Aristotle's Mean Applied to Acting Technique

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, "Ð'...in all of us there exists love and there exists hate, there exists creativity and an equal tendency toward self-destructivenessÐ'...sleeping and wakingÐ'...night and dayÐ'...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 found both extremes, they must still be sure not to gravitate toward the opposite of the true motivation. If there is love and hate opposite from each other in a heated argument scene, the actor needs to be aware of the very extremes of both of those emotions. She must be aware that the character has a deep love for the person she is fighting with, but because the scene is a heated argument, the extreme hate needs to be closer to the surface. If she conveyed precisely the middle ground between the love and hate, the argument would become a simple and flat conversation and the complexity and interest are lost.

Aristotle's second guideline advises one to take into account the vices to which he is more inclined. This applies to the actor on a personal level and in regard to the character he is playing. The actor himself must realize particular cases in which his own tendencies toward vice may differ from the character's and must work to make sure that they do not interfere with the character's development. Conversely, the actor needs to discover what the character's particular tendencies toward vice may be and convey that character's effort to keep to the mean, or, depending on the situation, perhaps that character's failure to keep the mean.

The third guideline tells us that it is necessary to guard against pleasure, because pleasure cannot be judged impartially. This also applies to the actor personally and in regard to the character's judgment. An actor must work to make judgments about her character without letting her own pleasure to skew her view of the character. She might want to portray a character in one manner simply because that is the way she prefers to act. If she realizes this and keeps it in mind she can make more accurate judgments about how the character is meant to be portrayed as intended within the work. Also then, the actor must think about the pleasures that the character may allow to affect its judgment and keep this in mind when acting the part.

Another matter of finding the mean between extremes in acting applies to the actual physical work of the actor