This book showcases contemporary US set design by engaging designers with one another, pairing dialogue and imagery from varied experiences and practices. Within these pages, we witness an expansion of traditional theatrical set design, evolving fluidly to include such work as performance art, installation, community events, and exhibitions, to name a few. The design and the designer have a story to tell that goes beyond the immediate collaboration. Readers get an intimate perspective providing insight into a somewhat mysterious world that has been under-valued and under-evaluated. The conversations include designers who are commercially successful, artistically successful, and those who have existed on the fringes of the theatre world whose work is not necessarily definable, and therefore not as visible. These thirty designers provide the next generation a view into a variety of career paths while also validating and encouraging an appreciation of their diverse artistic accomplishments.
This work offers detailed discussions on all aspects of acousto-optic deflectors, modulators and tunable filters, emphasizing hands-on procedures for design, fabrication and testing. It contains previously unpublished treatments of acousto-optic device design and impedance matching, permitting the actual design of real devices and device-matching circuits.
A how-to guide leading the prop master through planning, pre-production, production, and post-production procedures, budgeting, collaborations with designers and other production areas, and planning a prop shop from the layout of the spaces to the health and safety protocols for shop planning and workplace management.
Revered as the authoritative resource for stage management, this text offers students a practical manual on how to stage manage in all theater environments. Rich with practical resources — checklists, diagrams, examples, forms and step-by-step directions — Stage Management eschews excessive discussion of philosophy and gets right to the essential materials and processes of putting on a production. In addition to sharing his own expertise, Stern has gathered practical advice from working stage managers of Broadway, off-Broadway, touring companies, regional, community, and 99-seat Equity waiver theaters.
This book discusses human perception and performance within the framework of the theory of self-organizing systems. To that end, it presents a variety of phenomena and experimental findings in the research field, and provides an introduction to the theory of self-organization, with a focus on amplitude equations, order parameter and Lotka-Volterra equations. The book demonstrates that relating the experimental findings to the mathematical models provides an explicit account for the causal nature of human perception and performance. In particular, the notion of determinism versus free will is discussed in this context. The book is divided into four main parts, the first of which discusses the relationship between the concept of determinism and the fundamental laws of physics. The second part provides an introduction to using the self-organization approach from physics to understand human perception and performance, a strategy used throughout the remainder of the book to connect experimental findings and mathematical models. In turn, the third part of the book focuses on investigating performance guided by perception: climbing stairs and grasping tools are presented in detail. Perceptually relevant bifurcation parameters in the mathematical models are also identified, e.g. in the context of walk-to-run gait transitions. Chains of perceptions and actions together with their underlying mechanisms are then presented, and a number of experimental phenomena – such as selective attention, priming, child play, bistable perception, retrieval-induced forgetting, functional fixedness and memory effects exhibiting hysteresis with positive or negative sign – are discussed. Human judgment making, internal experiences such as dreaming and thinking, and Freud’s concept of consciousness are also addressed. The fourth and last part of the book explores several specific topics such as learning, social interactions between two people, life trajectories, and applications in clinical psychology. In particular, episodes of mania and depression under bipolar disorder, perception under schizophrenia, and obsessive-compulsive rituals are discussed. This book is intended for researchers and graduate students in psychology, physics, applied mathematics, kinesiology, and the sport sciences who want to learn about the foundations of the field. Written for a mixed audience, the experiments and concepts are presented using non-technical language throughout. In addition, each chapter includes more advanced sections for modelers in the fields of physics and applied mathematics.
The Stage Manager’s Toolkit provides a comprehensive account of the role of the stage manager for live theatre with a focus on both written and verbal communication best practices. The book outlines the duties of the stage manager and assistant stage manager throughout a production, discussing not only what to do but why. The book identifies communication objectives for each phase of production, paperwork to be created, and the necessary questions to be answered in order to ensure success. This book was written for Stage Management courses in Theatre programs and for the working professional.
The invasion of Sennacherib in 701 BCE is a classic issue for both biblical scholars and historians alike. Extant Assyrian, Biblical and even Greek texts all refer to Sennacherib and many different theories have been put forward in attempts to understand the relationship between these various accounts. Despite the rise of new literary-rhetorical criticism in biblical studies, studies tackling the problem of Sennacherib’s invasion have been dominated by historical-critical work on the issue and have virtually ignored rhetorical methodology. Against this trend, this book employs both traditional historical-critical methods and newer rhetorical methods in an effort to utilize the biblical texts in a historical reconstruction of this famous Assyrian assault on ancient Judah.
Acting for the Camera: Back to One is a "how to" book with practical steps to achieve a professional performance on camera. The book focuses on four distinct areas: how to prepare the character, how to execute the technical responsibilities that will assist the editor in creating the on-camera performance in post-production, tips from industry professionals, and how to create effective self-tape auditions. Part One: The Character’s World is packed with tools to analyze the script and fully prepare the character before arriving on set. Part Two: The Actor’s World focuses on developing technical acting skills for the camera that assist the pre- and post-production teams to create a dynamic on-screen performance. In Part Three: The Professional World, industry professionals provide tips from inside the film/TV audition room and how to navigate a career in the acting business. The final section, Part Four: Self-Tape Like a Pro, outlines how to build a self-tape studio in the privacy of your own home and submit high-quality self-tape auditions that will help you stand out from the competition. Written for students enrolled in Acting for the Camera courses, Acting for the Camera: Back to One explores techniques that can be practiced and mastered by actors of all levels, from the moment they audition for the part through to when they hear that director call "cut!"
Stage Management Basics touches on basic principles for stage management for theatre, dance, and opera productions. Without assuming any intrinsic prior knowledge of the theatrical field and its associated, specialized terminology, this book covers every aspect of the stage management, from reading a script, meeting with a director and theatre staff, and auditioning, to constructing green digital scripts, communication best practices, and opening night protocol. Additionally, this book features multiple appendices containing stage management form templates, blank version of which are available on its companion website. This book is for the beginning Stage Management student.
In 1888, Mark Twain reflected on the writer's special feel for words to his correspondent, George Bainton, noting that "the difference between the almost-right word and the right word is really a large matter." We recognize differences between a politician who is "willful" and one who is "willing" even though the difference does not cross word-stems or parts of speech. We recognize that being "held up" evokes different experiences depending upon whether its direct object is a meeting, a bank, or an example. Although we can notice hundreds of examples in the language where small differences in wording produce large reader effects, the authors of The Power of Words argue that these examples are random glimpses of a hidden systematic knowledge that governs how we, as writers or speakers, learn to shape experience for other human beings. Over the past several years, David Kaufer and his colleagues have developed a software program for analyzing writing called DocuScope. This book illustrates the concepts and rhetorical theory behind the software analysis, examining patterns in writing and showing writers how their writing works in different categories to accomplish varying objectives. Reflecting the range and variety of audience experience that contiguous words of surface English can prime, the authors present a theory of language as an instrument of rhetorically priming audiences and a catalog of English strings to implement the theory. The project creates a comprehensive map of the speaker and writer's implicit knowledge about predisposing audience experience at the point of utterance. The book begins with an explanation of why studying language from the standpoint of priming--not just meaning--is vital to non-question begging theories of close reading and to language education in general. The remaining chapters in Part I detail the steps taken to prepare a catalog study of English strings for their properties as priming instruments. Part II describes in detail the catalog of priming categories, including enough examples to help readers see how individual words and strings of English fit into the catalog. The final part describes how the authors have applied the catalog of English strings as priming tools to conduct textual research.
