, it appears, interchangeable.
Even sculpture without entirely deserting its function, may present a mere arabesque of curves and surfaces. But acting is imitative or it is nothing. It may borrow from all the arts in turn - from the arts of speech, of song, of colour, of form; but imitation is its differentia.
Acting is imitation; when it ceases to be imitation it ceases to be acting and becomes something else - oratory perhaps, perhaps ballet-dancing or posturing. Everyone knows that the actor is not necessarily a copyist of nature; he may sing, for example, or he may talk alexandrines; but he must always preserve a similarity in dissimilarity; he must always imitate; though we may permit him to steep his imitation, so to speak, in a more or less conventional atmosphere. “He plays naturally,” or, in other words, “He imitates well,” is our highest formula of praise even for the operatic tenor or the French tragedian, who may not deliver a single word or tone exactly as it would be uttered in real life.
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