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.

Masking Unmasked is a basic guide to using the ancient art of acting with masks to develop character and movement in four sections that correspond to mask size: Full-Face Masks, Clowning, Bag Masks, and Half-Face Masks. Each section addresses fundamental acting principles and shows how the ancient technique can be applied to the contemporary stage. It is the perfect book to use as background to traditional, non-masked acting principles. Actors in masks experience the primary goal of acting because they are required to tap into profound physical, vocal, emotional, and psychological transformations in the course of creating a character. In addition, masking promotes honest, believable, and detailed work. Illustrated profusely throughout, the hands-on exercises developed by Eli Simon teach actors to shift cleanly between beats, execute moment-to-moment specificity, unleash creative impulses, take risks, and expand character range, power, and vulnerability. Masking Unmasked is a book of ancient acting techniques that are indispensable for the actor of today.

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.

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.

Shakespeare's text is packed with clues that help the reader to "hear "and the performer to "act "any speech. He also tells the actor when to go fast and when to go slow and when to accent a particular word.

This book sets out to make going to Shakespeare performances or acting in them a richer experience, and it should have a wide appeal to both actors and audiences.

It also celebrates Sir Peter Hall's fifty years as a director of Shakespeare; from his early days at Cambridge, through founding the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford on Avon in the early '60s, and later to his fifteen years as the director of the Royal National Theatre of Great Britain. Throughout these years, Peter Hall worked with the greatest Shakespearean actors of our generation including Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud, Edith Evans, Ralph Richardson, Peggy Ashcroft, Charles Laughton and in later years Judi Dench, Anthony Hopkins, Ian Holm, David Warner, and many others. Through this great line flows a tradition of speaking and understanding Shakespeare that remains as relevant and important today. And it is Hall's experience of working and learning with these and many other actors over the years that underpins the core of this book.

Sir Peter Hall is one of the major figures in theatre today. To date he has directed over two hundred productions, including the world premiere in English of Samuel Beckett's "Waiting for Godot," and the premieres of most of Harold Pinter's plays. His diary and autobiography are published by Oberon Books.

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.

Acting: The First Six Lessons was first published in 1933 and remains a key text for anyone studying acting today. These dramatic dialogues between teacher and idealistic student explore the field of acting according to one of the original teachers of Stanislavsky 's System in America.

This new edition of an essential text is edited by Rhonda Blair and supplemented for the very first time with documents from the American Laboratory Theatre. These collect together a broad range of exciting unpublished material, drawn from Boleslavsky 's pivotal and unprecedented teachings on acting at the American Laboratory Theatre. Included are:

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.

Working with a Jungian analyst, Janet Sonenberg has re-interpreted the ancient practice of "incubating dreams"; in this technique, the actor seeds the dream with materials of the play and then uses the resulting dream.
Acting calls upon inner powers and perceptions, but most of all it calls upon the actor's imagination. This revolutionary book, offers an entirely new technique for exploring the imagination. No other acting technique offers the performer's own dreams as a means to imaginative and artistic expression. Drawing upon her experience as actor and director, Sonenberg shows what dreamwork can do. The result is a new tool with which actors can explore their psyches and enrich their performances.

Hollywood Remains to Be Seen is a fascinating, gossipy guide to the fourteen most significant Hollywood-area cemeteries and the final resting places of the movie stars who are buried in them. Arranged as easy-to-follow tours of the properties, the fourteen chapters -- one for each cemetery -- include histories of the cemeteries, directions for finding them, and a detailed listing of exactly where more than three hundred stars are buried.

Strange as it may seem, cemeteries are becoming one of the most popular destinations for tourists to Hollywood and for film fans who want to pay their respects to the rich and famous and passed-on. Every year, millions of people from all over the world visit the graves of the legendary film stars buried in Hollywood, and the interest in these places grows from year to year.

Hollywood Remains to Be Seen highlights the legend and lore of celebrity graves, from Rudolph Valentino's mysterious "Lady in Black" to the regular delivery of one red rose to Marilyn Monroe's grave, to the strange journeys made by the body of John Barrymore immediately after his death in 1942 -- and again thirty-eight years later. Also included are information and images of Hollywood's most lavish and majestic graves, from the huge mausoleum of Douglas Fairbanks Sr., complete with Roman pillars and a giant reflecting pool; to Liberace's flamboyant tomb, with a musical score set on white marble; to the spectacular domed monument of Al Jolson, featuring a life-sized statue of the entertainer atop a 120-foot cascading waterfall.

