The highly regarded actor training manual by top movement teacher Anne Dennis. This inspirational and instructive book shows how actors can use their body to be as expressive and 'articulate' as they are with words. It attempts to rethink and analyse the actor's physical needs, offering a graded series of exercises aimed at realising those needs and making the body fully articulate as a medium of expression. The book will also be of use to teachers, directors, movement directors and choreographers.

Acting for the Camera: Back to One is a "how to" book with practical steps to achieve a professional performance on camera. The book focuses on four distinct areas: how to prepare the character, how to execute the technical responsibilities that will assist the editor in creating the on-camera performance in post-production, tips from industry professionals, and how to create effective self-tape auditions. Part One: The Character's World is packed with tools to analyze the script and fully prepare the character before arriving on set. Part Two: The Actor's World focuses on developing technical acting skills for the camera that assist the pre- and post-production teams to create a dynamic on-screen performance. In Part Three: The Professional World, industry professionals provide tips from inside the film/TV audition room and how to navigate a career in the acting business. The final section, Part Four: Self-Tape Like a Pro, outlines how to build a self-tape studio in the privacy of your own home and submit high-quality self-tape auditions that will help you stand out from the competition. Written for students enrolled in Acting for the Camera courses, Acting for the Camera: Back to One explores techniques that can be practiced and mastered by actors of all levels, from the moment they audition for the part through to when they hear that director call "cut!"

A brand-new collection of original audition pieces written by and for actors of colour, commissioned by Tamasha Theatre Company and edited by Titilola Dawudu, with a foreword by Noma Dumezweni. Hear Me Now is a unique collection of over eighty original audition monologues, expressly created by a range of award-winning writers brought together by producer Titilola Dawudu and Tamasha Theatre Company. They're ideal for actors of colour searching for speeches for auditions or training, writers, teachers, and theatre-makers who are passionate about improving diversity. The book provides varied, nuanced stories that expand beyond the range of existing material available - from a cross-dressing Imam, to the first Black Prime Minister, the British Indian girl with dreams of becoming a country music star, or the young Black boy who loves baking as much as football - Hear Me Now is an essential tool for actors of colour to showcase their range, and seeks to inspire, empower, and create a legacy for generations to come.

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.

The Method Acting Exercises Handbook is a concise and practical guide to the acting exercises originally devised by Lee Strasberg, one of the Method's foremost practitioners. The Method trains the imagination, concentration, senses and emotions to 're-create' - not 'imitate' - logical, believable and truthful behavior on stage and in film. Building on nearly 30 years of teaching internationally and at the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute in New York and Los Angeles, Lola Cohen details a series of specific exercises in order to provide clear instruction and guidance to this preeminent form of actor training. By integrating Strasberg's voice with her own tried and tested style of teaching, Cohen demonstrates what can be gained from the exercises, how they can inform and inspire your learning, and how they might be applied to your acting and directing practice. As a companion to The Lee Strasberg Notes (Routledge 2010), a transcription of Strasberg's own teaching, The Method Acting Exercises Handbook offers an unparalleled and updated guide to this world renowned technique.

A resource book with over seventy games and lists for using improvisation games to teach drama skills. Classroom tested and proven to be intellectually stimulating and creatively successful.

Based on interviews with over forty award-winning artists, How to Rehearse a Play offers multiple solutions to the challenges that directors face from first rehearsal to opening night. The book provides a wealth of information on how to run a rehearsal room, suggesting different paths and encouraging directors to shape their own process. It is divided into four sections: lessons from the past: a brief survey of influential directors, including Stanislavski's acting methods and Anne Bogart's theories on movement; a survey of current practices: practical advice on launching a process, analyzing scripts, crafting staging, detailing scene work, collaborating in technical rehearsals and previews, and opening the play to the public; rehearsing without a script: suggestions, advice, and exercises for devising plays through collaborative company creation; rehearsal workbook: prompts and exercises to help directors discover their own process. How to Rehearse a Play is the perfect guide for any artist leading their first rehearsal, heading to graduate school for intense study, or just looking for ways to refresh and reinvigorate their artistry.

Finally--a collection of duologues from the best-selling author of Winning Monologs for Young Actors and her granddaughter. These humorous and thoughtful scenes present distinctive viewpoints on issues meant to provoke and inspire discussion as well as to entertain. Most roles can be played by either gender.

