This book situates the work of the renowned voice and movement trainer Arthur Lessac in the context of contemporary actor training as a whole. Melissa Hurt uses Maurice Merleau-Ponty's theories of embodiment to frame Lessac's approach in terms of Embodied Acting, a key subject in contemporary performance. In doing so, she explains how the actor can come to experience both technique and expression as a subjective whole, through meditation and spatial attunement. As well as feeding this somatic approach into a wider discussion of embodiment, the author provides concrete examples of how the practice can be put into effect, and studied at university level.

Denis Diderot (1713-1784) was one of the French philosophers and writers of the Enlightenment. This volume contains the first English translations of his plays, The Illegitimate Son and The Father of the Family. These complex and very entertaining plays delve into the attitudes of the middle-class, bourgeois society and reveal an eighteenth-century "suburbia" that populates dramatic and suspenseful situations and settings. The translations are vivid and contemporary and bring the plays alive to early twenty-first-century stage and culture.

A follow-on from Actors' Audition Speeches" this title includes speeches from plays written and produced in the 1990s, with extracts from West End productions ("Art" and "Cressida"), and films ("Pulp Fiction"). Comments from directors, casting directors, actors and teachers are included."

What can the Globe Theatre tell us about performing Shakespeare? Unearthing Shakespeare is the first book to consider what the Globe, today's replica of Shakespeare's theatre, can contribute to a practical understanding of Shakespeare's plays. Valerie Clayman Pye reconsiders the material evidence of Early Modern theatre-making, presenting clear, accessible discussions of historical theatre practice; stages and staging; and the relationship between actor and audience. She relays this into a series of training exercises for actors at all levels. From "Shakesball" and "Telescoping" to Elliptical Energy Training and The Radiating Box, this is a rich set of resources for anyone looking to tackle Shakespeare with authenticity and confidence.

Acting for the Stage is a highly accessible guide to the business of theater acting, written for those interested in pursuing acting as a profession. This book is a collection of essays by and interviews with talented artists and businesspeople who have built successful careers in the theater; it's a goldmine of career advice that might take years to find on your own. Herein, the myths around professional acting are dispelled, and the mysteries revealed. Acting for the Stage illuminates practical strategies to help you build a life as a theater professional and find financial rewards and creative fulfillment in the process. Contains essays by and interviews with working stage actors, acting coaches, directors, writers, and agents. Features discussions on selecting a graduate school program, choosing acting classes and workshops, making the most out of your showcase, landing an agent, networking and promoting yourself, and the business of casting. Covers issues of money management, balancing the highs and lows of the profession, finding work to nourish your acting career, and building your creative team and support network.

'This is a book about how to beat the living daylights out of another human being safely...' Roger Bartlett - professional fight director and Master Teacher for the British Academy of Stage & Screen Combat - leads you through everything you need to know in order to create and perform unarmed stage fights that are compelling, realistic and, above all, safe. Starting with the essential concepts, including Victim Control and Reversal of Energy, you will learn how to perform all of the following moves: Slapping Punching Kicking Strangling Pulling and Pushing Falling Locking Blocking Each technique is clearly described, extensively illustrated, and accompanied by online videos demonstrating it in slow motion and at full speed. Also included are chapters on understanding and conveying your character's pain, and creating and rehearsing your own fight sequence. For those already trained in stage combat, it will serve as a comprehensive reminder of what you have learned, and supplement your ongoing training. For amateur, fringe and student companies, the book offers a thorough understanding of the practicalities of staging a fight, but also helps you to recognise when you may need to call upon the services of a qualified professional. Whatever your current level of experience, Stage Combat: Unarmed is the essential book for directors, actors, students and teachers, or indeed anyone looking to incorporate safe, effective stage fights into their productions.

This book deals with the process of negotiation with the past in the present through the plays of Marina Carr. The title frames the work, connoting the path towards destruction and the sense of lethargy acquired along the way. The book offers an in-depth and extensive reading of Carr's plays. In doing so, it surveys some of the destructive issues represented in the works and provides a series of social and cultural contexts to which the concerns in the works are related. Carr is best known for her trilogy, The Mai, Portia Coughlan and By the Bog of Cats..., and more recently Woman and Scarecrow, The Cordelia Dream and Marble. The plays are regularly concerned with notions of identity in the context of self-destruction, self-estrangement and displacement. This book applies Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection to Carr's plays in an effort to structure the loss the author identifies in the works. Themes of memory, history and myth are examined in the context of these concerns in provocative and confrontational ways.

