Teaching Acting at Uew - An Experiential Observation

Abstract

It is an undeniable fact that Acting is at the core if not the fulcrum on which everything theatre swings. Though it is an art that eludes statutory tied-down definitions, it predates even the age old held notion that the Greeks gave it birth. This paper dares to assert that though commendable that high academia admits this age-old art into its curriculum, there is still the evident struggle, even in our times, as to the most accurate value to place on this eternally fascinating art that possesses the dual proclivity to prop up society for the better or spearhead the expiration of that very society's core values. In the author's nine-year experience of teaching Acting at the University of Education, Winneba the observation is that the student-actor's mental or psychological antenna picks up this obtrusive though covertly expressed suspicion of both his place and that of his art in high academia initiating intermittent dithering of his self-confidence. Albeit, for more than half a decade of the setting up of the Department of Theatre Arts here at UEW, it has been an exhilarating process of discovery for both facilitators and student-actors or student theatre-practitioners that no apology is owed for asserting their creative intellectual identity in a world where they still do exert a crucial influence as into which direction that defined world is headed. Drawing attention to the fact that the student-actor embodies language in action this paper is a reflective presentation of a typical Acting class orientation that positions student-actors/performers as the creative intellectuals that they are