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An Actor's Work: A Student's Diary
by Konstantin StanislavskiStanislavski’s ‘system’ has dominated actor-training in the West since his writings were first translated into English in the 1920s and 30s. His systematic attempt to outline a psycho-physical technique for acting single-handedly revolutionized standards of acting in the theatre. Until now, readers and students have had to contend with inaccurate, misleading and difficult-to-read English-language versions. Some of the mistranslations have resulted in profound distortions in the way his system has been interpreted and taught. At last, Jean Benedetti has succeeded in translating Stanislavski’s huge manual into a lively, fascinating and accurate text in English. He has remained faithful to the author's original intentions, putting the two books previously known as An Actor Prepares and Building A Character back together into one volume, and in a colloquial and readable style for today's actors. The result is a major contribution to the theatre, and a service to one of the great innovators of the twentieth century.
An Actor's Work on a Role
by Konstantin StanislavskiAn Actor’s Work on a Role is Konstantin Stanislavski’s exploration of the rehearsal process, applying the techniques of his seminal actor training system to the task of bringing truth to one’s chosen role. Originally published over half a century ago as Creating a Role, this book was the third in a planned trilogy – after An Actor Prepares and Building a Character, now combined in An Actor’s Work – in which Stanislavski sets out his psychological, physical and practical vision of actor training. This new translation from renowned scholar Jean Benedetti not only includes Stanislavski’s original teachings, but is also furnished with invaluable supplementary material in the shape of transcripts and notes from the rehearsals themselves, reconfirming 'The System' as the cornerstone of actor training.
The Actress: Hollywood Acting and the Female Star
by Karen HollingerThe Actress: Hollywood Acting and the Female Star investigates the contemporary film actress both as an artist and as an ideological construct. Divided into two sections, The Actress first examines the major issues in studying film acting, stardom, and the Hollywood actress. Combining theories of screen acting and of film stardom, The Actress presents a synthesis of methodologies and offers the student and scholar a new approach to these two subjects of study.
An Actress Prepares: Women and "the Method"
by Rosemary Malague'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
Actresses and Mental Illness: Histrionic Heroines (Interdisciplinary Research in Gender)
by Fiona GregoryActresses and Mental Illness investigates the relationship between the work of the actress and her personal experience of mental illness, from the late nineteenth through to the end of twentieth century. Over the past two decades scholars have made great advances in our understanding of the history of the actress, unearthing the material conditions of her working life, the force of her creative agency and the politics of her reception and representation. By focusing specifically on actresses’ encounters with mental illness, Fiona Gregory builds on this earlier work and significantly supplements it. Through detailed case studies of both well-known and neglected figures in theatre and film history, including Mrs Patrick Campbell, Vivien Leigh, Frances Farmer and Diana Barrymore, it shows how mental illness – actual or supposed – has impacted on actresses’ performances, careers and celebrity. The book covers a range of topics including: representing emotion on stage; the ‘failed’ actress; actresses and addiction; and actresses and psychiatric treatment. Actresses and Mental Illness expands the field of actress studies by showing how consideration of the personal experience of the actress influences our understanding of her work and its reception. The book underscores how the actress can be perceived as a representative public woman, acting as a lens through which we can examine broader attitudes to women and mental illness.
Actresses as Working Women: Their Social Identity in Victorian Culture (Gender in Performance)
by Tracy C. DavisUsing historical evidence as well as personal accounts, Tracy C. Davis examines the reality of conditions for `ordinary' actresses, their working environments, employment patterns and the reasons why acting continued to be such a popular, though insecure, profession. Firmly grounded in Marxist and feminist theory she looks at representations of women on stage, and the meanings associated with and generated by them.
Acts: Theater, Philosophy, And The Performing Self
by Tzachi ZamirWhy 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 Self sheds 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.
Acts of Activism
by D. Soyini MadisonEach volume in the Theatre and Performance Theory series introduces a key issue about theatre's role in culture. Specially written for student and a wide readership, each book uses case studies to guide readers into today's pressing debates in theatre and performance studies. Topics include contemporary theatrical practices; historiography; interdisciplinary approaches to making theatre; and the choices and consequences of how theatre is studied, among other areas of investigation. Book jacket.
Acts of Gaiety: LGBT Performance and the Politics of Pleasure
by Sara WarnerActs of Gaiety explores the mirthful modes of political performance by LGBT artists, activists, and collectives that have inspired and sustained deadly serious struggles for revolutionary change. The book explores antics such as camp, kitsch, drag, guerrilla theater, zap actions, rallies, manifestos, pageants, and parades alongside more familiar forms of "legitimate theater. " Against queer theory's long-suffering romance with mourning and melancholia and a national agenda that urges homosexuals to renounce pleasure if they want to be taken seriously by mainstream society, Acts of Gaiety seeks to reanimate notions of "gaiety" as a political value for LGBT activism. The book mines the archives of lesbian-feminist activism of the 1960s-70s, highlighting the outrageous gaiety that lay at the center of the social and theatrical performances of the era and uncovering original documents long thought to be lost. Juxtaposing historical figures such as Valerie Solanas and Jill Johnston with more recent performers and activists (including Hothead Paisan, Bitch & Animal, and the Five Lesbian Brothers), Warner shows how reclaiming this largely discarded and disavowed past elucidates possibilities for being and belonging. Acts of Gaiety explores the mutually informing histories of gayness as politics and as joie de vivre, along with the centrality of liveliness to queer performance and protest.