Heavily illustrated with nearly one hundred photographs, Hollywood Remains to Be Seen includes photographs of the celebrities as well as photographs ofthe cemeteries, mausoleums, and graves, maps of the burial grounds and gravesites, and a final section fitly titled "Exit Lines" made up of celebrities' last words.

Performing the work of William Shakespeare can be daunting to new actors. Author Herb Parker posits that his work is played easier if actors think of the plays as happening out of outrageous situations, and remember just how non-realistic and presentational Shakespeare's plays were meant to be performed. The plays are driven by language and the spoken word, and the themes and plots are absolutely out of the ordinary and fantastic-the very definition of outrageous. With exercises, improvisations, and coaching points, Acting Shakespeare is Outrageous! helps actors use the words Shakespeare wrote as a tool to perform him, and to create exciting and moving performances.

Studying the careers of popular actors Amedeo Nazzari and Alberto Sordi, Acting Across Borders explores the question of how Italian cinema from the 1930s to 1980s has considered human mobility. Through close readings of a selection of films, Alberto Zambenedetti examines the concept of italianita (Italian-ness) as manifested in contexts related to migration, diaspora, exile, tourism, travel and their supporting infrastructures. In this wide-ranging study, the methodologies of Film Studies and the Mobilities Framework are combined to illuminate an undertheorised yet vital tradition in the history of the national cinema.

A variety of stories from the pens of classical and contemporary writers, journalists and playwrights have been adapted for Readers Theatre performance in this new collection of scripts by a nationally-known authority on the subject. The success of Readers Theatre proves you don't need scenery or costumes to create a stirring dramatic performance. Sometimes called "theatre of the imagination, " Readers Theatre communicates in a style similar to the golden days of radio theatre. Its ease of performance makes these scripts ideal for the drama classroom. Sample titles include: The Tooth Fairy Who Didn't Have Any Teeth, The Taming of the Shrew, Sir de Maletrolt's Door, The Wind in the Willows and Where Have All the Flowers Gone? Included is a section defining Readers Theatre as a performance art. Contents: Reader's Theatre: A Performance Art, Comedy, Mystery/Suspense, Christmas Specials, Folklore, Children's Classics, The Human Spirit.

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.

An Actor Prepares is the most famous acting training book ever to have been written and the work of Stanislavski has inspired generations of actors and trainers. This translation was the first to introduce Stanislavski's 'system' to the English speaking world and has stood the test of time in acting classes to this day. Stanislavski here deals with the inward preparation an actor must undergo in order to explore a role to the full. He introduces the concepts of the 'magic if' units and objectives, of emotion memory, of the super-objective and many more now famous rehearsal aids. Now available in the Bloomsbury Revelations series to mark the 150th anniversary of Stanislavski's birth, this is an essential read for actors, directors and anyone interested in the art of drama.

What makes good drama? How does drama matter in our lives? In "Three Uses of the Knife, " one of America's most respected writers reminds us of the secret powers of the play. Pulitzer Prize--winning playwright, screenwriter, poet, essayist, and director, David Mamet celebrates the absolute necessity of drama -- and the experience of great plays -- in our lurching attempts to make sense of ourselves and our world.

In three tightly woven essays of characteristic force and resonance, Mamet speaks about the connection of art to life, language to power, imagination to survival, the public spectacle to the private script.

It is our fundamental nature to dramatize everything. As Mamet says, "Our understanding of our life, of our drama.... resolves itself into thirds: Once Upon a Time.... Years Passed.... And Then One Day." We inhabit a drama of daily life -- waiting for a bus, describing a day's work, facing decisions, making choices, finding meaning. The essays in the book are an eloquent reminder of how life is filled with the small scenes of tragedy and comedy that can be described only as drama.

First-rate theater, Mamet writes, satisfies the human hunger for ordering the world into cause-effect-conclusion. A good play calls for the protagonist "To create, in front of us, on the stage, his or her own character, the strength to continue. It is her striving to understand, to correctly assess, to face her own character (in her choice of battles) that inspires us -- and gives the drama power to cleanse and enrich our own character." Drama works, in the end, when it supplies the meaning and wholeness once offered by magic and religion -- an embodied journey from lie to truth, arrogance to wisdom.

