Combining life-coaching and screen-acting tools and techniques in one accessible handbook, this guide empowers actors to overcome personal inhibitions and approach their work, characters and careers with the assuredness to produce powerful, real and believable acting on screen. Structured to build confidence and understanding of yourself before you take on the role of someone else, this book offers the tools and techniques to give you the necessary conviction and self-assurance to perform uninhibited. Dresner then examines essential elements of a screen actor's craft, such as emotions, imagination, nerves, focus, listening, improvisation and line-learning. Published in partnership with The Actor's Centre, the book includes online videos of coaching sessions with professional actors and is ideal for readers and teachers looking to replicate the method in their own training.

What is it like to pursue a career in acting? Forty working actors comment on auditions, day jobs, agents, rejection, and what drives them to keep going when there is no work. These personal essays have been drawn from interviews with actors at different stages in their careers. Some have just begun; others have frequented Broadway, film, and television. They share stories of every aspect of being a professional actor, from heart-wrenching rejection, to the exhilaration of getting that first big part. Their often humorous stories, from the practical to the inspirational, will be invaluable for anyone studying acting or already embarking on a career.

What is the relationship between 'body' and 'mind', 'inner' and 'outer' in any approach to acting? How have different modes of actor training shaped actors' experiences of acting and how they understand their work? Phillip B. Zarrilli, Jerri Daboo and Rebecca Loukes offer insight into such questions, analysing acting as a psychophysical phenomenon and process across cultures and disciplines, and providing in-depth accounts of culturally and historically specific approaches to acting. Individual chapters explore:
- psychophysical acting and the legacy of Stanislavsky
- European psychophysical practices of dance and theatre
- traditional and contemporary psychophysical approaches to performance in India and Japan
- insights from the new sciences on the 'situated bodymind' of the actor
- intercultural perspectives on acting
This lively study is ideal for students and practitioners alike.

Cracking Shakespeare serves to demystify the process of speaking Shakespeare's language, offering hands-on techniques for drama students, young actors and directors who are intimidated by rehearsing, performing and directing Shakespeare's plays. For some artists approaching Shakespeare, the ability to capture the dynamic movement of thought from mind to mouth, and the paradox of using the formality of verse to express a realistic form of speech, can seem daunting. Cracking Shakespeare includes practical techniques and exercises to solve this dilemma - including supporting online video which demonstrate how to embody Shakespeare's characters in rehearsal and performance - offering a toolkit that will free actors and directors from their fear of Shakespeare. The result of thirty years of acting, teaching and directing Shakespeare, Kelly Hunter's Cracking Shakespeare is the ideal textbook for actors and directors looking for new ways to approach Shakespeare's plays in a hands-on, down-to-earth style.

This is the inside story of how theater, film, television, and commercials casting really works. In interviews with top casting directors in both Los Angeles and New York, the author comes upon the answers to such key questions as: What suggestions can be most helpful to an actor starting out? What kinds of pictures and resumes are most successful? What is the best way to get a casting director's attention? What are the biggest - and most common - mistakes actors make in auditions? How necessary is it to have an agent - in New York? in Los Angeles? The experts who field these and scores of other questions include the casting directors of Broadway shows and television series. Their professional experience and practical advice make Getting the Part an invaluable source for both professional actors and newcomers trying to break into performing in any (or all) of the various media.

In the 21st century, actors face radical changes in plays and performance styles, as they move from stage to screen and grapple with new technologies that present their art to ever-expanding audiences. Active Analysis offers the flexibility of mind, body, and spirit now urgently needed in acting. Dynamic Acting through Active Analysis brings to light this timely legacy, born during the worst era of Soviet repression and hidden for decades from public view. Part I unfolds like a mystery novel through letters, memoirs, and transcripts of Konstantin Stanislavsky's last classes. Far from the authoritarian director of his youth, he reveals himself as a generous mentor, who empowers actors with a brand new collaborative approach to rehearsals. His assistant, Maria Knebel, first bears witness to his forward-looking ideas and then builds the bridge to new plays in new styles through her directing and influential teaching. Part II follows a 21st century company of diverse actors as they experience the joy of applying Active Analysis to their own creative and professional work.