The gender-specific monologs in this new text are highly original works not found in other published versions. All are from very recently produced plays from both well-known and emerging new writers. The selections are for women actors fifteen to thirty years of age, suitable for competitive auditions, acting exercises, forensics, class or studio work. "Beginning with an introduction to performance and audition etiquette, the text's characterizations are divided into ages: The Age of Innocence, Coming of Age, The Age of Rebellion, The Glided Age "and New Age Voices. These monolog characterizations address the major trends and conflicts of today through revealing glimpses of society. A valuable resource for any auditioning female actor or theatre student.

If, as an actor, your body is your 'instrument' - and the only way you can express the internal impulses of the character you're playing - what happens when the body-mind, 'psychophysical' connection is lost? Andrei Droznin, Russia's foremost teacher of physical actor training, calls this loss the 'desomatization' of the human body, and argues that these connections urgently need to be restored for full expressivity. This is a genuinely unique book which links theory to practice by a man who has worked at the very top of Russian theatre; a movement specialist who has taught at the Moscow Art Theatre as well as drama schools all over the world. Beautifully translated by Natasha Fedorova, this volume will excite and inspire a new generation of English-language readers.

Drawing from early modern plays and treatises on the precepts and practices of the acting process, this study shows how the early modern Spanish actress subscribed to various somatic practices in an effort to prepare for a role. It provides today's reader not only another perspective to the performance aspect of early modern plays, but also a better understanding of how the woman of the theater succeeded in a highly scrutinized profession. Elizabeth Marie Cruz Petersen examines examples of comedias from playwrights such as Lope de Vega, Luis Velez de Guevara, Tirso de Molina, and Ana Caro, historical documents, and treatises to demonstrate that the women of the stage transformed their bodies and their social and cultural environment in order to succeed in early modern Spanish theater. Women's Somatic Training in Early Modern Spanish Theater is the first full-length, in-depth study of women actors in seventeenth-century Spain. Unique in the field of comedia studies, it approaches the topic from a performance perspective, using somaesthetics as a tool to explain how an artist's lived experiences and emotions unite in the interpretation of art, reconfiguring her "self" via the transformation of habit.

There are hundreds of biographies of filmstars and dozens of scholarly works on acting in general. But what about the ephemeral yet indelible moments when, for a brief scene or even just a single shot, an actor's performance triggers a visceral response in the viewer? Moment of Action delves into the mysteries of screen performance, revealing both the acting techniques and the technical apparatuses that coalesce in an instant of cinematic alchemy to create movie gold. Considering a range of acting styles while examining films as varied as Bringing Up Baby, Psycho, The Red Shoes, Godzilla, and The Bourne Identity, Murray Pomerance traces the common dynamics that work to structure the complex relationship between the act of cinematic performance and its eventual perception. Mining the spaces where subjective and objective analyses merge, Pomerance offers both a deeply personal account of film viewership and a detailed examination of the intuitive gestures, orchestrated movements, and backstage maneuvers that go into creating those phenomenal moments onscreen. Moment of Action takes us on an innovative exploration of the nexus at which the actor's keen skills spark and kindle the audience's receptive energies.

"How do we move actors into the less accessible regions of themselves and release hotter, more dangerous, and less literal means of approaching a role?" Superscenes are a revolutionary new mode of teaching and rehearsal, allowing the actor to discover and utilize the primal energies underlying dramatic texts. In Acting, Archetype, and Neuroscience Jane Drake Brody draws upon a lifetime's experience in the theatre, alongside the best insights into pedagogical practice in the field, the work of philosophers and writers who have focused on myth and archetype, and the latest insights of neuroscience. The resulting interdisciplinary, exciting volume works to: Mine the essentials of accepted acting theory while finding ways to access more primally-based human behavior in actors Restore a focus on storytelling that has been lost in the rush to create complex characters with arresting physical and vocal lives Uncover the mythical bones buried within every piece of dramatic writing; the skeletal framework upon which hangs the language and drama of the play itself Focus on the actor's body as the only place where the conflict inherent in drama can be animated. Acting, Archetype, and Neuroscience weaves together a wealth of seemingly disparate performance methods, exciting actors to imaginatively and playfully take risks they might otherwise avoid. A radical new mixture of theory and practice by a highly respected teacher of acting, this volume is a must-read for students and performance practitioners alike.

Audition Speeches for 6-16 Year Olds offers a generous helping of carefully selected speeches that children can prepare for auditions. Each speech is introduced with commentary to set the scene and help the young actor.