Acts of Manhood
by Karl M. KippolaExploring the performance of masculinity on and off the nineteenth-century American stage, this book looks at the shift from the passionate muscularity to intellectual restraint as not a linear journey toward national refinement; but a multitude of masculinities fighting simultaneously for dominance and recognition.
Acts of Poetry: American Poets' Theater and the Politics of Performance
by Heidi R BeanAmerican poets’ theater emerged in the postwar period alongside the rich, performance-oriented poetry and theater scenes that proliferated on the makeshift stages of urban coffee houses, shared apartments, and underground theaters, yet its significance has been largely overlooked by critics. Acts of Poetry shines a spotlight on poets’ theater’s key groups, practitioners, influencers, and inheritors, such as the Poets’ Theatre, the Living Theatre, Gertrude Stein, Bunny Lang, Frank O’Hara, Amiri Baraka, Carla Harryman, and Suzan-Lori Parks. Heidi R. Bean demonstrates the importance of poets’ theater in the development of twentieth-century theater and performance poetry, and especially evolving notions of the audience’s role in performance, and in narratives of the relationship between performance and everyday life. Drawing on an extensive archive of scripts, production materials, personal correspondence, theater records, interviews, manifestoes, editorials, and reviews, the book captures critical assessments and behind-the-scenes discussions that enrich our understanding of the intertwined histories of American theater and American poetry in the twentieth century.
The Actual One: How I Tried, And Failed, To Avoid Adulthood Forever
by Isy Suttie‘Isy Suttie turns the painful process of growing-up into something laugh-out-loud funny, and for that I could kiss her’ – Bryony Gordon, author of THE WRONG KNICKERS
The Actual One: How I tried, and failed, to remain twenty-something for ever
by Isy SuttieIsy woke up one day in her late twenties to discover that the invisible deal she'd done with her best mates - that they'd prolong growing up for as long as possible - had all been in her head. Everyone around her is suddenly into mortgages, farmers' markets and nappies, rather than the idea of running naked into the sea or getting hammered in Plymouth with eighty-year-old men. When her dearest friend advises her that the next guy Isy meets will be The Actual One, Isy decides to keep delaying the onset of adulthood - until a bet with her mother results in a mad scramble to find a boyfriend within a month.From papier-mâché penguins to being stranded on a dual carriageway in nothing but a fur coat and trainers, THE ACTUAL ONE is an ode to the confusing wilderness of your late twenties, alongside a quest for a genuinely good relationship with a man who doesn't use moisturiser.
The Actual One: How I tried, and failed, to remain twenty-something for ever
by Isy SuttieIsy woke up one day in her late twenties to discover that the invisible deal she'd done with her best mates - that they'd prolong growing up for as long as possible - had all been in her head. Everyone around her is suddenly into mortgages, farmers' markets and nappies, rather than the idea of running naked into the sea or getting hammered in Plymouth with eighty-year-old men. When her dearest friend advises her that the next guy Isy meets will be The Actual One, Isy decides to keep delaying the onset of adulthood - until a bet with her mother results in a mad scramble to find a boyfriend within a month.From papier-mâché penguins to being stranded on a dual carriageway in nothing but a fur coat and trainers, THE ACTUAL ONE is an ode to the confusing wilderness of your late twenties, alongside a quest for a genuinely good relationship with a man who doesn't use moisturiser.Performed by Isy Suttie, and featuring three songs from the book. This audio edition also includes an exclusive extra song and a unique introduction.(p) 2016 Orion Publishing Group
The Actual One: How I Tried, and Failed, to Avoid Adulthood Forever
by Isy SuttieA hilarious, razor-sharp debut memoir about the moment when you realize that your friends have all grown up and left you behind, for readers of Caitlin Moran’s How To Be A Woman, Jenny Lawson’s Let’s Pretend This Never Happened, and Kelly Williams Brown’s Adulting.Isy Suttie wakes up one day in her late twenties to discover that the deal she’d struck with her friends, to put off growing up for as long as possible, had been entirely in her head. Everyone around her is suddenly into mortgages, farmers’ markets, and going off the Pill, rather than running naked into the sea or getting hammered in a country pub with eighty-year-old men.After a particularly crushing breakup precipitated by Isy’s gifting of a human-size papier-mâché penguin to her boyfriend, her dearest friend advises Isy not to worry: the next guy she meets will be The Actual One.Heartened by this promise, Isy decides to keep delaying the onset of adulthood, whether that means standing on the side of a highway in nothing but an old fur coat and sneakers, dating a man who speaks only in rhyme, or conquering her fears of Alpine skiing by wildly overestimating her athletic ability. Insightful and laugh-out-loud funny, The Actual One is an ode to the confusing wilderness of your late twenties, alongside a quest for a genuinely good relationship . . . or at the very least, a good story to tell.
