Acting and Reacting

Emoting is not acting. Reproducing is not acting. Reacting is acting. With this powerful idea, Nick Moseley takes long-held views of actor training and opens them up to a productive new way of thinking about performance. The goal of Acting and Reacting is to stimulate thinking and reflection in both acting students and teachers. For too long, argues Nick Moseley, actor training has worked within superimposed concepts: on the one hand, the long tradition of Stanislavski, which has been countered more recently by the strongly anti-Stanislavskian views of David Mamet. Between the two, Moseley writes, is a creative way of thinking about acting that avoids extremes. Training is at the heart of acting, but training must fit the actor, not the other way round.