FIVE APPROACHES TO ACTING

The Collected Series: Five Approaches to Acting by David Kaplan is the complete collection of five approaches to acting with an additional section that deals with comparing, choosing and combing the different approaches. This acting textbook that deals with theory and practice for both beginning and advanced actors.
Deciding which approach to use, study a text and imagine what the text might become, just in the painting by René Magritte called “Clairvoyance,” where an artist studies an egg as he paints a picture of a bird in flight.
Kaplan’s five approaches to acting include identifying tasks, playing episodes, building images, learning the world of the play, and telling a story. Each approach has its own definition of what it means to act, what it means to act well, what it means to be a character in a performance on stage, and, by extension, what it means to be a person in “real” life. Each approach covers history, theory and examples of its practice.

In The Collected Series: Five Approaches to Acting David Kaplan considers acting to be an art of human relationships, an art woven to other arts and sciences, to history, to psychology, to current events.

Anyone interested in the study of acting will instantly realize that The Collected Series: Five Approaches to Acting is a comprehensive approach to studying acting. As David Kaplan explains, “If we can agree that acting involves the theory and practice of human relationships — not just the relationships of actors with actors, but of actors with audiences — then the study of acting merits attention from anyone interested in behavior, character, and a relationship to the world from which ideas about such things evolve.”