Acting 3

Course Description

Acting 3 focuses on exploration and development of a range of fundamental tools of the acting process, with emphasis on actions, objectives, imagination, and collaborative theatre production and performance.

Within the SCNS taxonomy, TPP is the Theatre Performance prefix. Daytona State publishes this at 3 credits, offered fall and spring.

Actions and objectives are the working vocabulary of nearly all Western actor training, and they are more practical than they sound. An objective is what the character is trying to get; an action is what they do to another person to get it. The reason the vocabulary persists is that it converts an unanswerable question — "how should I feel here?" — into an answerable one: "what am I trying to do to them?" Emotion pursued directly produces indication; emotion arising from genuine pursuit of an objective is what an audience recognises as truthful.

Daytona State does not publish a lecture and laboratory split for its performing arts courses. The applied and studio courses in these prefixes run at approximately 20 contact hours per credit — TPP1110 (Acting 1) and MUM1622 (Sound Reinforcement) are both live at 3 credits and 60 hours. This course is a studio or applied course and is priced at that convention.

Learning Outcomes

Required Outcomes

• Analyse a script for given circumstances, relationships, and structure.
• Identify a character's objectives across a scene and a play.
• Break a scene into beats and identify their turning points.
• Choose playable actions and pursue them.
• Distinguish playing an action from indicating an emotion.
• Use imagination and substitution to make circumstances specific.
• Listen and respond truthfully to a scene partner.
• Allow a performance to change in response to a partner.
• Develop a character from textual evidence rather than assumption.
• Make specific physical and vocal choices for a character.
• Use the voice with adequate support, clarity, and range.
• Use the body expressively and with awareness.
• Apply relaxation and concentration techniques.
• Work with text of varying styles and periods.
• Memorise accurately and hold text under pressure.
• Rehearse productively and independently.
• Take, apply, and retain direction.
• Receive and give critique constructively.
• Collaborate effectively in a production context.
• Describe rehearsal etiquette and professional conduct.
• Prepare and perform audition material.
• Perform for an audience and adapt to a live response.
• Reflect on and evaluate your own work honestly.
• Describe consent and boundary practice in rehearsal.

Optional Outcomes

• Describe major approaches to actor training and their differences.
• Work with heightened or verse text.
• Describe acting for camera and its differences from stage.
• Describe devising and ensemble creation.
• Describe dialect work at an introductory level.
• Build an audition book and a performance portfolio.

Major Topics

Required Topics

• Script analysis
• Objectives
• Beats and turning points
• Playable actions
• Action versus indicated emotion
• Imagination and substitution
• Listening and responding
• Responsiveness to a partner
• Character from textual evidence
• Physical and vocal choices
• Vocal support, clarity, and range
• Physical expressiveness
• Relaxation and concentration
• Text of varying styles
• Memorisation under pressure
• Productive rehearsal
• Taking direction
• Giving and receiving critique
• Collaboration in production
• Rehearsal etiquette
• Audition preparation
• Performing for an audience
• Honest self-evaluation
• Consent and boundaries

Optional Topics

• Approaches to actor training
• Heightened and verse text
• Acting for camera
• Devising
• Introductory dialect work
• Audition book and portfolio

Resources & Tools

• Your department's productions — audition, crew, and stage manage. Practical production credit is what the field actually recruits on, and it is free and available now.
• Recordings of professional work — many companies and archives stream productions, and college libraries frequently carry theatre and dance video databases at no cost to students.
• Your college's counselling and health services — free and confidential; relevant to a field with real physical and emotional demands.
• Local and regional companies — volunteering, ushering, or crewing gets you inside a working organisation and in front of people who hire.
• Florida's theme park and cruise line auditions — posted publicly and held regularly; substantial, steady, paid performance work that many students never think to pursue.
• Actors' Equity Association, SAG-AFTRA, and IATSE — the professional unions; understand what membership means and when it makes sense before you are eligible.
• Keep a portfolio from the first term — video, photographs, programmes, and a maintained resume.

Career Pathways

• Actor — SOC 27-2011.
• Dancer — SOC 27-2031; and choreographer, SOC 27-2032.
• Producer and director — SOC 27-2012.
• Stage manager and production management — consistently more employable than performance and frequently overlooked by students.
• Technical theatre — lighting, sound, scenery, costume, and rigging; steady work and transferable to live events.
• Theme park and cruise line entertainment — a major Florida employer of performers, technicians, and stage management.
• Live events, corporate production, and conference work — large, year-round, and well paid.
• Teaching artist, studio instruction, and K-12 arts teaching — the latter requires teacher certification.
• Arts administration, marketing, and development — every company needs these and they are steadier than performance.
• Applied and healthcare performance work — standardised patient programmes, simulation, and training scenarios; paid, local, and genuinely available.
• Transfer to a bachelor's programme in theatre, dance, or musical theatre.

Special Information

⚠ The work that separates actors is done outside the room

• Rehearsal time is for working with other people; script analysis, memorisation, and vocal and physical preparation are done alone and beforehand. Arriving unprepared spends everyone else's time.
• Be off book earlier than required. Nothing can be explored while the script is still in your hand, and directors notice who freed themselves first.
• Do the analysis in writing. Objectives and actions written down are testable; the ones carried vaguely in your head are usually vaguer than you think.
• ⚠ Make choices, including wrong ones. A specific choice can be redirected; a performance with no choice in it gives a director nothing to work with, and playing it safe reads as absence rather than restraint.
• Take direction without defending. Try it before explaining why you did what you did — the explanation is almost never what the director wants and it costs rehearsal time.
• Write your notes down and apply them next time. Being given the same note twice is the thing directors remember.
• Watch the other scenes. Most of what students learn in an acting class they learn from watching, and the ones on their phones during other people's work learn a third as much.
• Record yourself occasionally. It is uncomfortable and it is the fastest way to see the difference between what you intended and what is landing.

