While literary studies have a plethora of terms and reading strategies to capture the material construction of text (i.e. what happens on the page as word follows word), there are few equivalent strategies for reading the material construction of theatrical acting (i.e. what happens on stage as movement is added to movement). Taking this relative lack of discourse as a point of departure, my aim in this thesis is to develop tools and modes of spectating that can capture the formal aspects of acting – that is to say, acting seen in its surface-most layer, in its bodily, sinewy practices. By close reading (or rather: close seeing) the acting undertaken in four performances, analyzing patterns of movement and trying to figure out stylistic characteristics, the thesis claims to make three main contributions to a formalist way of spectating: 1) It proposes a terminological framework for a formalist analysis of actorly movement. 2) It proposes a characterization of the stylistic traits of four acting styles that I have chosen to label ‘Classicism’, ‘Romanticism’, ‘Realism’ and ‘Postmodernism’. 3) It explores, by way of example, how a formalist mode of spectating can be put into meaningful practice when describing the body in action.