Compassionate Acting: Healthy Artists Make Better Art

Abstract

Empathy has often been used as a word to describe acting, and a positive way to describe acting at that. This paper looks into empathy driven acting techniques as well as non-empathy driven acting techniques to discover whether or not empathy is a safe goal for actors to work towards. It's been found that compassion rather than empathy is what actors can healthfully work towards, and can do so by creating a ritual for themselves before every rehearsal and performance. The ability to discern what acting technnique(s) to use is personal to every actor, but compassionate acting is not a matter of disowning any technique. Compassionate acting is there to protect the actor and their mental health because healthy actors make better art.