This inspirational guide for advanced acting students brings together multiple ways of creating excellence in performance. David Krasner provides tried and tested exercises, a history of actor training and explores the complex relationships between acting theories and teachers. Drawing on examples from personal experience as an actor, director and teacher, An Actor's Craft begins with the building blocks of mind, body and voice, moving through emotional triggers and improvisation, to a final section bringing these techniques together in approaching a role. Each chapter contains accompanying exercises that the actor should practice daily. Combining theory and practice, this thought-provoking and challenging study of acting techniques and theories is for actors who have grasped the basics and now want to develop their knowledge and training further.

As the field of African American studies has gathered strength over the last decade, black theatre and performance has become a field unto itself. For literature scholars who study drama, and for playwrights, directors, and actors, the cultural heritage of black theatre has become too important to dismiss. Elam and Krasner's collection answers the need for a one-volume guide to the history and criticism of black theater and performance. Assembled by two of the most respected and prolific scholars in black theatre and composed of essays from acknowledged authorities in the field (Joe Roach and Genevieve Fabre, among others), the volume is likely to become the central reference for those studying black theatre and a vital tool for literature and African-American Scholars.

The fifteen original essays in "Staging Philosophy "make useful connections between the discipline of philosophy and the fields of theater and performance and use these insights to develop new theories about theater. Each of the contributors--leading scholars in the fields of performance and philosophy--breaks new ground, presents new arguments, and offers new theories that will pave the way for future scholarship.
"Staging Philosophy "raises issues of critical importance by providing case studies of various philosophical movements and schools of thought, including aesthetics, analytic philosophy, phenomenology, deconstruction, critical realism, and cognitive science. The essays, which are organized into three sections--history and method, presence, and reception--take up fundamental issues such as spectatorship, empathy, ethics, theater as literature, and the essence of live performance. While some essays challenge assertions made by critics and historians of theater and performance, others analyze the assumptions of manifestos that prescribe how practitioners should go about creating texts and performances. The first book to bridge the disciplines of theater and philosophy, "Staging Philosophy" will provoke, stimulate, engage, and ultimately bring theater to the foreground of intellectual inquiry while it inspires further philosophical investigation into theater and performance.
David Krasner is Associate Professor of Theater Studies, African American Studies, and English at Yale University. His books include "A Beautiful Pageant: African American Theatre, Drama, and Performance in the Harlem Renaissance, 1910-1920 "and "Renaissance, Parody, and Double Consciousness in AfricanAmerican Theatre, 1895-1910," He is co-editor of the series Theater: Theory/Text/Performance.
David Z. Saltz is Associate Professor of Theatre Studies and Head of the Department of Theatre and Film Studies at the University of Georgia. He is coeditor of "Theater Journal "and is the principal investigator of the innovative Virtual Vaudeville project at the University of Georgia.

As the field of African American studies has gathered strength over the last decade, black theatre and performance has become a field unto itself. For literature scholars who study drama, and for playwrights, directors, and actors, the cultural heritage of black theatre has become too important to dismiss. Elam and Krasner's collection answers the need for a one-volume guide to the history and criticism of black theatre and performance. Assembled by two of the most respected and prolific scholars in black theatre and composed of essays from acknowledged authorities in the field (Joe Roach and Genevieve Fabre, among others), the volume is likely to become the central reference for those studying black theatre and a vital tool for literature and African-American scholars.

This inspirational guide for advanced acting students brings together multiple ways of creating excellence in performance. David Krasner provides tried and tested exercises, a history of actor training and explores the complex relationships between acting theories and teachers. Drawing on examples from personal experience as an actor, director and teacher, An Actor's Craft begins with the building blocks of mind, body and voice, moving through emotional triggers and improvisation, to a final section bringing these techniques together in approaching a role. Each chapter contains accompanying exercises that the actor should practice daily. Combining theory and practice, this thought-provoking and challenging study of acting techniques and theories is for actors who have grasped the basics and now want to develop their knowledge and training further.