The study of theatre is of great value to psychologists because it is a vital part of life. This thoroughly revised and updated second edition provides a unique and up--to--date analysis of what psychology has to offer for actors, musicians, singers and dancers. It makes suggestions about how the particular stresses that performers are under can be managed. Newly provided examples, or Spotlights, give focused explanations of interesting topics that are self--contained within the text. Drawing on numerous practical examples from the arts as well as scientific and clinical research, this book has proven to be an invaluable resource for student, professional and amateur alike. Modern psychology has much to offer performing artists in terms of understanding themselves and optimizing their art: it examines the unique two--way relationship between audience and performer, describes the way in which emotions are communicated to an audience by non--verbal processes such as posture and facial expression, and explains the instinctual origins of the impulse to perform. Dr Glenn Wilson PhD, FBPS, CPsychol is Senior Lecturer in Psychology at the Institute of Psychiatry, University of London, and has previously held visiting professorships at Stanford University, San Francisco State and the University of Nevada, Reno. He trained as a baritone at the Guildhall School of Music, and now is an established stage director and opera singer who makes frequent appearances on British TV. He has published several papers on psychology as applied to the performing arts, and in London in 1990 and 1993 organized the first and second international conferences on Psychology and the Performing Arts.

Auditioning for Musical Theatre demystifies the process of giving the best possible professional audition for a role in a musical. It is the result of Denny Berry's own experience, sitting "behind the audition desk" for 30 years of professional Broadway auditions, as well as teaching newcomers and coaching established actors. The book coaches performers on how to be their best selves-and avoid the pitfalls of nerves and poor preparation. To do so, it offers: An in-depth, practical approach to a professional audition that gives readers detailed suggestions about how to identify their vocal strengths, choose the material most suited to it, and present the entirety of their "product" with confidence. Rules to guide the actor through the audition process, along with sample homework assignments. A comprehensive list of musical material, genres, and commonly-referred-to categories of songs designed to help auditioners select the right material for any given audition. The book is intended for the talented newcomer as well as the experienced actor who wants to deliver a more effective audition. Ultimately, Auditioning for Musical Theatre takes the reader through the parts of auditioning that they can control, and helps them tailor every situation to show their individual best.

Directed not only toward actors, dancers, and other performing artists who draw upon improvisation as part of their craft, this Zen-infused memoir of a life lived creatively will pique the interest of anyone in search of liberation from self-limiting concepts. What does it mean to live in a body? What does it mean to improvise? Do we wonder whether we're capable of improvising--to make up things as we go, step into the unknown, take a risk that changes our notion of ourselves and the world?
Author Ruth Zaporah has been a professional physical theater performer, writer, director, and teacher for forty years. Early on she realized that with a shift of perception, every moment of an improvisation holds both the familiar and the utterly new. With the same shift, so does every moment of life; every moment holds both the known and the unknown. And, as Zaporah says, "The body leads the way in this book. In each chapter the world is experienced by it and of it. It is the body that adds richness, wildness, and grace. The body invokes images and feelings. It is the body that imagines."
" Improvisation on the Edge" recounts events from Zaporah's life such as improvisational shows in the war zones of Sarajevo and Kosovo; apprenticing with a Huichol medicine woman from Chiapas, Mexico; understanding the concept of "practice" while on a beach; a bus ride in Cuba; a car ride in Estonia; the intricacies of onstage collaborations. Interspersed are chapters about awareness, listening, adapting, resiliency, time, space, silence, simplicity--all within the context of everyday life in the body. In several other chapters, Ruth writes from the logical (and nonlinear) voice of the improviser as she is on stage, within the immediate embodied process. A fascinating glimpse into the mind of an artist and true master of improvisation, this book will appeal to performers, teachers, and anyone who has ever needed to "wing it" with confidence and grace.
Table of Contents
1. Something That Needs Listening To 2. Mirror Mirror 3. On My Wall 4. Tutu Solitude 5. A Mind in Three Episodes 6. A Splish Splash Orchestra 7. A Take on Talk 8. Bobby's River 9. Roar 10. Meet Yourself Babe 11. Nuts and Bolts 12. Out of Chaos 13. Changing Course 14. The Flying Shaman 15. You Could Say Death 16. Ain't It The Truth 17. The Raging Boomerang 18. See This Feel That 19. Stalking War 20. Your Mother Just Died Christina, Leave the Backdoor Open 21. The Illusive Genture 22. A Pack of Lies 23. Again Gun and Boys 24. A Ride in Estonia 25. Art and Heart 26. Floating to the Surface 27. Stuffed With Junk 28. A Chair in Cuba 29. Any Where Practice 30 Teacher Says 31. Older and Under