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.

This collection of performance scripts runs the entire gamut of teenage joys, insecurities and tragic difficulties. They challenge both the performer and the audience with situations that require thinking to resolve. They are superb for classroom use, contest competitions, discussion-starters or audition scripts. The book is divided into three sections: TRIOLOGUES - separate monologues for three performers speaking viewpoints on a single theme; DUOLOGUES - monologues for two performers on a theme; MONOLOGUES - one-person commentaries on a wide variety of subjects, happy and sad. All of the monologues are non-theatrical in style - they speak as teenagers live and move.

Directing Postmodern Theater brings together critical theory and contemporary theater practice to provide valuable tools for directing in today's expansive performance world. Postmodern theater places new and novel demands on stage directors. It is more experimental, and the boundaries of what constitutes a performance have shifted. Dialogue is no longer always the primary mode of communication, and music, sound, movement, and other visual elements are being explored as ways to make meaning onstage. Directing Postmodern Theater identifies the key communications systems at work in the theater: linguistic, visual, aural, olfactoral, and physical. Further, it pinpoints and examines twenty semiotic sign-systems that can be manipulated by directors to bring about meaningful communications. It is also the first book to bridge the gap between theoretical discussions of semiotics and the actual practice of producing theater. For those theories to have an impact, argues Whitmore, they must be linked to the process of transforming a playscript or concept into a living performance. This book fills the gap in practical yet provocative ways, grounding theoretical discussions in examples from specific postmodern productions.

A four-section book of acting games and improvisations to assist students in developing their creative abilities. Section one includes games for relaxing and focusing. Section two helps students discover new ways of seeing themselves, others and the world around them. The third section demonstrates with improvisations how to use space to build scenes and create characters from imagination. Section four features acting games to analyze and play characters from existing plays. All of the essential elements of acting and character development are explored. A working textbook for acting students of all ages. Four parts: Relaxing and Focusing Exercises: Acting Games: Improvisations: Exercises for Characters, Scenes and Plays.

Actors and Audiences explores the exchanges between those on and off the stage that fill the atmosphere with energy and vitality. Caroline Heim utilises the concept of "electric air" to describe this phenomenon and discuss the charge of emotional electricity that heightens the audience's senses in the theatre. In order to understand this electric air, Heim draws from in-depth interviews with 79 professional audience members and 22 international stage and screen actors in the United Kingdom, United States, France and Germany. Tapping into the growing interest in empirical studies of the audience, this book documents experiences from three productions - The Encounter, Heisenberg and Hunger. Peer Gynt - to describe the nature of these conversations. The interviews disclose essential elements: transference, identification, projection, double consciousness, presence, stage fright and the suspension of disbelief. Ultimately Heim reveals that the heart of theatre is the relationship between those on- and off-stage, the way in which emotions and words create psychological conversations that pass through the fourth wall into an "in-between space," and the resulting electric air. A fascinating introduction to a unique subject, this book provides a close examination of actor and audience perspectives, which is essential reading for students and academics of Theatre, Performance and Audience Studies.

Co-written by Tina Packer, founding artistic director of the company. Focus on the company's practical processes makes the book ideal for students, teachers and professionals. Includes comprehensive coverage of the company's core actor training curriculum.

In this digital age, it is more exciting than ever to seek a career in the entertainment industry-from stuntmen and musicians to actresses, dancers, and even make-up artists. With the advent of social media, YouTube, Facebook, and more, someone with talent in any medium can (and needs to) create their own brand, steer their career, and master the art of "virtually auditioning" at all times with every post. This is a far cry from the "old days" of paper headshot and cattle calls. Forbes Riley, an overnight success 20+ years in the making, shares her insights, obstacles, and successes as she pursued her career as an actress, dancer, and TV host. For her, meeting Will Quinones and hearing his dream of building his audition platform, Virdition, to help struggling artists of all levels was a dream come true. Virdition takes auditioning to a whole new level and helps aspiring entertainers truly understand the possibilities from contest shows like The Voice and American Idol to feature film casting.

