Download or read book The Actor Image and Action written by Rhonda Blair and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2007-11-30 with total page 153 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rhonda Blair examines the physiological relationship between bodily action and emotional experience, in the first full-length study of actor training using the insights of cognitive neuroscience and their crucial importance to an actor’s engagement with a role.
Download or read book The Actor Image and Action written by Rhonda Blair and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2007-11-30 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Actor, Image and Action is a 'new generation' approach to the craft of acting; the first full-length study of actor training using the insights of cognitive neuroscience. In a brilliant reassessment of both the practice and theory of acting, Rhonda Blair examines the physiological relationship between bodily action and emotional experience. In doing so she provides the latest step in Stanislavsky's attempts to help the actor 'reach the unconscious by conscious means'. Recent developments in scientific thinking about the connections between biology and cognition require new ways of understanding many elements of human activity, including: imagination emotion memory physicality reason. The Actor, Image and Action looks at how these are in fact inseparable in the brain's structure and function, and their crucial importance to an actor’s engagement with a role. The book vastly improves our understanding of the actor's process and is a must for any actor or student of acting.
Download or read book Image Action and the Creative Brain written by Thomas Ray Angland and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 110 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Actions written by Marina Caldarone and published by Nick Hern Books. This book was released on 2004 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An essential companion for actors in rehearsal - a thesaurus of action words to revitalise performance. Actors need actions. They cannot act moods. They need to be doing something with every line. They need verbs. They need an aim to achieve, and an action selected to help achieve that aim. 'Actions' are active verbs. 'I tempt you.' 'You taunt me.' In order to perform an action truthfully and therefore convincingly, an actor needs to find exactly the right action to suit that particular situation and that particular line. That is where this book comes in ... It is a thesaurus of active verbs, with which the actor can refine the action-word until s/he hits exactly the right one to help make the action come alive. It looks like this: taunt insult, tease, torment, provoke, ridicule, mock, poke, needle tempt influence, attract, entice, cajole, coax, seduce, lure, fascinate It is well known in the acting community that random lists of action-words circulate rehearsal rooms in dog-eared photocopies - as a sort of actor's crib. This book makes them available for the first time in an organised and comprehensive form.
Download or read book Theatre Performance and Cognition written by Rhonda Blair and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2016-03-24 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Theatre, Performance and Cognition introduces readers to the key debates, areas of research, and applications of the cognitive sciences to the humanities, and to theatre and performance in particular. It features the most exciting work being done at the intersection of theatre and cognitive science, containing both selected scientific studies that have been influential in the field, each introduced and contextualised by the editors, together with related scholarship from the field of theatre and performance that demonstrates some of the applications of the cognitive sciences to actor training, the rehearsal room and the realm of performance more generally. The three sections consider the principal areas of research and application in this interdisciplinary field, starting with a focus on language and meaning-making in which Shakespeare's work and Tom Stoppard's Arcadia are considered. In the second part which focuses on the body, chapters consider applications for actor and dance training, while the third part focuses on dynamic ecologies, of which the body is a part.
Download or read book The Actor and the Target written by Declan Donnellan and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Actor and the Character written by Vladimir Mirodan and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-11-12 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Transformative acting remains the aspiration of many an emerging actor, and constitutes the achievement of some of the most acclaimed performances of our age: Daniel Day-Lewis as Lincoln, Meryl Streep as Mrs Thatcher, Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter – the list is extensive, and we all have our favourites. But what are the physical and psychological processes which enable actors to create characters so different from themselves? To understand this unique phenomenon, Vladimir Mirodan provides both a historical overview of the evolution of notions of 'character' in Western theatre and a stunning contemporary analysis of the theoretical implications of transformative acting. The Actor and the Character: Surveys the main debates surrounding the concept of dramatic character and – contrary to recent trends – explains why transformative actors conceive their characters as ‘independent’ of their own personalities. Describes some important techniques used by actors to construct their characters by physical means: work on objects, neutral and character masks, Laban movement analysis, Viewpoints, etc. Examines the psychology behind transformative acting from the perspectives of both psychoanalysis and scientific psychology and, based on recent developments in psychology, asks whether transformation is not just acting folklore but may actually entail temporary changes to the brain structures of the actors. The Actor and the Character speaks not only to academics and students studying actor training and acting theory, but contributes to current lively academic debates around character. This is a compelling and original exploration of the limits of acting theory and practice, psychology, and creative work, in which Mirodan boldly re-examines some of the fundamental assumptions of actor training and some basic tenets of theatre practice to ask: What happens when one of us ‘becomes somebody else’?
