Art mirrors life; life returns the favor. How could nineteenth and twentieth century technologies foster both the change in the world view generally called «postmodernism and the development of new art forms? Scholar and curator Faye Ran shows how interactions of art and technology led to cultural changes and the evolution of Installation art as a genre unto itself - a fascinating hybrid of expanded sculpture in terms of context, site, and environment, and expanded theatre in terms of performer, performance, and public.

David Zinder s Body Voice Imagination is written by one of the master teachers of the Michael Chekhov technique of acting training. This book is a comprehensive course of exercises devoted to the development of actors creative expressivity, comprising both pre-Chekhov ImageWork Training and seminal exercises of the Chekhov technique. It also details the way in which these techniques can be applied to performance through a discovery of the profound connections between the actor s body, imagination and voice.

This new edition has been fully updated, with revisions and new material:

• Updated exercises, reflecting developments in David Zinder s own ImageWork Training
• An detailed description, with exercises, of ImageWork s connections to the Chekhov technique
• A new chapter, bridging the gap between training and performance

Body Voice Imagination develops both a comprehensive physical training system and an emphasis on practical character work. This authoritative programme of pre-Chekhov training is furnished with essential notes and advice from the author s vast store of professional experience.

David Zinder s Body Voice Imagination is written by one of the master teachers of the Michael Chekhov technique of acting training. This book is a comprehensive course of exercises devoted to the development of actors creative expressivity, comprising both pre-Chekhov ImageWork Training and seminal exercises of the Chekhov technique. It also details the way in which these techniques can be applied to performance through a discovery of the profound connections between the actor s body, imagination and voice.

This new edition has been fully updated, with revisions and new material:

• Updated exercises, reflecting developments in David Zinder s own ImageWork Training
• An detailed description, with exercises, of ImageWork s connections to the Chekhov technique
• A new chapter, bridging the gap between training and performance

Body Voice Imagination develops both a comprehensive physical training system and an emphasis on practical character work. This authoritative programme of pre-Chekhov training is furnished with essential notes and advice from the author s vast store of professional experience.

Liminality, if interpreted as a concern with borders and states of in-betweenness, is a wide-spread theme in Irish literature and culture, which is perhaps not surprising considering the colonial and postcolonial background of Ireland. The liminal, from the Latin word limen, meaning «a threshold, can be broadly defined as a transitional place of becoming. It is a borderland state of ambiguity and indeterminacy, leading those who participate in the process to new perspectives and possibilities. This collection of essays examines the theme of liminality in Irish literature and culture against the philosophical discourse of modernity and focuses on representations of liminality in contemporary Irish literature, art and film in a variety of contexts. The book is divided into four sections. The first part deals with theoretical aspects of liminal states. Other sections focus on liminal narratives and explore drama as liminal rites of passage, while the last part examines transformative spaces in contemporary Irish women's poetry.

Much work has been done in recent years on Quinault's librettos, but no major study of his spoken plays has appeared since the monumental thesis by Etienne Gros, published in 1926. Moreover, he has never been the subject of a monograph in English. There is a need to re-assess the influence of his life on his plays, and to re-evaluate Gros's findings in the light of eighty years' research into seventeenth-century French theatre in general. This book rejects the deterministic approach that sees his plays as apprentice pieces for the greater achievement that is his corpus of librettos, as well as the implicit comparative approach that pigeon-holes his work, in passing, by borrowing from the pithy judgements of Boileau. To what extent does Quinault's steady move away from comedy and light tragi-comedy to tragedies that combine love and menace go hand in hand with his search for greater integrity, better characterisation, and ever more credible plotting? How did he come to create and retain a tremendously faithful audience that even the withering mockery of Boileau failed to discourage? And is there any purpose in retaining the time-worn comparison between the author of Andromaque and the author of Astrate?

This is the first book of its kind to explain and detail research for practice for actors. The book has a versatile approach that offers meaningful points of intersection in a variety of performance-based contexts, and avoids enshrining a set methodology or praxis which might be perceived as conflicting with other approaches. This is a supplementary text designed to support study and training across programs of performance study.

This book is the first critical analysis of the key principles and practices informing the movement training of actors in the modern era. Focusing on the cultural history of modern movement training for actors, Evans traces the development of the 'neutral' body as a significant area of practice within drama school training and the relationship between movement pedagogy and the operation of discipline and power in shaping the professional identity of the actor.