"Theatrical Improvisation" provides an in-depth analysis of short form, long form, and sketch-based improv--tracing the development of each form and the principles that define and connect the styles of performance. Brimming with original interviews from leaders in the field such as Ron West, Charna Halpern, John Sweeny and Margaret Edwartowski, "Theatrical Improvisation" presents straightforward improvisational theory, history, and trends. Includes easy-to-follow resources on teaching improvisation, with assessment tools, exercises, games, and classroom assignments to enable instructors to incorporate and assess improv in the classroom. Leep offers a practical, essential, and engaging guide for anyone who wants to better understand the art, teach, or perform improvisation.

This book offers a provocative and groundbreaking re-appraisal of the demands of acting ancient tragedy, informed by cutting-edge scholarship in the fields of actor training, theatre history, and classical reception. Its interdisciplinary reach means that it is uniquely positioned to identify, interrogate, and de-mystify the cliches which cluster around Greek tragedy, giving acting students, teachers, and theatre-makers the chance to access a vital range of current debates, and modelling ways in which an enhanced understanding of this material can serve as the stimulus for new experiments in the studio or rehearsal room. Two theoretical chapters contend that Aristotelian readings of tragedy, especially when combined with elements of Stanislavski's (early) actor-training practice, can actually prevent actors from interacting productively with ancient plays and practices. The four chapters which follow (Acting Sound, Acting Myth, Acting Space, and Acting Chorus) examine specific challenges in detail, combining historical summaries with a survey of key modern practitioners, and a sequence of practical exercises.

Sande Shurin's enlightened acting technique is a determined effort to steer away from intellectual, theory-based instruction to a more creative and viscerally human approach. It moves beyond teaching how to represent a character or various emotions toward living a role with in-the-moment identification and urgency. The goal of Sande Shurin's transformational acting is to bring both the actor and the character into the same body. To do this requires, first, finding the differences and similarities that divide and link the actor and the role being performed; and second, imagining the entire life of the character -- including what is hidden on the stage or on the screen.

One of the most popular thrillers of Alfred Hitchcock's middle years, Rear Window is now also recognised as one of the most brilliant demonstrations of the director's cinematic wizardry. Starring James Stewart and Grace Kelly, with Thelma Ritter and Raymond Burr in memorable supporting roles, the film centres on a photographer confined to a wheelchair in his apartment who, using binoculars, spies on his courtyard neighbours and witnesses a possible murder. Stefan Sharff, professor emeritus of Columbia University's film department, shows us how Hitchcock achieved the mounting excitement and fear that mark this film. The author first provides a detailed overview of the director's skill in developing the story from intriguing start to shattering climax. In the second part of the book, he goes on to a shot-by-shot analysis; using the film's continuity as his text, he describes how Hitchcock's technique accomplished its magic. Illustrated throughout with stills from the film, The Art of Looking is a unique appreciation of the art of Alfred Hitchcock, made even more valuable by the first publication in any form of the full dialogue of a screen masterpiece.

The Routledge Companion to Performance Practitioners collects the outstanding biographical and production overviews of key theatre practitioners first featured in the popular Routledge Performance Practitioners series of guidebooks. Each of the chapters is written by an expert on a particular figure, from Stanislavsky and Brecht to Laban and Decroux, and places their work in its social and historical context. Summaries and analyses of their key productions indicate each practitioner's theoretical approaches to performance and the performer were manifested in practice. With all 22 practitioners from the original series represented, this is the definitive first step for students, scholars and practitioners hoping to acquaint themselves with the leading names in performance, or deepen their knowledge of these seminal figures.

This original study, published initially in 1959, introduces students of philosophy and of theology to a treatment of religion based upon the methods of modern philosophy - particularly logical empiricism and existentialism. Above and beyond the importance of its point of view, this book is distinguished by its clarity and by its objective and understanding presentation of diverse points of view.

