The classic voice-training book for actors, teachers of voice and speech and anyone interested in vocal expression - by a pre-eminent voice teacher, actor and director. Fully revised and expanded edition. Linklater's approach is to liberate the voice you have rather than apply vocal techniques from the outside. Her basic assumption is that everyone possesses a voice capable of expressing whatever emotion, mood or thought he/she experiences. This edition incorporates vocal exercises developed over three decades to help the voice connect viscerally with language - a key element in the actors' craft. 'a radical breakaway from the old formal methods... an invaluable new resource... essential' Educational Theatre Journal 'the best and only work of its kind for vocal training' Educational Theatre News

Kerry Muir, who brought together scenes and monologues for children in her highly successful 'Childsplay' presents three complete short plays for older children and teenagers. They include: 'Promenade' by Josh Adell (6 girls, 4 boys), 'Summer' by Gideon Brower (5 girls, 4 boys), and 'Befriending Bertha' by Kerry Muir herself (4 girls, 1 boy). Serious, comic, and thoroughly contemporary, all of these plays were successfully performed at The Young Actor's Studio in Los Angeles.

The figure of Stella Adler towers high among the memorable acting teachers in American theatre. Her methods of training, her principles of acting and character interpretation, her analyses of the seminal plays of the modern theatre comprise a legacy for everyone who followed her. In this book, that legacy gains the special immediacy and authenticity of her own spoken words. Over three years in the 1970s, Joanna Rotte worked with Adler as a student and as an actress under her direction, all the white taking the copious notes that have become the heart of this book. Throughout, Adler speaks about her principles in a tough minded and demanding way, inspired by her overriding conviction that as a person an actor 'becomes bigger through working'. This book provides an opportunity to sit in on the classes of this remarkable woman of whom her student Marlon Brando said, "My debt and gratitude to her are enormous. As a teacher of acting, she has few peers. As a human being, few equals."

With On Screen Acting, director Edward Dmytryk and actress Jean Porter Dmytryk offer a lively dialogue between director and actress about the principles and practice of screen acting for film and television. Informal and anecdotal in style, the book spans auditioning, casting, rehearsal, and on-set techniques, and will be of interest to both aspiring and working actors and directors. Originally published in 1984, this reissue of Dmytryk's classic acting book includes a new critical introduction by Paul Thompson, as well as chapter lessons, discussion questions, and exercises.

Tallulah Bankhead was an actress whose talents were greatly overshadowed by her antics. Indeed, the Bankhead personality was much better known than her acting roles. While it is impossible to study her career without exploring her highly charged personality, this bio-bibliography honors Tallulah Bankhead, the actress. In a career that spanned five decades, she conquered practically every medium of entertainment--theater, film, radio, and television--leaving her mark in each one. Biographers have several times attempted to chronicle her life, but Bankhead remains too original, too unconventional, too colorful to be captured fully on paper. What can be noted are her many accomplishments--which have previously been ignored. This book corrects that oversight by documenting her 19 motion pictures, 56 stage plays, 167 radio appearances, and 56 television appearances, and also listing other professional appearances, recordings, awards and tributes. Additional features include a biographical sketch based on research and interviews with associates, a chronology of highlights in her life, an annotated bibliography of books and magazine articles about her or referring to her, and interesting photographs illustrating her career. Fully cross-referenced and indexed, this is a complete source for any research about Bankhead and will also provide helpful data and insights into the theater, films, persons, and events of her world.

One of the most neglected areas of study in nineteenth-century theater is pantomime: this book provides a comprehensive overview of pantomime in the Victorian period, ranging from the ideological positions perpetrated by pantomime to discussions of practitioners and enthusiastic spectators, such as E.L. Blanchard, Lewis Carroll and John Ruskin.

Embodied Playwriting: Improv and Acting Exercises for Writing and Devising is the first book to compile new and adapted exercises for teaching playwriting in the classroom, workshop, or studio through the lens of acting and improvisation. The book provides access to the innovative practices developed by seasoned playwriting teachers from around the world who are also actors, improv performers, and theatre directors. Borrowing from the embodied art of acting and the inventive practice of improvisation, the exercises in this book will engage readers in performance-based methods that lead to the creation of fully imagined characters, dynamic relationships, and vivid drama. Step-by-step guidelines for exercises, as well as application and coaching advice, will support successful lesson planning and classroom implementation for playwriting students at all levels, as well as individual study. Readers will also benefit from curation by editors who have experience with high-impact educational practices and are advocates for the use of varied teaching strategies to increase accessibility, inclusion, skill-building, and student success. Embodied Playwriting offers a wealth of material for teachers and students of playwriting courses, as well as playwrights who look forward to experimenting with dynamic, embodied writing practices.

With a political agenda foregrounding collaborative practice to promote ethical relations, these individually and joint written essays and interviews discuss dances often with visual art, theatre, film and music, drawing on continental philosophy to explore notions of space, time, identity, sensation, memory and ethics.