The volume looks in detail at the influence of the leading figures in movement training - Laban, Alexander, Copeau and Lecoq - on twentieth century professional actor training, and is informed by interviews with students and staff at leading English drama schools. Mark Evans re-evaluates the significance of movement training in the professional drama school, offering a new understanding of the body as a site for performative resistance to industrialization. Despite the publication of a number of 'how to' books on movement training for the professional acting student, this is the first text to look behind the curtain and write the unseen biography of the actor's body.

In Lessons from The Maestro: Crafting a Successful Fight/Stunt Career in Theatre and Film, famed Hollywood and theatre stuntman, trainer, and fight director David L. Boushey writes about his life, the history of stage and screen combat and stunt work, and how to enter the entertainment industry. Charting his illustrious career that spanned over 45 years, 400 theatre credits, and 45 films, Boushey narrates the events and decisions that lead him to enter the entertainment industry and documents for the first time his founding of multiple national and international associations for fight directors and stuntmen. He provides a roadmap for individuals aspiring to work in the theatre and film industry, providing information on training, auditioning, networking, unions, different paths one might take, and tips on how to be a successful stunt performer in a competitive industry. Part autobiography, part how-to guide to the entertainment business from the foremost authority in stage combat and stunt work, this is an invaluable resource for professional and aspiring fight and intimacy directors and stunt performers in theatre and film.

In Lessons from The Maestro: Crafting a Successful Fight/Stunt Career in Theatre and Film, famed Hollywood and theatre stuntman, trainer, and fight director David L. Boushey writes about his life, the history of stage and screen combat and stunt work, and how to enter the entertainment industry. Charting his illustrious career that spanned over 45 years, 400 theatre credits, and 45 films, Boushey narrates the events and decisions that lead him to enter the entertainment industry and documents for the first time his founding of multiple national and international associations for fight directors and stuntmen. He provides a roadmap for individuals aspiring to work in the theatre and film industry, providing information on training, auditioning, networking, unions, different paths one might take, and tips on how to be a successful stunt performer in a competitive industry. Part autobiography, part how-to guide to the entertainment business from the foremost authority in stage combat and stunt work, this is an invaluable resource for professional and aspiring fight and intimacy directors and stunt performers in theatre and film.

Psychophysical Acting is a direct and vital address to the demands of contemporary theatre on today 's actor. Drawing on over thirty years of intercultural experience, Phillip Zarrilli aims to equip actors with practical and conceptual tools with which to approach their work. Areas of focus include:

• an historical overview of a psychophysical approach to acting from Stanislavski to the present
• acting as an energetics of performance, applied to a wide range of playwrights: Samuel Beckett, Martin Crimp, Sarah Kane, Kaite O Reilly and Ota Shogo
• a system of training though yoga and Asian martial arts that heightens sensory awareness, dynamic energy, and in which body and mind become one
• practical application of training principles to improvisation exercises.

Psychophysical Acting is accompanied by Peter Hulton 's interactive DVD-ROM featuring exercises, production documentation, interviews, and reflection.

A sophisticated analysis of how the intersection of technique, memory, and imagination inform performance, Crossing Cultural Borders Through the Actor's Work redirects the intercultural debate by focusing exclusively on the actor at work. Alongside the perspectives of other prominent intercultural actors, this study draws from original interviews with Ang Gey Pin (formerly with the Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards) and Roberta Carreri (Odin Teatret). By illuminating the hidden creative processes usually unavailable to outsiders - the actor's apprenticeship, training, character development, and rehearsals - Nascimento both reveals how assumptions based on race or ethnicity are misguiding, trouble definitions of intra- and intercultural practices, and details how performance analyses and claims of appropriation fail to consider the permanent transformation of the actor's identity that cultural transmission and embodiment represent.

Stanislavsky in Focus brilliantly examines the history and actual premises of Stanislavsky's 'System', separating myth from fact with forensic skill. The first edition of this now classic study showed conclusively how the 'System' was gradually transformed into the Method, popularised in the 1950s by Lee Strasberg and the Actor's Studio. It looked at the gap between the original Russian texts and what most English-speaking practitioners still imagine to be Stanislavsky's ideas. This thoroughly revised new edition also delves even deeper into: the mythical depiction of Stanislavsky as a tyrannical director and teacher yoga, the mind-body-spirit continuum and its role in the 'System' how Stanislavsky used subtexts to hide many of his ideas from Soviet censors. The text has been updated to address all of the relevant scholarship, particularly in Russia, since the first edition was published. It also features an expanded glossary on the System's terminology and its historical exercises, as well as more on the political context of Stanislavsky's work, its links with cognitive science, and the System's relation to contemporary developments in actor-training. It will be a vital part of every practitioner's and historian's library.