Download or read book The Image of the Actor written by Shearer West and published by Palgrave Macmillan. This book was released on 1991-03-15 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The mistake of interpreting 18th-century theatrical portraits too literally has been made since the 19th-century when a different set of artistic codes prevailed. The image of the 18th-century actor which we can obtain from prints, paintings and pamphlets of the time, is not a collection of visual truths, but a construction based on critical canons, aesthetic prejudices, and commercial motivations prevalent during the period. Through an analysis of the importance of theatre among all the pleasures and pastimes enjoyed by 18th-century Londoners the author presents a detailed picture of the cultural climate inhabited by the actor and his audience. The overwhelming fascination they had with the actor provides the background to an analysis of the function of the theatrical portrait, the burgeoning economy of the engraver, and the illustrator. Concepts of classicism and realism are explored in terms of how Garrick and Kemble will have been viewed in their work. The author also draws an interesting analogy between the aesthetics of action and sculptural representation through the work of Siddons, and goes on to consider the representation of the comic actor and how it was informed by art and art theory.
Download or read book A Practical Handbook for the Actor written by Melissa Bruder and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2012-04-25 with total page 108 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For anyone who has ever wanted to take an acting class, "this is the best book on acting written in the last twenty years" (David Mamet, from the Introduction). This book describes a technique developed and refined by the authors, all of them young actors, in their work with Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright David Mamet, actor W. H. Macy, and director Gregory Mosher. A Practical Handbook for the Actor is written for any actor who has ever experienced the frustrations of acting classes that lacked clarity and objectivity, and that failed to provide a dependable set of tools. An actor's job, the authors state, is to "find a way to live truthfully under the imaginary circumstances of the play." The ways in which an actor can attain that truth form the substance of this eloquent book.
Download or read book Rethinking the Actor s Body written by Dick McCaw and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-04-02 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How does an actor embody a character? How do they use their body as an instrument of expression? Rethinking the Actor's Body offers an accessible introduction to the fields of neurophysiology and embodied knowledge through a detailed examination of what an actor does with their body. Built on almost a decade of conversations and public seminars by the author Dick McCaw in partnership with John Rothwell (Professor of Neurophysiology at University College London, UK), Rethinking the Actor's Body explores a set of questions and preoccupations concerning the actor's body and examines overlaps in research and practice in the fields of actor training, embodied knowledge and neurophysiology.
Download or read book Action written by Sabin Epstein and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2023-03-16 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work is a straightforward approach to the creative process of actor training. Combining principles of verbal and nonverbal communication with the basic tenets of Stanislavski's approach, it includes a step-by-step guide for reading, analyzing, and preparing a text for performance. The book also provides a template for rehearsing a sonnet, a soliloquy, and scenes from plays of heightened language ranging from Shakespeare, Moliere, and Congreve, to Ibsen, Shaw, and Lynn Nottage. Using improvisation, games and exercises with a series of tools designed to enhance the creative process, the book outlines the specific steps necessary to engage in the basic tenets of acting: overcoming obstacles and playing action-based objectives. Enlarging the field of study to include status, opposition, and releasing, as well as scansion and an emphasis on operative words and images, the actor emerges from this training process prepared to play any text, in any style, under any circumstance, with confidence, ease and a sense of joy.