A vital companion for actors in rehearsal - a thesaurus of action-words to revitalise performance Actors need actions. They cannot 'act' adjectives, they need verbs: they need an aim to achieve, an action to perform. 'Actions' are active verbs. 'I tempt you.' 'You taunt me.' In order to perform an action truthfully and therefore convincingly, an actor needs to find exactly the right action to suit that particular situation and that particular line. That is where this book comes in...It is a thesaurus of active verbs, with which the actor can refine the action-word until s/he hits exactly the right one to help make the action come alive. It looks like this: taunt insult, tease, torment, provoke, ridicule, mock, poke, needle tempt influence, attract, entice, cajole, coax, seduce, lure, fascinate It is well known in the acting community that random lists of action-words circulate rehearsal rooms in dog-eared photocopies - as a sort of actor's crib. This book makes them available for the first time in an organised and comprehensive form.

At the time of his death, Stanislavsky considered Nikolai Demidov to be 'his only student, who understands the System'. Demidov's incredibly forward-thinking processes not only continued his teacher's pioneering work, but also solved the problems of an actor's creativity that Stanislavsky never conquered. Despite being one of the original teachers of the Stanislavski system, Demidov's name was little known either in his native Russia or the wider world until the turn of the 21st Century. Since then, his extensive works have been published in Russian but are yet to find their way to the English-speaking world. His sophisticated psychological techniques, stimulation of creativity, and methods of developing the actors themselves are now gaining increasing recognition.This book brings together Demidov's five volumes on actor training. Supplementary materials, including transcriptions of Demidov's classes, and notes and correspondence from the author make this the definitive collection on one of Russian theatre's most important figures.

Uses twenty-two sketches and one-act plays to explore the major devices of comedy and various comedic genre.

* This book expands on content, history and perspectives of the Stanislavski actor lineage. * This book analyzes history, lineage and contemporary experiential aspects of performance, focusing on its peculiar research that deals with truth, trance and attention. * This book fill existing gaps in contemporary studies, particularly in English, related to the theory, practice, history and aims of a conscient use of altered states of consciousness as a work on the self in acting and performance.

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.

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.

(Applause Books). This book isn't a critical examination of high comedy. Rather, it's a collection of suggestions for the middlemen: the actors who have to catch the comic spark from the playwright and pass it on to the audience. The effort involved must be imperceptible: one has to acquire the cleverness, the articulacy, the febrility of the characters and then make the whole laborious exercise seem like swimming through silk...The characters in high comedies don't find verbal sophistication difficult or unfamiliar; they enjoy it as you might enjoy slang.

This step-by-step guide to learning and practising an American accent is for anyone who wants to use a General American accent with confidence in auditions and performance. Inside, you'll find an easy-to-follow breakdown of the fundamentals required for the accent - including the shape and position of the mouth; vowels and consonants; rhythm; stressing; pitch; pace and more - as well as structured drills and exercises to build on and consolidate what you've learned, using extracts from contemporary American plays. The book is supplemented by dozens of online audio clips of General American voices, recorded by native speakers, so you can listen to the target sounds and repeat for practice. Also included are tips on fully integrating the accent into your performance, as well as a series of vocal warm-ups. Rebecca Gausnell is a voice and dialect coach, who has worked internationally in theatre, film and television. Born and raised in the United States, she studied acting in Chicago, before completing an MFA in Voice Studies in London. The Compact Guides are pocket-sized introductions for actors and theatremakers, each tackling a key topic in a clear and comprehensive way. Written by industry professionals with extensive hands-on experience of their subject, they provide you with maximum information in minimum time.

Acting in America has staggered to a dead end. Every year tens of thousands of aspiring actors pursue the Hollywood grail and chant the familiar strains of the Stanislavski "Method" in classrooms and studios across the nation. The initial liberating spirit of Stanislavski's experiments has long ago withered into rigid patterns of inhibitions and emotional introspection. According to Richard Hornby, the Method now "shackles American acting". With his iconoclastic new work, The End of Acting, Richard Hornby dismantles, tenet by tenet, the American Method as promulgated by Lee Strasberg and other pretenders to the Stanislavski dynasty. Hornby separates the myth from the Method in his exploration of Stanislavski's original initiatives and the proprietary feud over his theories which continues even today.

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.

Book of Sides II: Original, Two-Page Scenes for Actors and Directors is the second book in the Book of Sides series by Dave Kost, featuring original, two-page, two-character scenes for use in acting, directing, and auditioning classes. While shorter than the traditional three-to-six-page scenes commonly used in classes, Book of Sides II features longer scenes than the first Book of Sides with greater character development, more reversals, and stronger climaxes. Balanced, structured scenes designed specifically for educational use challenge both actors and directors equally with objectives, obstacles, tactics, and subtext; Two-page length is ideal for high-intensity exercises and faster-paced workshops; Printed in easy-to-read film-script format with plenty of room for notes; Scenes are completely original and unencumbered by copyright, so students may film and post legally on the internet; Universally castable, so all roles can be played by actors of any gender, appearance, skill level, or ethnicity; Accessibly-written for modern students, helping them to focus on the fundamentals of performance and directing; Simple and conducive to performing in a classroom without sets, costumes, or special props. This book was written by an educator for educators and designed for use in the classroom. Never search for scenes again!

"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.