The words of the craft, defined in one sentence and then explained. Each entry points to the articles where the term is really put to work.
actor training
also called a practice routine, a daily warm-up
The daily work an actor does alone, with no project underway, to keep their body, voice and memory for text available.
Unlike the dancer’s barre or the musician’s scales, there is no common version of it: the profession standardised its schools, not its daily practice. Three families still come up in every description, body, voice and text, and every actor recombines them according to the week, the role in hand and the room in the flat where it is possible.
An acting technique in which the actor recalls a personal memory close to the character’s situation, to bring back its emotion and lend it to the role.
Stanislavski put it at the centre of his early research, drawing on the psychologist Théodule Ribot, before favouring physical action at the end of his life. Lee Strasberg made it the cornerstone of his teaching at the Actors Studio, and it is through him that the tool became the most widespread image of the Method. Stella Adler and Sanford Meisner moved away from it, she towards imagination, he towards listening to the partner.
The stretch of a scene that runs from one shift of intention to the next.
Breaking a scene into beats means spotting where the character changes tactics: they were asking, now they threaten; they were retreating, now they attack. The breakdown is marked in pencil in the margin with a plain double slash, and it works as a game plan when the scene goes sideways.
The moment one line triggers the next, and where nearly every dry happens.
A line is learned as a reaction to the one before it. Rehearsing alone therefore means memorising answers without having the questions: the text looks solid, then cracks the moment a partner walks in. Working your cue pickups means learning the other actor’s last three words as thoroughly as your own.
Everything the play fixes around a scene that the actor does not get to choose: the place, the period, what has just happened, the ties between the characters.
The term comes from Stanislavski and remains the starting point of almost every scene analysis, whatever the school. Stella Adler made it the heart of her teaching: rather than drawing on personal memories, the actor studies the circumstances until they are enough to feed the performance. You first pick them out of the text itself, then imagination fills in what the play leaves unsaid.
the French status for performing-arts workers, annexe 10
The French unemployment scheme that pays performing-arts workers between two short contracts, from 507 hours worked over twelve months.
The threshold measures declared work, not recognition: it makes no difference between a season in a national theatre and a pile of one-day contracts, as long as the hours are there. Actors fall under annexe 10, reserved for performers, while technicians fall under annexe 8. Holding the status says nothing about how someone acts, and not holding it says nothing either.
also called a speed-through, a Russian run, a run-through
A rehearsal where the whole text is spoken at high speed, seated, with no acting and no movement.
The company sits in a line and runs the dialogue far faster than in performance. The exercise separates the words from the acting: as long as you rehearse while playing, it becomes hard to tell whether the text is held or whether emotion is quietly fetching it for you. Above all it works the cue pickups, where nearly every dry happens.
the JTN, France’s support scheme for drama school graduates
A French public scheme that supports actors for three years after they leave a national drama school, by covering part of their salary for the organisations that hire them.
Set up for graduates of the Conservatoire national supérieur d’art dramatique and the school of the Théâtre national de Strasbourg, it has linked twelve higher education schools since 2009. It is one of the few schemes designed for the moment of leaving school, and yet the public document setting out its amounts and durations dates from 2010: what it funds today is hard to check from the outside.
Attaching what you want to remember to a place you know perfectly, then walking through it in your mind.
The technique is ancient, Roman orators used it, and it rests on one simple observation: memory for places is far sturdier than memory for lists. Formidable on the order of a monologue, it does nothing for the exact wording of a line.
In a self-tape, the person who says the other characters’ lines off camera, right next to the lens.
You never see the reader and you hear them in every exchange. Casting directors agree on three points: stay right by the lens, at eye level; speak more quietly than the actor on camera; never steal the scene. Whether the reader should act, be an actor, be in the room or on a video call is where opinions split, and the brief you were sent decides.
An audition filmed by the actor, at home, and sent to the production.
It has become the default way into casting. Instructions vary from one casting director to the next, framing, length, file naming, and they override any general guide. What never varies: the sound, the light on the eyes, and sending it on time.
Revisiting a text at growing intervals, at the exact moment it starts to fade.
The principle has been documented since 1885: what consolidates is the effort of recall, not the time spent staring at the page. A company that opens every session with an Italian run has been doing spaced repetition for centuries without knowing it.