Download or read book Acting in Real Time written by Paul Binnerts and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2012-06-25 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new theory of acting that tears down the theatrical "Fourth Wall"
Download or read book Staging Spectatorship in the Plays of Philip Massinger written by Professor Joanne Rochester and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2013-04-28 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The playwrights composing for the London stage between 1580 and 1642 repeatedly staged plays-within and other metatheatrical inserts. Such works present fictionalized spectators as well as performers, providing images of the audience-stage interaction within the theatre. They are as much enactments of the interpretive work of a spectator as of acting, and as such they are a potential source of information about early modern conceptions of audiences, spectatorship and perception. This study examines on-stage spectatorship in three plays by Philip Massinger, head playwright for the King's Men from 1625 to 1640. Each play presents a different form of metatheatrical inset, from the plays-within of The Roman Actor (1626), to the masques-within of The City Madam (1632) to the titular miniature portrait of The Picture (1629), moving thematically from spectator interpretations of dramatic performance, the visual spectacle of the masque to staged 'readings' of static visual art. All three forms present a dramatization of the process of examination, and allow an analysis of Massinger's assumptions about interpretation, perception and spectator response.
Download or read book An Actress Prepares written by Rosemary Malague and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-06-17 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Every day, thousands of women enter acting classes where most of them will receive some variation on the Stanislavsky-based training that has now been taught in the U.S. for nearly ninety years. Yet relatively little feminist consideration has been given to the experience of the student actress: What happens to women in Method actor training?' An Actress Prepares is the first book to interrogate Method acting from a specifically feminist perspective. Rose Malague addresses "the Method" not only with much-needed critical distance, but also the crucial insider's view of a trained actor. Case studies examine the preeminent American teachers who popularized and transformed elements of Stanislavsky’s System within the U.S.—Strasberg, Adler, Meisner, and Hagen— by analyzing and comparing their related but distinctly different approaches. This book confronts the sexism that still exists in actor training and exposes the gender biases embedded within the Method itself. Its in-depth examination of these Stanislavskian techniques seeks to reclaim Method acting from its patriarchal practices and to empower women who act. 'I've been waiting for someone to write this book for years: a thorough-going analysis and reconsideration of American approaches to Stanislavsky from a feminist perspective ... lively, intelligent, and engaging.' – Phillip Zarrilli, University of Exeter 'Theatre people of any gender will be transformed by Rose Malague’s eye-opening study An Actress Prepares... This book will be useful to all scholars and practitioners determined to make gender equity central to how they hone their craft and their thinking.' – Jill Dolan, Princeton University
Download or read book Teachers Minds And Actions written by Gunnar Handal and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2005-07-19 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on the 10th International Study Association on Teacher Thinking and Practice Conference in Gothenburg, this text contains a collection of original research conducted by scholars from Europe, North America, Israel and Hong Kong, and provides an overview of the current status of international research on teacher thinking.; The contributors write from different perspectives - some analytical, some philosophical and some contextual - on the way teachers think and act. The intention of the book is not to characterise critically the established traditions or any of its researchers, but to study teacher-thinking research in context, analysing research objectives and enquiring into what lies behind the traditions. The result is a picture of an unpredictable but exciting and interesting future in developments in teacher-thinking research.
Download or read book The Actor s Menu written by Bill Howey and published by Compass Publishing. This book was released on 2005-09 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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. From typecasting to reinventing a character's story, actors discover the key ingredients that will enable them to use their own unique qualities and emotions to develop strong, believable characters that people are interested in watching. How to identify and resolve problems such as hidden agendas that can disable an actor's work; distinguish between perception, feeling, and emotions; and find lasting sources of inspiration are among the issues explored. The importance of imagination, words, and story as well as the difference between intellectual and visceral choices (and the impact of each) are also discussed.
Download or read book The Handbook of Motion Picture Photography written by Herbert Couchman McKay and published by . This book was released on 1927 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