During its fifty year run, Theatre Arts Magazine was a bustling forum for the foremost names in the performing arts, including Stanislavski, Laurence Olivier, Lee Strasberg, John Gielgud and Shelley Winters. Renowned theatre historian Laurence Senelick has plundered its stunning archives to assemble a stellar collection of articles on every aspect of acting and theatrical life.

During its fifty year run, Theatre Arts Magazine was a bustling forum for the foremost names in the performing arts, including Stanislavski, Laurence Olivier, Lee Strasberg, John Gielgud and Shelley Winters. Renowned theatre historian Laurence Senelick has plundered its stunning archives to assemble a stellar collection of articles on every aspect of acting and theatrical life.

This book throws new light on the complexity and variety of practices which may be defined as 'theatrical' in a broad sense in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English drama. The volume deals first with the mainstream of dramatic production, starting from the anti-theatrical debate which characterized the whole period and increased in intensity as it went on. Here Shakespeare and Ben Jonson come on stage with their rejoinders to this issue. At the same time, while the universities were offering a kind of theatre workshop importing Latin and Italian models, popular performances were being staged in non-theatrical spaces. Tournaments, and their aristocratic codes, are explored as well as more popular and 'marginal' spectacles -- such as those of conny-catching improvisers, jugglers, gypsy dancers and fortune-tellers, clowns and prophetesses.

Shakespeare's plays present the dynamics of personal relationships in a way that is direct and unambiguous, and with unparalleled forcefulness. This book concentrates on three of Shakespeare's last plays, King Lear, Pericles and The Tempest, allowing them to demonstrate the underlying dynamic of theatre as it is embodied within the work of a master craftsman. The three plays are widely dissimilar from one another at the surface level, yet they all concentrate on a particular relationship - that between fathers and daughters - working outwards from the centre of human experience and using the fundamental relational paradigm as it is enshrined in theatre, especially Shakespeare's. As a professional actor as well as an academic, the author combines an actor's understanding with psychodynamics and literary criticism.

This book examines the ritualistic and mythological features derived from various religious traditions depicted in ten Ibsen plays. The worshipping of the Great Mother, the Mysteries of Eleusis, the Hebrew Passover Meal and Yom Kippur, alongside with the most sacred feasts of Christianity, are identified in Ibsen's texts in a way not discovered before. The outcome is a fascinating voyage through a landscape of ritualistic visions. Throughout the book the author illustrates how the plays contribute to the revival of the sacred in modernist theatre. Each chapter of the book contains a synopsis of the play interpreted, followed by a detailed analysis, which focuses on religious concepts and mythological elements incorporated in Ibsen's texts. The following plays are interpreted: Emperor and Galilean, Brand, Peer Gynt, A Doll's House, The Wild Duck, Rosmersholm, The Lady from the Sea, Hedda Gabler, The Master Builder, When We Dead Awaken.

Focusing on examples of live performance in drama, dance, opera and light entertainment, Jane Goodall explores a characteristic as compelling and enigmatic as the performers who demonstrate it. The mysterious quality of 'presence' in a performer has strong resonances with the uncanny. It is associated with primal, animal qualities in human individuals, but also has connotations of divinity and the supernatural, relating to figures of evil as well as heroism. Stage Presence traces these themes through theatrical history. This fascinating study also explores the blend of science and spirituality that accompanies the appreciation of human power. Performers display a magnetism of their audiences; they electrify them, exhibit mesmeric command, and develop chemistry in their communication. Case studies include: Josephine Baker, Sarah Bernhardt, Thomas Betterton, David Bowie, Maria Callas, Bob Dylan, David Garrick, Barry Humphries, Henry Irving, Vaslav Nijinsky and Paul Robeson.

This book rediscovers a spiritual way of preparing the actor towards experiencing that ineffable artistic creativity defined by Konstantin Stanislavski as the creative state. Filtered through the lens of his unaddressed Christian Orthodox background, as well as his yogic or Hindu interest, the practical work followed the odyssey of the artist, from being oneself towards becoming the character, being structured in three major horizontal stages and developed on another three vertical, interconnected levels. Throughout the book, Gabriela Curpan aims to question both the cartesian approach to acting and the realist-psychological line, generally viewed as the only features of Stanislavski's work. This book will be of great interest to theatre and performance academics as well as practitioners in the fields of acting and directing.