⚠⚠ The published prerequisite names a course number Daytona State does not appear to offer

• Daytona State's catalog lists the prerequisite for this course as a THE-prefixed number. ⚠ Daytona State's own course inventory contains no such course — the only THE course it lists is THE1000 (Theatre Appreciation).
• What the institution does offer is a complete acting sequence under the TPP prefix: TPP1110 (Acting 1), TPP1111 (Acting 2), and then this course and TPP2119 as Acting 3 and Acting 4.
• The most likely reading is that the published prerequisite carries a number from another institution's numbering or from an earlier catalog, and that the intended prerequisite is the preceding course in Daytona State's own acting sequence. This repository already records that Florida carries introductory acting under two different SCNS numbers, which is exactly the situation that produces this kind of carry-over.
• ⚠ This guide does not resolve it — the catalog is the published record and it says what it says. Confirm the actual prerequisite with the theatre department before registering, and do not assume either reading.
• Under Rule 22 the distinction matters, because a prerequisite satisfied by one number is not automatically satisfied by another — particularly for a student transferring credit in from elsewhere.
• If you are transferring acting credit into this sequence, raise it early. A department can accept an equivalent readily in advance and with much more difficulty at registration.

⚠⚠ Consent and boundaries in rehearsal — the standards have changed and they matter

• Performance work involves physical contact, physical closeness, and emotionally exposing material, and the profession's standards for how that is handled have changed substantially and for the better in recent years.
• Contact should be choreographed, discussed in advance, and agreed — not discovered in the moment. Spontaneity is not a justification for surprising a scene partner with touch.
• ⚠ You may decline. Saying that a piece of staging is not something you are willing to do is a professional statement, not a failure of commitment, and a good rehearsal room makes that easy to say.
• Intimacy direction exists as a discipline precisely because scenes involving intimacy need the same deliberate choreography that stage violence does.
• Check in during and after emotionally demanding work, and treat that as ordinary practice rather than fuss.
• ⚠ De-role deliberately. Learn a practice for leaving a character behind at the end of a session — particularly with distressing material. Actors who never learned this carry work home for years.
• Raise concerns with the instructor or director, and know your institution's reporting routes if that is not possible.
• Extend the same care to others. The person who makes a rehearsal room safe to speak up in is usually a peer rather than the person in charge.

⚠⚠ Performers get injured, and the culture works against reporting it

• Performance training is physical training, and the injury rates in dance and physical theatre are comparable to those in sport — but the culture around them is much worse, because performers are taught that continuing is professionalism.
• ⚠⚠ Working through pain is not discipline. Pain is information. The overuse injuries that end performing careers are almost always ones that were felt, ignored, and worked through — and they are far more treatable early.
• Warm up properly and cool down. Cold muscle is the condition in which most acute injuries happen, and the warm-up is the first thing skipped when time is short.
• Know the difference between effort and strain, and between the discomfort of stretching and the sharpness of damage.
• ⚠ Do not push a stretch to pain, and never bounce into one. Flexibility gained by forcing is gained at the joint's expense.
• Rest is training. Adaptation happens during recovery, and continuous work without it produces injury rather than progress.
• Hydrate and eat adequately. ⚠ Disordered eating is a recognised and serious problem in dance and performance training; if you or someone you know is struggling, campus counselling and health services are confidential and free.
• Report injuries to your instructor rather than concealing them, and get proper assessment rather than advice from other students.
• Speak up about unsafe conditions — floors, lighting, obstructions, equipment. A rehearsal or performance space is a workplace.

⚠ An honest account of performing arts employment

• Performance work is intermittent, competitive, and unevenly paid, and most people who work in it also do other things. That is the normal shape of the career rather than a sign of failure, and knowing it in advance changes how you plan.
• Build the second and third skill deliberately. Teaching, stage management, technical work, arts administration, choreography, and directing are all adjacent, and the people who sustain careers in this field are usually the ones who can do several things.
• The transferable skills are real and employers value them — public presentation, collaboration under pressure, taking direction and criticism, meeting immovable deadlines, and performing when unwell or unprepared. Name them explicitly when applying for anything.
• Florida has a genuine market: theme parks and cruise lines are substantial and year-round employers of performers, technicians, and stage management, alongside regional theatre, education, and events. It is not New York, and it is a great deal steadier than New York.
• Learn the business side early — contracts, self-employment tax, invoicing, and keeping records. Most performers learn this the hard way.
• ⚠ Unpaid work has a place and it has limits. Student and community work builds craft and contacts; a professional production expecting free labour is a different matter.
• Keep documentation of everything you do — recordings, photographs, programmes, reviews. A portfolio is built continuously and cannot be assembled retrospectively.
• Health insurance and income stability deserve a plan, not optimism.

How Florida course levels affect transfer

The first digit of an SCNS number denotes the year of offering, not transferability. Courses at the 1000 and 2000 levels transfer transparently between Florida public institutions, and 3000 to 4000 is unproblematic since both are upper division. The boundary that actually matters is 2000 to 3000, where lower-division credit generally cannot satisfy an upper-division requirement.

TPP2118 is 3 credits and approximately 60 contact hours, offered fall and spring at Daytona State.

⚠ Confirm the prerequisite with the department before registering — see the note above. See also this repository's TPP1110 (Acting 1) guide.