"How do we move actors into the less accessible regions of themselves and release hotter, more dangerous, and less literal means of approaching a role?" Superscenes are a revolutionary new mode of teaching and rehearsal, allowing the actor to discover and utilize the primal energies underlying dramatic texts. In Acting, Archetype, and Neuroscience Jane Drake Brody draws upon a lifetime's experience in the theatre, alongside the best insights into pedagogical practice in the field, the work of philosophers and writers who have focused on myth and archetype, and the latest insights of neuroscience. The resulting interdisciplinary, exciting volume works to: Mine the essentials of accepted acting theory while finding ways to access more primally-based human behavior in actors Restore a focus on storytelling that has been lost in the rush to create complex characters with arresting physical and vocal lives Uncover the mythical bones buried within every piece of dramatic writing; the skeletal framework upon which hangs the language and drama of the play itself Focus on the actor's body as the only place where the conflict inherent in drama can be animated. Acting, Archetype, and Neuroscience weaves together a wealth of seemingly disparate performance methods, exciting actors to imaginatively and playfully take risks they might otherwise avoid. A radical new mixture of theory and practice by a highly respected teacher of acting, this volume is a must-read for students and performance practitioners alike.

Lively yet intriguing, The Body in Performance is a varied collection of essays about this much-discussed area. Posing the question "Why this current preoccupation with the performed body?" the collection of specially commissioned essays from both academics and practitioners - in some cases one and the same person - considers such cutting edge topics as the abject body and performance, censorship and live art, the presentation of violence on stage, carnal art, and the vexed issue of mimesis in the theatre. Drawing variously on the work of Franko B., Orlan, Annie Sprinkle, Karen Finley, and Forced Entertainment, it concludes with a creative piece about a 'Famous New York Performance Artist.' Contributors include Rebecca Schneider whose book The Explicit Body in Performance is a key text in this area, and Joan Lipkin, director and writer.

Actors of colour need the best speeches to demonstrate their skills and hone their craft. Roberta Uno has carefully selected monologues that represent African-American, Native American, Latino, and Asian-American identities. Each monologue comes with an introduction and notes on the characters and stage directions to set the scene for the actor. This new edition now includes more of the most exciting and accomplished playwrights to have emerged over the 15 years since the Monologues for Actors of Color books were first published, from new, cutting edge talent to Pulitzer winners.

A rare behind-the-scenes look at the rehearsal sessions of acclaimed directors and actors. Cole offers a view of what is often hidden from the public eye: what actors and directors do when they prepare a dramatic text for performance.

Dialect work is one of the actor's most challenging tasks. Need to know a Russian accent? Playing a German countess or a Midwestern farmhand? These and more accents - from Yiddish to French Canadian - are clearly explained in Evangeline Machlin's classic work. Now available in a book-and-downloadable resources format, Evangeline Machlin's Dialects for the Stage is based on a method of dialect acquisition she developed during her years working with students at Boston University's Division of Theatre. During her long career, Evangeline Machlin trained such actors as Steve McQueen, Lee Grant, Suzanne Pleshette, Joanne Woodward, and Faye Dunaway.

In order to create a living character on the stage, the actor needs more than masterful technique. He must work on the play in a way that will enable him to understand the meaning of each of the roles in it, and the nature of the relations between these roles. Stanislavsky developed his method of working on the play and the role over many years, but because it was constantly being modified and improved, only fragments of the method were ever recorded. Now Irina and Igor Levin have systematized the method, clearly setting forth its principles and demonstrating precisely how they are put to use. Using the complete text of Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard and breaking it into individual "events;" they take the reader through each situation in the play, exploring the motivations and feelings of the characters. The reader emerges with a fine understanding of the play and its roles, and with a method that can be used successfully to analyze any drama. "An excellent book, highly useful for actors and directors both in its principles and in its detailed analyses of text and subtext."-Nicholas Rudall, Court Theatre.

'Lucid, sharp, funny, Bogad's Tactical Performance is the book we've been waiting for on creative activism.' Diana Taylor, Director, Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, New York University, and author of Performance 'Tactical Performance rehearses theatre and social justice strategies at their best: historically connected, culturally informed, alive and nimble in their responses to the political moment. With the savvy of a participant/observer and the acuity of an historian and critic, Bogad provides a lively overview of important activist performances, asking us to reconsider their effects and their promise. A crystal-clear argument in a must-read book for all who care about performance and social change.' Jill Dolan, Dean of the College, Princeton University 'Beautifully written; a playful, potent mixture of history, how-to, and theory, informed by the author's many years of personal front-line experience.' The Yes Men (Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno) 'The love child of Lenny Bruce and Saul Alinsky, Bogad has worked, on the street and behind the scenes, at the nexus of some of the most compelling art-interventions of the past 15 years. He brings his truly original and bizarre performance-art sensibility both to his activism and to this ground-breaking book. Read it!' Guillermo Gomez-Pena, writer, performance artist and pedagogue 'Appalling bad taste and worse judgment make Bogad's interventions memorable and frequently effective. Don't try this alone at home. These actions should be undertaken with friends, and preferably with very good friends.' Peter Sellars, theatre director Tactical Performance explores creative protest in unique depth, looking at the possibilities for direct action and theatrical confrontation with some of the most powerful institutions in the world. It effectively combines theory and practice, illustrating the basic principles of artful activism in an absorbing, accessible manner. L.M. Bogad draws on his own experience as a writer, performer, and strategist working with groups such as the Yes Men, the Clown Army, Reclaim the Streets, and La Pocha Nostra, to share the most effective nonviolent tactics and theatrics. An inspiring practical and theoretical guide, Tactical Performance is essential reading for anyone interested in creative pranksterism, subvertisement, cultural sabotage, and the global justice movement.