This book rediscovers a spiritual way of preparing the actor towards experiencing that ineffable artistic creativity defined by Konstantin Stanislavski as the creative state. Filtered through the lens of his unaddressed Christian Orthodox background, as well as his yogic or Hindu interest, the practical work followed the odyssey of the artist, from being oneself towards becoming the character, being structured in three major horizontal stages and developed on another three vertical, interconnected levels. Throughout the book, Gabriela Curpan aims to question both the cartesian approach to acting and the realist-psychological line, generally viewed as the only features of Stanislavski's work. This book will be of great interest to theatre and performance academics as well as practitioners in the fields of acting and directing.

This book elucidates how learning from actors enables an intense education of attention for anthropologists. Actors perform the perception of sunshine, the sensation of pain, affects such as shock and emotions such as happiness; they act quarrels, erotic attraction, leadership and submission on stage. In order to achieve that, they undergo an education of attention, allowing them to develop skills that are also useful for anthropologists, particularly when doing research on phenomena that often elude academic procedures. Drawing on her own acting experiences and ongoing research with actors from Africa and Europe, Cassis Kilian takes up Tim Ingold's manifold proposals to reconfigure anthropological research. She introduces approaches actors use to explore the complexity of human life and its bodily, sensual and emotional dimensions, which can be difficult for academics to grasp when examining topics such as everyday practices, traumatic experiences and power relations. Though the book discerns pitfalls in anthropological research and suggests artistic approaches to overcome them, it values anthropology as a discipline whose radical self-reflexive approach allows for such experiments. Including exercises and practical approaches, this is valuable reading for scholars interested in anthropological methods, sensory anthropology, perception and materiality, and theatre anthropology.

The Actor, Image and Action is a 'new generation' approach to the craft of acting; the first full-length study of actor training using the insights of cognitive neuroscience. In a brilliant reassessment of both the practice and theory of acting, Rhonda Blair examines the physiological relationship between bodily action and emotional experience. In doing so she provides the latest step in Stanislavsky's attempts to help the actor 'reach the unconscious by conscious means'. Recent developments in scientific thinking about the connections between biology and cognition require new ways of understanding many elements of human activity, including: imagination emotion memory physicality reason. The Actor, Image and Action looks at how these are in fact inseparable in the brain's structure and function, and their crucial importance to an actor's engagement with a role. The book vastly improves our understanding of the actor's process and is a must for any actor or student of acting.

This book explores the interplay between global and local influences in theatre festivals in the German-speaking border region around Lake Constance. Whilst opening up a fascinating yet under-researched theatre region to academic study, it also provides much-needed empirical grounding for often vague theories of place, globalisation and culture. Do we really live in a 'shrinking world' dominated by a homogenising global culture industry, or are we experiencing the revival of 'local particularism'? To what extent is an apparently place-dependent cultural form such as theatre affected by the processes of cultural globalisation? Through detailed analysis of theatrical case studies from Lake Constance and the application of an interdisciplinary theoretical framework, this book begins to answer such important questions. The empirical focus is on the defining features of the Lake Constance region: the beautiful and often romanticised natural landscape of lake and mountains, and the presence of the nation-state borders which make this the crossroads of the German-speaking world. The author thus examines both open-air summer theatre festivals, such as the internationally renowned Bregenzer Festspiele, and politically focused cross-border theatre festivals, such as the youth festival Triangel.

Award Monologues for Women is a collection of fifty-four monologues taken from plays written since 1980 that have been nominated for the Pullitzer Prize, the Tony and the Drama Desk Awards in New York, and The Evening Standard and Laurence Olivier Awards in London. The book provides an excellent range of up-to-date audition pieces, usefully arranged in age groups, and is supplemented with audition tips to improve your acting, and to ensure that the best possible performance.

Award Monologues for Men is a collection of fifty monologues taken from plays written since 1980 that have been nominated for the Pullitzer Prize, the Tony and the Drama Desk Awards in New York, and The Evening Standard and Laurence Olivier Awards in London. The book provides an excellent range of up-to-date audition pieces, usefully arranged in age groups, and is supplemented with audition tips to improve your acting, and to ensure you give your best possible performance.