A comprehensive guide to winning by enhancing acting skills by Roger Ellis. This text is not a typical shake-and-bake manual of quickie tips on how to do a good audition. No other book puts auditioning in the context of acting training. The nuts and bolts are all here, but this book will do much more. It will develop audition and acting skills in a systematic way over time, throughout the actor's study and career. This book is first and foremost an acting text. It shows auditioning as another kind of acting performance, not a technical exercise or desperate attempt to highlight every skill or talent the actor possesses. It is a step-by-step guide for training young actors to audition well by developing acting skills. Includes more than sixty relevant acting exercises or 'explorations', as well as fourteen sample audition pieces from contemporary playwrights and a wealth of other resource material. An all-encompassing audition text.

Expressionism and Its Deformation in Contemporary Chinese Theatre provides both rigorous readings of dramatic works as well as a historical overview of Chinese theatre from the 1980s to the present. Expressionism becomes a discursive locus to be incorporated and even transformed during a critical phase in the modernization of Chinese drama during the post-Maoist era. Six leading Chinese dramatists (Gao Xingjian, Lin Zhaohua, Huang Zuolin, Xu Xiaozhong, Meng Jinghui, and Stan Lai) are clear representatives of opening up a new world of modern Chinese drama. They embody each of the major phases of the adoption, deformation, and multicultural infusion of Expressionism in the development of Chinese dramatic modernization. Approaching their dramatic works from multiple perspectives, including expressionist vision and techniques, comparative aesthetics, Bakhtinian chronotope and heteroglossia, semiotics, "psychic interiority", and concluding with Lu Xun's definition of Expressionism as "to write a good deal about yourself", Chinese dramatists' enthusiasm for Expressionism is not just an artistic rejoinder to the spiritual aspirations of life in a time of rapid industrialization and modernization but also a coming-to-terms with the ideological and aesthetic conflicts between different dramatic traditions. Expressionism and Its Deformation in Contemporary Chinese Theatre is the first scholarly book to explore the deep and intricate relationship between Expressionism and contemporary Chinese drama, attempting to assume the critical task of challenging these dramatists while delineating the contours of the most recent trends of Chinese theatre. This book could situate itself within the Chinese scholarly and theatrical contexts for English readers as it is an accessible text for both undergraduate students and graduates and scholars.

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.

The Actor's Survival Kit is required reading in Canadian theatre schools and is a constant resource for its many readers across the country. This fourth edition gives actors fresh research from today's experience, new lists of Canada-wide contracts, and input from success stories. It speaks to a new generation of artists, giving them an up-to-date guide to the business of acting. It addresses a range of new issues: performer websites, video self-production, and sending resumes and networking on the Internet. It also takes a fresh look at old ones: agents, self-profomotion, and work opportunities for women and minorities. The authors learn by constantly talking to emerging artists about the problems they face in the business in Canada. Often those conversations begin with, "You wrote the book!" The authors are still receiving thanks from grateful artists who have been guided by this irreplaceable book over the years. Miriam Newhouse has acted and directed in theatre worldwide and across Canada. She has appeared in film, radio, and television and is the Labour Co-Chair of the Ontario Advisory Committee for Health and Safety in the Live Performing Arts. Peter Messaline voiced the original Dr. Who Daleks and has worked in England, Canada, and the U.S. After the Stratford and Shaw Festivals, he has principal casting in series and MOW. He hasn't had a joe job in 40 years.

Acting & Auditioning for the 21st Century covers acting and auditioning in relation to new media, blue and green screen technology, motion capture, web series, audiobook work, evolving livestreamed web series, and international acting and audio work. Readers are given a methodology for changing artistic technology and the global acting market, with chapters covering auditions of all kinds, contracts, the impact of new technology and issues relating to disabled actors, actors of colour and actors that are part of the LGBTQIA community.

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.

Contemporary actor training in the US and UK has become increasingly multicultural and multilinguistic. Border-crossing, cross-cultural exchange in contemporary theatre practices, and the rise of the intercultural actor has meant that actor training today has been shaped by multiple modes of training and differing worldviews. How might mainstream Anglo-American voice training for actors address the needs of students who bring multiple worldviews into the training studio? When several vocal training traditions are learned simultaneously, how does this shift the way actors think, talk, and perform? How does this change the way actors understand what a voice is? What it can/should do? How it can/should do it? Using adaptations of a traditional Korean vocal art, p'ansori, with adaptations of the "natural" or "free" voice approach, Tara McAllister-Viel offers an alternative approach to training actors' voices by (re)considering the materials of training: breath, sound, "presence," and text. This work contributes to ongoing discussions about the future of voice pedagogy in theatre, for those practitioners and scholars interested in performance studies, ethnomusicology, voice studies, and intercultural theories and practices.