'Masks are empowering... They enable you to take risks. They provoke you into working with the reckless logic of a six-year-old or the enigmatic stillness of someone wiser than you'll ever be. But above all, masks let you be you without your habitual limitations.' In Playing the Mask, award-winning theatre-maker and teacher John Wright explores and demystifies mask-work: what masks do, how they do it, and, above all, what they can teach us about acting. This book is a wonderfully accessible introduction to a fresh and innovative acting technique for actors, theatre-makers and teachers to use in training and rehearsal. A mask releases the actor to be playful, and playfulness generates ideas, finds meaning, develops characterisation - and is infinitely more fun than traditional training. Rather than a dry guide to making masked theatre, it is about, for instance, playing Lady Macbeth in Red Nose, or Hamlet in the mask of The Victim, The Ogre or The Fool, or even Romeo and Juliet in grotesque half-masks... All in the name of liberating your creativity and, ultimately, improving your performance. Extensively illustrated with a rich variety of masks, this inventive and pragmatic book is full of invaluable games and exercises drawn from the author's own workshops, his experience as co-founder of both Trestle and Told by an Idiot, and his pioneering mask and clown work in many professional productions. 'Brilliant, entertaining and accessible' Paul Hunter, from his Foreword

Provides workshop activities and dramatic sketches for student actors.

A handbook for aspiring actors by two of the best-known names in the British theatre and television Written by two of the best-known actors in the country, this short book offers practical advice and do's and don'ts to anyone thinking of taking up acting. Both authors are passionate about actor training, know the profession inside out and, as they say in their intro, have more than a hundred years' experience between them Writing alternate paragraphs throughout the book - and frequently contradicting each other - they cover the whole gamut from * Applying to drama school * Auditioning * Training * Working in unpaid productions * Doing 'bits' on telly etc etc and on up to * Getting an agent and * Enduring a West End run - should you be so lucky. Published in slimline format (cf. NHB's Actions), this handy but pleasantly unstuffy manual is essential reading - or an essential gift -for any aspiring actor.

The Player's Passion reinterprets theories of acting in light of the history of science, examining acting styles from the seventeenth to the twentieth century and measuring them against prevailing conceptions of the human body. The author explores how dominant theories of emotion, from the Galenic humor to the Pavlovian reflex, have shaped the critic's changing standards of the natural order of life and the actor's physical embodiment of it. The Player's Passion has become a classic among theater historians and students of acting, and received the prestigious Barnard Hewitt Award for outstanding research in theater history. A wider audience will appreciate the book for its consideration of how far an idea can spread from its original discipline into the broader currents of intellectual history and popular comprehension.

A complete textbook on all aspects of Readers Theatre for high school and college use. The early texts of this unique performance technique are now out of print. This contemporary text includes complete documentation of the earliest days of Readers Theatre and how it has developed into a modern art form for performing artists and lovers of literature in its many forms. It clarifies methods and techniques in adapting prose works of all types to a classroom stage. This current, more theatrical approach, utilizes much more than simply scripts and stools. It allows performers the convenience of Readers Theatre with theatrical staging as an added extra. Many royalty-free script adaptations for performers and audiences of all ages. Also included is an extensive listing of source material ideas. Seven chapters: The Principles, The Process, The Product, The Performance, The Space, Sample Scripts. Suggested Sources.

THE GOOD AUDITION GUIDES: Helping you select and perform the audition piece that is best suited to your performing skills If you're auditioning for a musical - or needing to choose a song to perform for an exam, showcase or drama-school application - it's vital you find a song that shows off your voice and reveals your full potential as both a singer and an actor. In this invaluable book, you'll find comprehensive introductions to fifty of the best songs from musical theatre, for tenor/high baritone and baritone/bass voices, and in a variety of periods, styles, genres and tempos. Each song comes with detailed textual, vocal and musical analysis, and a practical performance guide to ensure you perform it to maximum effect in your own unique way. Drawing on his experience as a performer, musical director and teacher at several leading drama schools, Paul Harvard gives his top tips for performing each song, note by note, moment by moment. He also recommends soundtrack recordings to inspire you, and tells you where to find the correct sheet music for your chosen song (please note: the book does not contain the sheet music itself). The selection includes songs from acclaimed contemporary musicals such as Children of Eden and Pippin by Stephen Schwartz, Parade and The Last Five Years by Jason Robert Brown, as well as Martin Guerre, The Wild Party, Taboo and The Lion King - alongside many much-loved classics like Carousel, Fiddler on the Roof, 42nd Street, Kiss Me, Kate, and six of Sondheim's masterpieces. Also included is an extensive introduction to the process of choosing your song, preparing your performance and approaching the audition itself, along with many vocal and acting exercises to improve your technique and boost your confidence. 'For anyone wishing to do justice to a musical-theatre role, and definitely for those wishing to work in this genre, this guide is a must' Teaching Drama Magazine on Paul Harvard's bestselling book Acting Through Song

