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Books > Arts & Architecture > Performing arts
This wide-ranging volume explores the technical and physical
aspects of voice as a craft, questioning its definitions, its
historical presence, training practices and its publications.
Drawing on a wealth of experience, Jane Boston presents a selection
of readings that demonstrate and contextualize some of the defining
moments of voice throughout history. This clear and accessible text
examines the relationship between voice and aesthetics and poetics,
against the backdrop of class, race and gender politics,
demonstrating how vocal training has been and still is inevitably
connected to such issues. Underpinned by theory, voice practitioner
accounts, and cultural and historical contextualization, this
comprehensive resource will be invaluable for practitioners,
researchers and students of voice studies, physical theatre and
theatre history.
Elia Kazan's varied life and career is related here in his
autobiography. He reveals his working relationships with his many
collabourators, including Harold Clurman, Lee Strasberg, Clifford
Odets, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Marilyn Monroe, Marlon
Brando, James Dean, John Steinbeck and Darryl Zanuck, and describes
his directing "style" as he sees it, in terms of position,
movement, pace, rhythm and his own limitations. Kazan also retraces
his own decision to inform for the House Un-American Activities
Committee, illuminating much of what may be obscured in McCarthy
literature.
Alan Edgewater finds himself a best-selling author and motivational
speaker. His base of operations in St. Louis, Missouri allows him
to stay somewhat grounded but with growing influence and
aspirations he becomes something of a local industry. His team of
advisors and a hapless mega lottery winner influence his marketing
strategies as he builds on his business. At the core of his
enterprise is the idea of embracing failure instead of fearing it.
Surprising outcomes come as Alan lends his name to an unconditional
scholarship program and the scholars provide insight into
unfettered life choices. Alan's journey and that of his close-knit
associates create a tapestry of extraordinary events in this
thought-provoking novel.
This book argues for a durational cinema that is distinct from slow
cinema, and outlines the history of its three main waves: the New
York avant-garde of the 1960s, the European art cinema in the years
after 1968, and the international cinema of gallery spaces as well
as film festivals since the 1990s. Figures studied include Andy
Warhol, Ken Jacobs, Chantal Akerman, Marguerite Duras, Claude
Lanzmann, James Benning, Kevin Jerome Everson, Lav Diaz, and Wang
Bing.Durational cinema is predominantly minimal, but has from the
beginning also included a more encompassing or encyclopedic kind of
filmmaking. Durational cinema is characteristically
representational, and converges on certain topics (the Holocaust,
deindustrialization, the experience of the working class and other
marginalized people), but has no one meaning, signifying
differently at different moments and in different hands. Warhol's
durational cinema of subtraction is quite different from Jacobs's
durational cinema of social disgust, while Lav Diaz' durational
sublime is quite different from Kevin Jerome Everson's unblinking
studies of African-American working people.
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