"The study of acting should not begin with an exploration of feeling, perception, imagination, memories, intention, personalization, self-identification... or even performance but physical action."

Michael Lugering's The Expressive Actor presents a foundational, preparatory training method, using movement to unlock the entire acting process. Its action-based perspective integrates voice, movement and basic acting training into a unified approach.

A wealth of exercises and diagrams guide the reader through this internationally taught program, making it an ideal step-by-step course for both solo and classroom use. Through this course, voice and body training becomes more than a simple skill-building activity it is the central prerequisite to any actor training.

This new Routledge edition has been fully updated, to include:

Advanced Consciousness Training for Actors: Meditation Techniques for the Performing Artist explores theories and techniques for deepening the individual actor's capacity to concentrate and focus attention. Going well beyond the common exercises found in actor training programs, these practices utilize consciousness expanding "technologies" derived from both Eastern and Western traditions of meditation and mindfulness training as well as more recent discoveries from the fields of psychology and neuroscience. This book reviews the scientific literature of consciousness studies and mindfulness research to discover techniques for focusing attention, expanding self-awareness, and increasing levels of mental concentration; all foundational skills of the performing artist in any medium.

For whom does the actor perform? To answer this foundational question of the actor's art, Grotowski scholar Kris Salata explores acting as a self-revelatory action, introduces Grotowski's concept of "carnal prayer," and develops an interdisciplinary theory of acting and spectating. Acting after Grotowski: Theatre's Carnal Prayer attempts to overcome the religious/secular binary by treating "prayer" as a pre-religious, originary deed, and ultimately situates theatre along with ritual in their shared territory of play. Grounded in theatre practice, Salata's narrative moves through postmodern philosophy, critical theory, theatre, performance, ritual, and religious studies, concluding that the fundamental structure of prayer, which underpins the actor's deed, can be found in any self-revelatory creative act.

Performance hints and vocal and physical exercises for playing a variety of scenes from modern and classical theater.

How did acting begin? What is its history, and what have the great thinkers on acting said about the art and craft of performance? In this single-volume survey of the history of acting, Jean Benedetti traces the evolution of the theories of the actor's craft drawing extensively on extracts from key texts, many of which are unavailable for the student today. Beginning with the classical conceptions of acting as rhetoric and oratory, as exemplified in the writing of Aristotle, Cicero and others, The Art of the Actor progresses to examine ideas of acting in Shakespeare's time right through to the present day. Along the way, Benedetti considers the contribution and theories of key figures such as Diderot, Stanislavski, Meyerhold, Brecht, Artaud and Grotowski, providing a clear and concise explanation of their work illustrated by extracts and summaries of their writings. Some source materials appear in the volume for the first time in English.
The Art of the Actor will be the essential history of acting for all students and actors interested in the great tradition of performance, both as craft and as art.

For nearly a decade, Jackie Apodaca and Michael Kostroff shared duties as advice columnists for the actors' trade paper, Backstage. Their highly popular weekly feature, "The Working Actor," fielded questions from actors all over the country. A cross between "Dear Abby" and The Hollywood Reporter, their column was a fact-based, humorous, compassionate take on the questions actors most wanted answered. Using some of their most interesting, entertaining, and informative columns as launch points, Answers from "The Working Actor" guides readers through the ins and outs (and ups and downs) of the acting industry. Apodaca and Kostroff share an approach that is decidedly "on the ground." They've both labored in the trenches just like their readers-dealing with auditions, classes, photos, resumes, rehearsals, contract negotiations, representatives, jobs, challenging colleagues, and the search for that elusive life/career balance. There are few absolutes in the acting profession and virtually no proven and reliable steps. Unlike books that claim to offer "Quick Steps to a Successful Acting Career," Answers from "The Working Actor" deals honestly with the realities, providing facts, options, strategies, stories, points of view, and the wisdom of experience, while ultimately challenging readers to make their own decisions. This book will give new actors a head start on their journeys and remind experienced professionals that, in the acting business, there is never only one answer to any question.