'Lucid, sharp, funny, Bogad's Tactical Performance is the book we've been waiting for on creative activism.' Diana Taylor, Director, Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, New York University, and author of Performance 'Tactical Performance rehearses theatre and social justice strategies at their best: historically connected, culturally informed, alive and nimble in their responses to the political moment. With the savvy of a participant/observer and the acuity of an historian and critic, Bogad provides a lively overview of important activist performances, asking us to reconsider their effects and their promise. A crystal-clear argument in a must-read book for all who care about performance and social change.' Jill Dolan, Dean of the College, Princeton University 'Beautifully written; a playful, potent mixture of history, how-to, and theory, informed by the author's many years of personal front-line experience.' The Yes Men (Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno) 'The love child of Lenny Bruce and Saul Alinsky, Bogad has worked, on the street and behind the scenes, at the nexus of some of the most compelling art-interventions of the past 15 years. He brings his truly original and bizarre performance-art sensibility both to his activism and to this ground-breaking book. Read it!' Guillermo Gomez-Pena, writer, performance artist and pedagogue 'Appalling bad taste and worse judgment make Bogad's interventions memorable and frequently effective. Don't try this alone at home. These actions should be undertaken with friends, and preferably with very good friends.' Peter Sellars, theatre director Tactical Performance explores creative protest in unique depth, looking at the possibilities for direct action and theatrical confrontation with some of the most powerful institutions in the world. It effectively combines theory and practice, illustrating the basic principles of artful activism in an absorbing, accessible manner. L.M. Bogad draws on his own experience as a writer, performer, and strategist working with groups such as the Yes Men, the Clown Army, Reclaim the Streets, and La Pocha Nostra, to share the most effective nonviolent tactics and theatrics. An inspiring practical and theoretical guide, Tactical Performance is essential reading for anyone interested in creative pranksterism, subvertisement, cultural sabotage, and the global justice movement.

Laughter is the most effective technique for teenage survival. These monologs, dialogs and short skits allow teenage performers a chance to laugh at the system, their teachers, their parents and most importantly, themselves! These are scripts for laughter and pathos. They create an awareness of the perils of drinking and driving, teenage parties, smoking, alcoholic parents and much more. Sixty superb, short scripts! For speech contests, acting exercises, auditions, variety shows and classroom use. Some of the titles include: MONOLOGS: Vacation from Hell, Daydreaming, Kiss Off That First Kiss, DIALOGS: Girls Come in All Shapes, Designated Driver, Tassels and Tears. SKITS: How to Dump a Dip, Beauty Sleep, Party Time.

The Process of Drama provides an original and invaluable model of the elements of drama in context, and defines how these are negotiated to produce dramatic art. John O'Toole takes the reader through a lively, fascinating account of the relationships between the playwright, the elements of dramatic art, and the other artists involved in this most interactive of creative processes. In doing so he demonstrates - with clarity and wit - how dramatic meaning emerges; how the dramatic event is constructed. Areas covered include: roles and relationships the drama space language and movement tension and the audience gesture and movement This is an essential book for every student of drama who wants to understand how the theatrical art form operates

First Published in 1994. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This is a comprehensive workbook for actors, covering the key characteristics and profiles of a wide range of African accents of English. Its unique approach not only addresses the methods and processes by which to go about learning an accent, but also looks in detail at each example. This lets the reader plot their own route through the learning process and tailor not only their working methods but also their own personal idiolect. Full breakdowns of each accent cover: an introduction giving a brief history of the accent, its ethnic background, and its language of origin preparatory warm-up exercises specific to each accent a directory of research materials including documentaries, plays, films and online resources key characteristics such as melody, stress, pace and pitch descriptions of physical articulation in the tongue, lips, jaw, palate and pharynx practice sentences, phoneme tables and worksheets for solo study. African Accents is accompanied by a website at www.routledge.com/cw/mcguire with an extensive online database of audio samples for each accent. The book and audio resources guide actors to develop their own authentic accents, rather than simply to mimic native speakers. This process allows the actor to personalize an accent, and to integrate it into the creation of character rather than to play the accent on top of character.