Product Description: What happens in the relationship between audience and performer? What choices are made in the space of performance about how we attend to others? A Strange Proximity examines stage presence as key to thinking about performance and ethics...read more

Product Description: This pioneering introduction to Stanislavsky's methods and modes of actor training covers all of the essential elements of his System. Recreating ‘truthful’ behaviour in the artificial environment, awareness and observation, psychophysical work, given circumstances, visualization and imagination, and active analysis are all introduced and explored...read more

Product Description: What should an actor be thinking onstage? This overlooked, important question is the crux of this new book that combines psychological theory, numerous practical exercises, and a thorough and wide-reaching examination of inner monologue in various forms including film, musical theatre, and comedy...read more

Using new interview material with actors, directors and writers, this book explores the challenges of performance in documentary theatre. Through a series of high profile case studies, Cantrell uses acting theory to examine the actors' complex processes, and makes a significant contribution to our understanding of stage performance.

‘A focus on the body, its actions, and its cognitive mechanisms identifies ... foundational principles of activity that link the three elements of theatre; Story, Space, and Time. The three meet in, are defined by, and expressed through the actor’s body.’ – from the Introduction Embodied Acting is an essential, pragmatic intervention in the study of how recent discoveries within cognitive science can – and should – be applied to performance. For too long, a conceptual separation of mind and body has dominated actor training in the West. Cognitive science has shown this binary to be illusory, shattering the traditional boundaries between mind and body, reason and emotion, knowledge and imagination. This revolutionary new volume explores the impact that a more holistic approach to the "bodymind" can have on the acting process. Drawing on his experience as an actor, director and scholar, Rick Kemp interrogates the key cognitive activities involved in performance, including: non-verbal communication the relationship between thought, speech, and gesture the relationship between self and character empathy, imagination, and emotion. New perspectives on the work of Stanislavski, Michael Chekhov, and Jacques Lecoq – as well as contemporary practitioners including Daniel Day-Lewis and Katie Mitchell – are explored through practical exercises and accessible explanations. Blending theory, practice, and cutting-edge neuroscience, Kemp presents a radical re-examination of the unconscious activities engaged in creating, and presenting, a role.

Book by HARRIS LANI MICHEALE, PATE SUSAN, WONZONG RANDY

Product Description: Rather than focus on the well-known truism that great plays and dramatic performances can deeply transform and ennoble us, Marcus draws from a much less known dimension of theatre, namely, acting technique theory, how actors and actresses learn dramatic performance as an art, profession and way of life...read more

Product Description: Dreaming Together introduces a playful, interactive way to get much more from dreams. It starts with storytelling fragments we recall, and leads to new ways of engaging the creative mind many of us leave behind on waking. An easy, safe way to get acquainted in a real way, it's fun for anyone who dreams-and particularly useful/practical for actors who want a new way into emotions they must be able to perform convincingly...read more

Product Description: Psychophysical Acting is a direct and vital address to the demands of contemporary theatre on today’s actor. Drawing on over thirty years of intercultural experience, Phillip Zarrilli aims to equip actors with practical and conceptual tools with which to approach their work...read more

Product Description: Drama school hopefuls who use this book to supplement their training will find themselves on an inside track previously available only to students of the very best professional drama coaches. The author, a retired successful actor on the London stage and currently a renowned drama teacher, presents a variety of effective tutorials that focus on voice, movement, text, and the understanding of character...read more

Product Description: 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...read more

Reassessing the practice and theory of acting, this book examines the physiological relationship between bodily action and emotional experience. It looks at how imagination, emotion, memory, physicality, and reason are inseparable in the brain's structure and function, and their importance to an actor's engagement with a role.

Product Description: Theater instructors and students, aspiring actors, and working theater professionals can all benefit from this examination of acting as a self-development practice and spiritual path. Beginning with a brief history of the acting profession, the text covers Stanislavski and other special approaches to actor training, practices specific to acting that can open up wider perspectives, ways to promote both personal and professional development, the place of sexual energy in acting, and more...read more

Product Description: Stanislavski, Strasberg, Meisner, Adler, Berghoff, Hagen, Mamet...now Batson. Like all great performers, Nicole Kidman approached her role in The Hours as a creative collaboration. Kidman knew that portraying Virginia Woolf on screen required a truth that she as the actor and Woolf as the character shared...read more

Product Description: From well-known auteur of the American theatre scene, Anne Bogart, And Then, You Act is a fascinating and accessible book about directing theatre, acting and the collaborative creative process. Writing clearly and passionately, Bogart speaks to a wide audience, from undergraduates to practitioners, and makes an invaluable contribution to the field tackling themes such as: intentionality inspiration why theatre matters...read more

Product Description: Why do actors get stage fright? What is so embarrassing about joining in? Why not work with animals and children, and why is it so hard not to collapse into helpless laughter when things go wrong? In trying to answer these questions - usually ignored by theatre scholarship but of enduring interest to theatre professionals and audiences alike - Nicholas Ridout attempts to explain the relationship between these apparently unwanted and anomalous phenomena and the wider social and political meanings of the modern theatre...read more

Breaking new ground in the study of performance theory, this maverick and powerful project from renowned Renaissance scholar and queer theorist Simon Shepherd presents a unique take on theory and the physical reality of theatre. Examining a range of material, Theatre, Body, Pleasure addresses a significant gap in the literary and drama studies arenas and explores the interplay of bodily value, the art of bodies and the physical responses to that art. It explains first how the body makes meaning and carries value. Then it describes the relationships between time and space and body. The book’s features include: * large historical range, from medieval to postmodern * case studies offering close readings of written texts * examples of how to ‘read for the body’, exploring written text as a ‘discipline’ of the body * breadth of cultural reference, from stage plays through to dance culture * a range of theoretical approaches, including dance analysis and phenomenology  Writing in accessible prose, Shepherd introduces new ways of analyzing dramatic text and has produced a book which is part theatre history, part dramatic criticism and part theatrical tour de force. Students of drama, theatre and performance studies and cultural studies will find this an absolute must read.

Product Description: Whether new to the business or a seasoned professional, this handbook provides actors with a personal, active approach to discovering and developing their talent. Beginning with appetizers and ending with desserts, actors learn how to prepare a character in the same way that a master chef chooses the most complementary dishes for a feast...read more

Product Description: This study examines the effect of the mask upon the masked performer int he Balinese Topeng and Calonarang dance dramas and Japanese Noh Theatre. It represents the first systematic study of the relationship between the actor and the mask from the performer's perspective...read more