Twenty-four leading voice experts speak out on the changing role of voice on stage. Essay topics include: Re-Discovering Lost Voices * Thoughts on Theatre, Therapy, and the Art of Voice * Finding Our Lost Singing Voices * Voice Training, Where Have We Come From? * Vocal Coaching in Private Practice * more.

(Limelight). From Booklist: Actor-director-producer Leonard has a real gift for storytelling that he displays to the fullest in a breezy, readable memoir of his life in show business. Starting out as an actor in 1930s New York in such forgotten hit plays as Hotel Alimony, Fly Away Home, and Kiss the Boys Goodbye, Leonard had the foresight and financial need to leap first to radio and movies, then to television, in which he created or produced such rerun perennials as Make Room for Daddy, The Andy Griffith Show, and the controversial (for its time) I Spy . Along the way, Leonard met lots and lots of fascinating people--John Garfield, Jack Benny, Danny Thomas, Carl Reiner, and Bill Cosby, to mention a few of the dozens about whom Leonard has a funny story or three to tell. Some of these stories are well known, such as those of the closeness of the writers, actors, and staff of The Dick Van Dyke Show; others are not, such as those of Leonard's various, sometimes dangerous, adventures around the world while filming I Spy . Jack Helbig

This inspirational guide for advanced acting students brings together multiple ways of creating excellence in performance. David Krasner provides tried and tested exercises, a history of actor training and explores the complex relationships between acting theories and teachers. Drawing on examples from personal experience as an actor, director and teacher, An Actor's Craft begins with the building blocks of mind, body and voice, moving through emotional triggers and improvisation, to a final section bringing these techniques together in approaching a role. Each chapter contains accompanying exercises that the actor should practice daily. Combining theory and practice, this thought-provoking and challenging study of acting techniques and theories is for actors who have grasped the basics and now want to develop their knowledge and training further.

Outlining different perspectives, this classic and field-defining text introduces 'dramaturgy' as a critical concept and a practical process in an accessible and engaging style. The revised edition includes a new introduction and afterword which provides insight into contemporary developments and future directions of scholarship.

"There is an actual, living relationship between the spaces of the body and the spaces the body moves through; human living tissue does not abruptly stop at the skin, exercises with space are built on the assumption that human beings and space are both alive". Here are the exercises which began as radical departures from standard actor training etiquette and which stand now as classic means through which the performer discovers his or her true power of transformation. Available for the first time in fifteen years, the new expanded edition of Environmental Theater offers a new generation of theater artists the gospel according to Richard Schechner, the guru whose principles and influence have survived a quarter-century of reaction and debate.

This book explores the way in which the contemporary proliferation of forms of storytelling practice in international theatre has created a distinctive set of performance practices. Texts and performers discussed include Split Britches, Billy Connolly, Anna Deavere Smith's Let Me Down Easy, Spalding Gray, David Hare's Via Dolorosa

George Frederick Cooke was a member of that select company of legendary actors -- Garrick, Kemble, Henderson, Kean -- who dominated the English stage during the late 18th and early 19th centuries. He was the first important actor to cross the Atlantic and to play the theatres of the new United States. Don B. Wilmeth's extensive research in Cooke's journal and in many other contemporary sources provides us with a new appreciation of the actor's importance.

How do audiences look at actors in costume onstage? How does costume shape theatrical identity and form bodies? What do audiences wear to the theatre? This lively and cutting-edge book explores these questions, and engages with the various theoretical approaches to the study of actors in performance. Aoife Monks focuses in particular on the uncanny ways in which costume and the actor's body are indistinguishable in the audience's experience of a performance. From the role of costume in Modernist theatre to the actor's position in the fashion system, from nudity to stage ghosts, this wide-ranging exploration of costume, and its histories, argues for the centrality of costume to the spectator's experience at the theatre. Drawing on examples from paintings, photographs, live performances, novels, reviews, blogs and plays, Monks presents a vibrant analysis of the very peculiar work that actors and costumes do on the stage.