2005:50 R

Educational breadth and drama

Acting is a profession in which training plays an important role. Actors can learn numerous techniques about using their voices, posture and other forms of psychological and physical expression. During their training they are not infrequently confronted with extreme situations to which they have to give tangible form and unusual circumstances that have to brought to life. Moreover an actor´s training takes place not only within the National Academy of Mime and Acting but also begins again with each new role and the new skills that need to be learnt.

One of the decisive factors for the profession of acting in the form it takes in our part of the world is that it almost always requires engagement with a text. Threefold empathy is an inherent requirement in this encounter with the text: from the perspective of the playwright, the perspective of the actor and, finally, the perspective of the audience. This requirement may perhaps pave the way for educational breadth as well.

This report is intended to propose and develop the dea that empathy is a fundamental requirement for educational breadth.

In my attempts to define drama I have adopted many of the arguments in Sven Åke Heed´s book Teaterns tecken (Drama´s signs) (2002). Although slender, this is a work that is full of learning and enormously useful in not only providing a foundation of general knowledge about drama but also far more extensive and advanced arguments about what the structure of drama really consists of. Another book that has demonstrated its usefulness where the thoughts of actors themselves about their profession are concerned is Dionysos och Apollon (Dionysus and Apollo) (2004), a work in which Hannes Meidal presents a selection of texts by Keve Hjelm, who worked as an actor, producer and professor at the Academy of Mime and Acting in Stockholm.