Augmenting and Emboldening Actor Training with the Hierarchy of Needs

Actor training pedagogy in the West is intended to provide students with the requisite skills to succeed in their future career(s). Many of the practitioners whose theories and ideas are taught in such higher education institutions (or schools), have not changed over the last century and many of those ideas include some element of understanding – leading to the replication – of human psychology. This paper argues for the expansion of that canon of theory and practitioners by the inclusion of the theories of the psychologist Abraham Maslow as an adjunct – but not replacement – of these ideas. Using his hierarchy of needs, an additional tool becomes available to training (and nascent professional) actors, directors and maybe even dramaturgs, which could lead to a deeper understanding of the psychology of characters. Extrapolation of these ideas could also see applications in other artistic and literary focussed disciplines, in further and higher educational settings, leading to deeper and fuller understanding(s) of the texts studied and therefore the stories and ideas represented in those stories.

http://liminalities.net/19-2/hierarchy.pdf