Author Robert Barton uses the NLP approach to illustrate a range of innovative methods to help the actor and directors, including: reducing performance anxiety enabling clearer communication intensifying character analysis stimulating imaginative rehearsal choices. The author also shows how NLP can be used alongside other basic training systems to improve approaches to rehearsal and performance.
“What is it that we’re doing, when we’re acting well?” This is the question famously posed by Earle Gister, the legendary head of the acting department at Yale School of Drama from 1979 to 1999. In Acting Action, actor, director, and teaching artist Hugh O’Gorman invites readers to explore the question in detail. Focusing on playing action—one of the essential components of acting passed on to renowned acting teachers Earle Gister and Lloyd Richards by Paul Mann—Acting Action is divided into two parts: context and practice. The first section provides a thorough examination of the theory behind the core elements of playing action. The second section presents a step-by-step rehearsal guide for actors to integrate playing action into their preparation process. Acting Action offers a foundation for how to get started and build the core of a performance. More precisely, it provides a practical guide for actors, directors, and teachers in the technique of playing action, addressing a void in the world of actor training by illuminating what exactly to do in the moment-to-moment act of acting.
Style for Actors is an award-winning handbook and the definitive guide to roles in historical drama. Anyone who has ever struggled with capes, fans, swords, doublets and crinolines should make this third edition their constant companion. The past is a foreign country, and this outstanding book is concerned with exploring it from the actor's point of view. Specific guides to each major period give readers a clear map to discover a range from Greek, Elizabethan, Restoration and Georgian theatre to more contemporary stylings, including Futurism, Surrealism and Postmodernism. New material in this edition covers Commedia dell'arte and non-Western forms of theatre, theatrical fusion and developments in musicals and Shakespeare. The book’s references, images, resource lists and examples have all been updated to support today's diverse performers. Robert Barton takes great care to present the actor with the roles and genres that will most commonly confront them. Containing a huge resource of nearly 150 exercises, suggestions for scene study and applications not only for theatrical performance but also for stylistic challenges in the reader’s own offstage life, this book is an invaluable resource for students and practitioners of acting and drama.
People who don’t know theatre may think the only creative artist in the field is the playwright--with actors, directors, and designers mere “interpreters” of the dramatist’s vision. Historically, however, creative mastery and power have passed through different hands. Sometimes, the playwright did the staging. In other periods, leading actors demanded plays be changed to fatten their roles. The late 19th and 20th centuries saw “the rise of the director,” in which director and playwright struggled for creative dominance. But no matter where the balance of power rested, good theatre artists of all kinds have created powerful experiences for their audience. The purpose of this volume is to bridge the interdisciplinary abyss between the study of creativity in theatre/drama and in other fields. Sharing theories, research findings, and pedagogical practices, the authors and I hope to stimulate discussion among creativity and theatre scholar/teachers, as well as multidisciplinary research. Theatre educators know from experience that performance classes enhance student creativity. This volume is the first to bring together perspectives from multiple disciplines on how drama pedagogy facilitates learning creativity. Drawing on current findings in cognitive science, as well as drama teachers’ lived experience, the contributors analyze how acting techniques train the imagination, allow students to explore alternate identities, and discover the confidence to take risks. The goal is to stimulate further multidisciplinary investigation of theatre education and creativity, with the intention of benefitting both fields.
Movement: Onstage and Off is the complete guide for actors to the most effective techniques for developing a fully expressive body. It is a comprehensive compilation of established fundamentals, a handbook for movement centered personal growth and a guide to helping actors and teachers make informed decisions for advanced study. This book includes: fundamental healing/conditioning processes essential techniques required for versatile performance specialized skills various training approaches and ways to frame the actor’s movement training. Using imitation exercises to sharpen awareness, accessible language and adaptable material for solo and group work, the authors aim to empower actors of all levels to unleash their extraordinary potential.
In this collection of essays, the four branches of radical cognitive science—embodied, embedded, enactive and ecological—will dialogue with performance, with particular focus on post-cognitivist approaches to understanding the embodied mind-in-society; de-emphasising the computational and representational metaphors; and embracing new conceptualisations grounded on the dynamic interactions of "brain, body and world". In our collection, radical cognitive science reaches out to areas of scholarship also explored in the fields of performance practice and training as we facilitate a new inter- and transdisciplinary discourse in which to jointly share and explore common reactions of embodied approaches to the lived mind. The essays originally published as a special issue in Connection Science.
"a work on the art and craft of comedy as important in its own way as works by Stanislavski and Chekhov" – Oxford Theatre Companion In 1939, a young, inexperienced actor wrote to a famous actress of his acquaintance, asking for advice on playing comedy. She responded enthusiastically, and they corresponded variously over the next year. The Craft of Comedy, a record of these exchanges, soon emerged as one of the few classic texts in the field of comedy acting. This major new edition takes a brilliant book and makes it better. Editor Robert Barton has devised extensive supplementary material, including: An introduction to the correspondents, the culture of the time, and the evolution of their book; Summaries, definitions, and exercises and practice scenes for readers wishing to explore Athene Seyler’s invaluable advice; Photographs, additional essays by Seyler, and a guide to easily accessed video clips of her performing. Seyler’s lucid guidance, and Barton’s scrupulous editorship, ensure this legendary work’s rightful status is restored: as one of the great practical guides to the craft of comedy, and an essential resource for actors and students of acting.
A trans teen is swept up in a whirlwind friendship with lethal consequences in this taut YA thriller, for fans of Sadie, Andrew Joseph White, and HBO's Euphoria. BEFORE. Newly out trans guy Max is having a hard time in school. Things have been tough since his summer romance, Danny, turned into his bully. This year, his plan is to keep his head down and graduate. All that changes when new It Girl, Gloss, moves to town. No one understands why perfect, polished Gloss is so interested in an introverted skater kid, but Max blooms in the hothouse of her attention. Caught between romance and obsession, he’ll do whatever it takes to keep her on his side. AFTER. Haircuts, makeovers, drugs, parties. It’s all fun and games until someone gets killed at a rager gone terribly wrong. Max refuses to believe that Gloss did it. But if not Gloss, who? Desperate to figure out truth in the wake of tragedy, Max veers dangerously close to being implicated—and his own memories of that awful night are fuzzy. Both sharp-edged thriller and moving coming of age, this gorgeously wrought novel is perfect for readers who want stories with trans characters front and center.
This book examines the theatrical movement-based pedagogy of Jacques Lecoq (1921-1999) through the lens of the cognitive scientific paradigm of enaction. The conversation between these two both uncovers more of the possible cognitive processes at work in Lecoq pedagogy and proposes how Lecoq’s own practical and philosophical approach could have something to offer the development of the enactive paradigm. Understanding Lecoq pedagogy through enaction can shed new light on the ways that movement, key to Lecoq’s own articulation of his pedagogy, might cognitively constitute the development of Lecoq’s ultimate creative figure – the actor-creator. Through an enactive lens, the actor-creator can be understood as not only a creative figure, but also the manifestation of a fundamentally new mode of cognitive selfhood. This book engages with Lecoq pedagogy’s significant practices and principles including the relationship between the instructor and student, identifications, mime, play, mask work, language, improvisation, and movement analysis.
