Performative theatre is one of the most important trends of our time. It is emblematic of the work of many European theatrical artists in the early twenty-first century. Annamaria Cascetta does not propose a model or a historical overview, but rather strives to identify the salient features of a significant trend in the theatrical research and transformation of our time by analysing some crucial examples from outstanding works, of great international resonance. She draws on work by artists from different generations, all active between the late twentieth century and the first decades of the twenty-first, and in various European countries, performed in a number of European theatres in recent years. The aim is to apply a method of analysis in depth, bringing out the technical elements of contemporary "performative theatre" in the field, and above all to highlight the close links between it and the urgent and troubled issues and problems of history and society in the phase of cultural and anthropological transition we are experiencing.

What is good acting? How does one create believable characters? How can an actor understand a character if they do not understand themselves?

In The Science of Acting, Sam Kogan uses his theories on the relationship between neuroscience, psychology and acting to answer these questions. Practical exercises provide a step-by-step guide to developing an actor's ability, culminating in Ten Steps to Creating a Character.

He presents the reader with a groundbreaking understanding of the subconscious and how it can be applied to their acting. The author s highly original perspective on Stanislavski's teaching gives readers a unique insight into their character s minds.

Sam Kogan studied at the Moscow Institute of Theatre Arts (now the Russian Academy of Theatre Arts) under the tutelage of Professor Maria Knebel. He established The Science of Acting, a complete stand-alone technique.

Helen Kogan is the chair and former principal of The Academy of Science of Acting and Directing, has helped to shape her father's words and work for the publication of this book.

How do objects 'speak' to us? What happens to authorship when voice is projected into inanimate objects? How can one articulate an object into speech? Is the inarticulate body necessarily silent? These are just some of the questions brought up by this unique and unusual collection of essays, which presents subjects and categories often overlooked by the disciplines of art history, visual culture, theatre history and comparative literature. Drawing from and expanding upon the 'Performing Objects, Animating Images' academic session run by the Henry Moore Institute at the Association of Art Historians conference, held in London in 2003, this book presents thirteen essays that bring together a multidisciplinary approach to the animated object. Contributions range from literal accounts of magic lanterns, tableaux vivants, puppets and ventriloquist dummies, to the more abstract notions of voice displacement in audio art and authorship projection in writing machines. The contributors come from diverse backgrounds in art history, cultural history, comparative literature, and artistic, theatrical and curatorial practice, and all tackle the issue of 'articulate objects' from a range of lively and unexpected perspectives.

Experiencing Speech: A Skills-Based, Panlingual Approach to Actor Training is a beginner's guide to Knight-Thompson Speechwork (R), a method that focuses on universal and inclusive speech training for actors from all language, racial, cultural, and gender backgrounds and identities. This book provides a progression of playful, practical exercises designed to build a truly universal set of speech skills that any actor can use, such as the ability to identify, discern, and execute every sound found in every language on the planet. By observing different types of flow through the vocal tract, vocal tract anatomy, articulator actions, and how these components can be combined, readers will understand and recreate the process by which language is learned. They will then be introduced to the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) and will practice using the IPA for narrow transcription of speech sounds. The book also offers both an intellectual and physical understanding of oral posture and how it contributes to vocal characterization and accent work. This approach to speech training is descriptive, giving students a wide and diverse set of speech sounds and skills to utilize for any character in any project, and it establishes a foundation for future accent study and acquisition. Experiencing Speech: A Skills-Based, Panlingual Approach to Actor Training is an excellent resource for teachers and students of speech and actor training, as well as aspiring actors looking to diversify their speech skills.

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.

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.