This book, written in collaboration with Dennis Longwell, follows an acting class of eight men and eight women for fifteen months, beginning with the most rudimentary exercises and ending with affecting and polished scenes from contemporary American plays. Throughout these pages Meisner is delight--always empathizing with his students and urging them onward, provoking emotion, laughter, and growing technical mastery from his charges. With an introduction by Sydney Pollack, director of "Out of Africa" and "Tootsie," who worked with Meisner for five years.



"This book should be read by anyone who wants to act or even appreciate what acting involves. Like Meisner's way of teaching, it is the straight goods."--Arthur Miller


"If there is a key to good acting, this one is it, above all others. Actors, young and not so young, will find inspiration and excitement in this book."--Gregory Peck

Teaching Strategies for Neurodiversity and Dyslexia in Actor Training addresses some of the challenges met by acting students with dyslexia and highlights the abilities demonstrated by individuals with specific learning differences in actor training. The book offers six tested teaching strategies, created from practical and theoretical research investigations with dyslexic acting students, using the methodologies of case study and action research. Utilizing Shakespeare's text as a laboratory of practice and drawing directly from the voices and practical work of the dyslexic students themselves, the book explores: the stress caused by dyslexia and how the teacher might ameliorate it through changes in their practice the theories and discourse surrounding the label of dyslexia the visual, kinaesthetic, and multisensory processing preferences demonstrated by some acting students assessed as dyslexic acting approaches for engaging with Shakespeare's language, enabling those with dyslexia to develop their authentic voice and abilities a grounding of the words and the meaning of the text through embodied cognition, spatial awareness, and epistemic tools Stanislavski's method of units and actions and how it can benefit and obstruct the student with dyslexia when working on Shakespeare Interpretive Mnemonics as a memory support and hermeneutic process, and the use of color and drawing towards an autonomy in live performance This book is a valuable resource for voice and actor training, professional performance, and for those who are curious about emancipatory methods that support difference through humanistic teaching philosophies.

The Commedia dell'Arte of Flaminio Scala presents a translation and commentary of selected scenarios composed or collected by the actor-manager Flaminio Scala that were first published in 1611. Thirty of Scala's 50 scenarios are included, complete with a detailed scene-by-scene analysis that demonstrates the methodology of Italian improvised theatre in the early modern period for the purposes of study as well as re-creation. Taking into consideration previous translations of the work, Richard Andrews's English translation and lengthy analytic commentary of the scenarios provide an overview of the commedia dell'arte style, describing how actors fleshed out scenes by inserting existing material from their repertoire into a plot framework and demonstrating a constant interchange of plot, characterization, and scene structure that moved between scripted and improvised comedy. Andrews points out similarities between the scenarios, borrowings from earlier Italian scripted comedies, analogies with other early modern drama including Shakespeare, and the re-use of these components by later dramatists such as Moliere and Goldoni. An extensive introduction sets the parameters for the commentaries, giving a description of commedia dell'arte as a phenomenon, explaining the categories of masked characters, and describing the nature and structure of the genre. A comprehensive index is organized for quick reference and lists which characters and masks appear in which scenarios, as well as frequent scenic components that recur, such as types of speeches, relationships, and emotional situations.

Staging Sex lays out a comprehensive, practical solution for staging intimacy, nudity, and sexual violence. This book takes theatre practitioners step-by-step through the best practices, tools, and techniques for crafting effective theatrical intimacy. After an overview of the challenges directors face when staging theatrical intimacy, Staging Sex offers practical solutions and exercises, provides a system for establishing and discussing boundaries, and suggests efficient and effective language for staging intimacy and sexual violence. It also addresses production and classroom specific concerns and provides guidance for creating a culture of consent in any company or department. Written for directors, choreographers, movement coaches, stage managers, production managers, professional actors, and students of acting courses, Staging Sex is an essential tool for theatre practitioners who encounter theatrical intimacy or instructional touch, whether in rehearsal or in the classroom.