This is a book for the thinking actor, and the finest actors I've known are just that. The best actors bring it all together body, heart, spirit, and mind. This book is for the actor who thinks about craft and influence, who thinks about the relationship of performance to living, who thinks about doing and what that doing means. Acting is a metaphor and it's a mirror, and, so, a theory of acting, if true, shows us to ourselves. Jeff Zinn knows this. He knows it as an actor, director, teacher, and thinker. His theory of everything is simple and revelatory. (from the foreword by Todd London)
Why do people act? Why are other people drawn to watch them? How is acting as a performing art related to role-playing outside the theater? As the first philosophical study devoted to acting, Acts: Theater, Philosophy, and the Performing Selfsheds light on some of the more evasive aspects of the acting experience— such as the import of the actor's voice, the ethical unease sometimes felt while embodying particular sequences, and the meaning of inspiration. Tzachi Zamir explores acting’s relationship to everyday role-playing through a surprising range of examples of “lived acting,” including pornography, masochism, and eating disorders. By unearthing the deeper mobilizing structures that underlie dissimilar forms of staged and non-staged role-playing, Acts offers a multi-layered meditation on the percolation from acting to life. The book engages questions of theatrical inspiration, the actor’s “energy,” the difference between acting and pretending, the special role of repetition as part of live acting, the audience and its attraction to acting, and the unique significance of the actor’s voice. It examines the embodied nature of the actor’s animation of a fiction, the breakdown of the distinction between what one acts and who one is, and the transition from what one performs into who one is, creating an interdisciplinary meditation on the relationship between life and acting.
Sommer Browning's third poetry collection At birth we are given a role--it is our name. GOOD ACTORS is a side-eyed illumination of the artist as self-help guru, oracle, and sage, but more importantly as mother, lover, and friend. Part psychological experiment, part conceptual art piece, part screenplay, GOOD ACTORS is 100% a joyful celebration of language and life. And because it is Sommer, the book is hilarious, melancholy, and existential. Poetry. Women's Studies. Art. Hybrid.
The Existential Englishman is both a memoir and an intimate portrait of Paris – a city that can enchant, exhilarate and exasperate in equal measure. As Peppiatt remarks: 'You reflect and become the city just as the city reflects and becomes you'. This, then, is one man's not uncritical love letter to Paris. Intensely personal, candid and entertaining, The Existential Englishman chronicles Peppiatt's relationship with Paris in a series of vignettes structured around the half-dozen addresses he called home as a plucky young art critic. Having survived the tumultuous riots of 1968, Peppiatt traces his precarious progress from junior editor to magazine publisher, recalling encounters with a host of figures at the heart of Parisian artistic life – from Sartre, Beckett and Cartier-Bresson to Serge Gainsbourg and Catherine Deneuve. Peppiatt also takes us into the secret places that fascinate him most in this ancient capital, where memories are etched into every magnificent palace and humble cobblestone. On the historic streets of Paris, where all life is on show and every human drama played out, Michael Peppiatt is the wittiest and wickedest of observers, capturing the essence of the city and its glittering cultural achievements.
A valuable new touchstone for phenomenology and performance as research. In this book, Daniel Johnston examines how phenomenology can describe, analyze, and inspire theater-making. Each chapter introduces themes to guide the creative process through objects, bodies, spaces, time, history, freedom, and authenticity. Key examples in the work are drawn from Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, Sophocles' Antigone, and Shakespeare's Hamlet. Practical tasks throughout explore how the theatrical event can offer unique insights into being and existence, as Johnston's philosophical perspective shines a light on broader existential issues of being. In this way, the book makes a bold contribution to the study of acting as an embodied form of philosophy and reveals how phenomenology can be a rich source of creativity for actors, directors, designers, and collaborators in the performance process. Brimming with insight into the practice and theory of acting, this original new work stimulates new approaches to rehearsal and sees theater-making as capable of speaking back to philosophical discourse.
Analyzing the relationship between dramatic action and the controversial art of acting, William Worthen demonstrates that what it means to act, to be an actor, and to communicate through acting embodies both an ethics of acting and a poetics of drama. Originally published in 1984. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
This is a book about play practice rather than play theory. Of course, practice presupposes theory, but here the editors choose to keep general theoretical assumptions under cover rather then force them into explicitness. The contributors to this volume were given free rein to discuss whatsoever aspect of literary play caught their fancy. The absence of a predetermined theoretical framework has resulted in an idiosyntractic volume on the different forms of play.
The capacity for reasonable argument about practical and political matters is important to our daily lives. Yet what does arguing really involve? Often, our very concept of what it is to argue seems systematically distorted. Practical, political arguing is too often stylized as hyper-cognitive, ending by treating people as objects rather than other selves — in ways that are fundamentally unreasonable. This book examines what follows from seeing people as deliberating and acting in ways that intertwine a variety of emotional and evaluative processes and effects of virtue or character. From this point of view, practical arguing involves not just cognition, emotion, and virtue, but also practices, including imaginative practices. Politics of Practical Reasoning: Integrating Action, Discourse and Argument uses these ideas to interrogate ways in which reasoning is bound up with the interrelated lives that human beings lead in their everyday, public and political worlds. We build here on efforts to re-concretize practical reasoning in modern traditions linked to phenomenology and Wittgensteinian thought, also referring back to Aristotle and the Stoics in classical times. Medieval theologians and philosophers such as Aquinas confront the same issue, as do Enlightenment thinkers such as Smith and Kant. Using the history of philosophical thought as one of our major sources, the contributors sympathize with the link underscored between interpretation, tradition and reasoning by Gadamer, the stress placed on communicative and emancipatory action by Habermas, and MacIntyre’s notion of praxis as highlighting deliberation within communities. All these approaches respond to practical reasoning as practical. Building on these points of view, the volume both explores what practical reasoning itself means, and applies it to particular questions: what it means to respond to arguments about meaningful work or disability, or how to debate institutional ethics or art. None of these debates is susceptible to exclusively cognitive or technical solutions; this does not mean abandoning them to unreason. Practical and political reasoning is examined here from an appropriately broad spectrum of approaches, founded in a concern for what human reasoning can justifiably be expected to involve, and what justifying it can reasonably be expected to achieve.
"Between them, the movements of Logical Postivism and Existentialism dominated philosophy in Europe for much of the last century, and the influence they exerted can still be felt today. In his widely acclaimed Contemporary Philosophy, Frederick Copleston provides a detailed and objective introduction to these two highly controversial areas of recent thought. Originally written in 1956, and revised in 1972, this book explores the work of many of the most important thinkers of the 20th century, including Ayer, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Sartre and Camus." "Written in a clear and accessible style, this book will prove invaluable to anyone looking for a general introduction to either of these fascinating and influential philosophical movements."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Of the 6000 languages now spoken throughout the world around 3000 may become extinct during the next century. This guide gives linguists the tools to describe them, syntactically and grammatically, for future reference.