As personal technology becomes ever-present in the classroom and rehearsal studio, its use and ubiquity is affecting the collaborative behaviors that should underpin actor training. How is the collaborative impulse being distracted and what kind of solutions can re-establish its connections? The daily work of a theater practitioner thrives on an ability to connect, empathize, and participate with other artists. This is true at every level, from performing arts students to established professionals. As smartphones, social media, and other forms of digital connectedness become more and more embedded in daily life, they can inhibit these collaborative, creative skills. Turn That Thing Off! Collaboration and Technology in 21st-Century Actor Training explores ways to foster these essential abilities, paving the way for emerging performers to be more present, available, and generous in their work.

The Routledge Comedy Studies Reader is a selection of the most outstanding critical analysis featured in the journal Comedy Studies in the decade since its inception in 2010. The Reader illustrates the multiple perspectives that are available when analysing comedy. Wilkie's selections present an array of critical approaches from interdisciplinary scholars, all of whom evaluate comedy from different angles and adopt a range of writing styles to explore the phenomenon. Divided into eight unique parts, the Reader offers both breadth and depth with its wide range of interdisciplinary articles and international perspectives. Of interest to students, scholars, and lovers of comedy alike, The Routledge Comedy Studies Reader offers a contemporary sample of general analyses of comedy as a mode, form, and genre.

In 1927, the first production of Pygmalion was staged in Brazil. At the time, over 65 per cent of the adult Brazilian population was illiterate, which makes it all the more surprising that directors and producers dared to stage such a controversial playwright - a writer who had often been rejected by the more sophisticated theatregoer in England. This book analyses the reception of almost a century of Brazilian productions of Pygmalion, My Fair Lady, Arms and the Man, Candida and Mrs Warren's Profession, setting that analysis in the context of the political, economic and cultural climate at the time of each production. What emerges is a faithful portrait of a country where theatre and theatre criticism are precariously established, and the theatregoer with no knowledge of English cannot be certain that the translation or adaptation they are watching bears anything more than a passing resemblance to the original. Nonetheless, Brazil has also witnessed a number of fine productions, presented by highly skilled actors and directors and reviewed by well-informed and articulate critics. As well as supplying fascinating detail on the wide range of Shaw productions staged in Brazil over the last ninety years, this volume also generates valuable insights into the complexities of twentieth-century Brazilian society.

In (toward) a phenomenology of acting, Phillip Zarrilli considers acting as a 'question' to be explored in the studio and then reflected upon. This book is a vital response to Jerzy Grotowski's essential question: "How does the actor 'touch that which is untouchable?'" Phenomenology invites us to listen to "the things themselves", to be attentive to how we sensorially, kinesthetically, and affectively engage with acting as a phenomenon and process. Using detailed first-person accounts of acting across a variety of dramaturgies and performances from Beckett to newly co-created performances to realism, it provides an account of how we 'do' or practice phenomenology when training, performing, directing, or teaching. Zarrilli brings a wealth of international and intercultural experience as a director, performer, and teacher to this major new contribution both to the practices of acting and to how we can reflect in depth on those practices. An advanced study for actors, directors, and teachers of acting that is ideal for both the training/rehearsal studio and research, (toward) a phenomenology of acting is an exciting move forward in the philosophical understanding of acting as an embodied practice.

Fall in love with your voice. Get to know how it works. You will soon feel how good it is to sound like you. In The Voice Exercise Book, Jeannette Nelson - Head of Voice at the National Theatre - shares the voice exercises she uses with many of Britain's leading actors to help to keep their voices in shape. Her belief is that all of us, not just actors, can learn to use our voices well. Whether you perform professionally or you just want to be understood clearly and easily, you can improve your voice by knowing how it works and by practising simple exercises. The aim is not to 'fake it' - to try to sound like someone else. It is to find your authentic voice: to be honestly and clearly you in any situation. 'Jeannette's warm-up sessions are tremendous and this book extends those exercises.' Zoe Wanamaker CBE 'Jeannette's knowledge is astonishing, and her approach so gentle and effective.' Derren Brown 'She makes voice production endlessly fascinating and fun. There is no one better.' Rory Kinnear 'A must for anyone who is serious about producing a strong, clean noise from their voice box.' Sir Lenny Henry

The real-life experiences of contemporary teenagers are expressed in this collection of fifty monologs. Excellent material for speech contests, acting exercises, auditions or classroom use. Each monolog characterization is five minutes or less in length. What makes this book different is that the characters in most of the monologs are speaking to another character (the "vis-a-vis"). This brings an imaginary friend onstage with the actor to make performances "scarefree." In each, the character is experiencing or anticipating something new or frightening. Includes both humorous and serious monologs. Any young person will relate to the topics of these scripts. Sample titles: First Job, Stock Boy, Automatic Suspension, the Mall, Exchange Student, He's My Dog!, Dancing Fool, The Con, The Boss's Son.