Mamet also writes of bad theater; of what it takes to write a play, and the often impossibly difficult progression from act to act; the nature of soliloquy; the contentless drama and empty theatrics of politics and popular entertainment; the ubiquity of stage and literary conventions in the most ordinary of lives; and the uselessness, finally, of drama -- or any art -- as ideology or propaganda.

Don Ameche, Eve Arden, George Burns, Bette Davis, Greer Garson, Rex Harrison, Lilli Palmer, George Raft, Ginger Rogers, Barbara Stanwyck, Orson Welles, Cornel Wilde--these are among the stars who graced the silver screen in Hollywoods Golden Age. Biographies and filmographies of these actors and actresses and 70 others who had passed from the scene by September 1996 are presented in this reference work. The biographical section focuses on how they came to be involved with whom they shared the screen. The filmography lists all the films in which they appeared, along with the studio and the year of release.

An Actora (TM)s Work on a Role is Konstantin Stanislavskya (TM)s classic exploration of the rehearsal process, applying the techniques of his seminal actor training system to the task of bringing life and truth to onea (TM)s role.

Originally published over half a century ago as Creating a Role, this book became the third in a trilogy a " after An Actor Prepares and Building a Character, which are now combined in a newly translated volume called An Actora (TM)s Work. In these books, now foundational texts for actors, Stanislavsky sets out his psychological, physical and practical vision of actor training.

This new translation from renowned writer and critic Jean Benedetti not only includes Stanislavskia (TM)s original teachings, but is also furnished with invaluable supplementary material in the shape of transcripts and notes from the rehearsals themselves, reconfirming The System as the cornerstone of actor training.

This standard text, now in paperback for the first time-- the companion volume to Foreign Dialects-- American Dialects offers representative dialects of every major section of the United States. In each case, a general description and history of the dialect is given, followed by an analysis of vowel and consonant peculiarities, of its individual lilt and rhythm, and of its grammar variations. There are also lists of the idioms and idiomatic expressions that distinguish each dialect and exercises using them. American Dialects also includes musical inflection charts and diagrams showing the placement of lips, tongue, and breath.

What are the key elements that go into creating a work of art for the stage? Which are the most productive conditions and methods of rehearsal? In this collection of interviews, 18 international artists share their experience and offer practical advice on the creation of performance work. Their answers provide a goldmine of tried and tested approaches as they discuss the common problems and difficulties of creative work, their turning-point experiences, and ways in which they have challenged performers and themselves to go beyond conditioned reflexes to create groundbreaking new work.

An essential handbook for anyone who wants to act on television and film - by a leading teacher of screen acting. For any aspiring screen actor, the challenge is to combine all the components of your craft with an ability to handle the technical demands of acting for the camera within the often bewildering environment of a film set. Michael Bray takes you step by step through all the challenges you'll face, demystifying the processes you'll encounter, and helping you develop the necessary skills, including: How to approach the script and prepare your character How to maintain your concentration and learn to relax on set How to deliver your lines and improve your vocal range How to master continuity, eye lines, and hitting your marks How to tackle auditions to ensure your best chance of getting the job Full of invaluable advice, extracts from screenplays, numerous illustrations and practical exercises - which can be undertaken on your own, using the camera on your phone - this book is an accessible and authoritative guide to developing a successful career as a screen actor.

In one handy volume, a concise course on all phases of acting and stage movement. Speech control, interpretation of a character style--all the essentials of good acting are fully reviewed. Every phase of acting and motion is included: sitting, walking, standing, hand and arm coordination and opposition, the eyes, the head, body movement, exits and entrances, mechanics of emotional range and relaxation and tension. A fully illustrated book. Sample chapters include: The Actor's Dilemma: Need for Technique; "Speak the Speech, I Pray You"; Sult the Action to the Work; Interpretation of Character; The Play's the Thing; Style; Feet When Sitting, Standing and Walking; Hands When Sitting, Standing and Walking; The Mechanics of Relaxation and Tension; The Mechanics of Pause; The Emotional Range--Mental and Vocal; Coordination of Speech with Movement.