The Actual Real Reality of Jennifer James
by Gillian ShieldsThis is the diary of Jennifer James. It contains: One Heroine: Jennifer James, burdened by brains, struggling to release her Inner Babe One High School: London Road Comprehensive, a no-hope English school in a no-hope English town One Prize: A scholarship to the elite St. Willibald's College [Jennifer's idea of Paradise] offered to the winner of a tacky reality TV show, Down The Bog and . . . A Thousand Complications: Like Jocasta, the crazy feminist mother; Tallulah, the blond rival from hell; Marcus, the guy with green eyes; and above all, the actual real reality that Jennifer's chances of winning are less than Mega-Zero. . . .
The Ad Makers: How the Best TV Commercials are Produced
by Tom von NewthThe Ad-Makers looks at the cinematic form where commerce and creativity collide most dramatically: the TV commercial.Featuring interviews from top professionals in the field, the book provides the kind of behind-the-scenes expertise that it usually takes a lifetime of professional practice to acquire.Gathered from the disciplines of cinematography, directing, producing and editing, the filmmakers tell the stories behind the making of some of the world's top commercials. Each chapter includes an overview of best practice and a host of images-stills from the spots themselves and concept visuals.Exploring the creative process from conception to post-production, The Ad-Makers also covers developments within the industry precipitated by the digital age and the new challenges placed on ad-making by the explosion of social media.With special focus on the shooting and production elements of making a television advert, this book is ideal for all filmmakers who want to build a career in advertising, or, as is increasingly common, feature films.- The stories behind some of the best-known TV commercials, as told by the people who made them- Top producers, designers, storyboarders, directors, editors and visual effects creatives reveal the secrets of the television advertising industry
The Ad-Makers: How the Best TV Commercials are Produced (Creative Professional Ser.)
by Tom von Logue NewthThe Ad-Makers looks at the cinematic form where commerce and creativity collide most dramatically: the TV commercial. Featuring interviews from top professionals in the field, the book provides the kind of behind-the-scenes expertise that it usually takes a lifetime of professional practice to acquire. Gathered from the disciplines of cinematography, directing, producing, and editing, the filmmakers tell the stories behind the making of some of the world’s top commercials. Each chapter includes an overview of best practice and a host of images—stills from the spots themselves and concept visuals. Exploring the creative process from conception to post-production, The Ad-Makers also covers developments within the industry precipitated by the digital age and the new challenges placed on ad-making by the explosion of social media. With special focus on the shooting and production elements of making a television advert, this book is ideal for all filmmakers who want to build a career in advertising or even feature films. • The stories behind some of the best-known TV commercials, as told by the people who made them • Top producers, designers, storyboarders, directors, editors, and visual effects creatives reveal the secrets of the television advertising industry
Adam Sandler
by Bill CrawfordFrom the comedy clubs of New York to his big break on "Saturday Night Live" to block-buster films like "Big Daddy" and "Little Nicky" Adam Sandler has left America howling in their seats and peeing in their pants. Sandler has emerged as the decade's most unstoppable comedic-and the ladies love him! But how many people know the story behind this lovable comedic prodigy's ascent to fame? Bill Crawford takes you back to Sandler's childhood in a small New Hampshire Town, where his stand-up routines were always hits with his classmates but not necessarily the teachers! When Adam left his small town to take on the big city at New York University, it wasn't always easy, Sandler performed as a street musician crooning Springsteen songs to commuters, but he was destined to succeed. From his long friendship with then college classmate Tim Herlihy, who went on to co-write all Sandler's movies, to being discovered by Dennis Miller and eventually becoming America's funnyman, Bill Crawford looks behind the headlines and tabloid tales to shed new light on this decade's comedic darling.
Adaptable TV: Rewiring The Text (Palgrave Studies In Adaptation And Visual Culture Series)
by Yvonne GriggsThis book focuses on the significantly under-explored relationship between televisual culture and adaptation studies in what is now commonly regarded as the ‘Golden Age’ of contemporary TV drama. Adaptable TV: Rewiring the Text does not simply concentrate on traditional types of adaptation, such as reboots, remakes and sequels, but broadens the scope of enquiry to examine a diverse range of experimental adaptive types that are emerging within an ever-changing TV landscape. With a particular focus on the serial narrative form, and with case studies that include Penny Dreadful, Fargo, The Night Of and Orange is the New Black, this study is essential reading for anyone who is interested in the complex interplay between television studies and adaptation studies.
Adaptation and Beyond: Hybrid Transtextualities (Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Literature)
by Eva C. Karpinski Ewa Kębłowska-ŁawniczakThis interdisciplinary collection focuses on recent adaptations, both experimental and popular, that put hybridity, transtextuality, and transmediality at play. It reframes adaptation in terms of the transmedia concept of "world-building," which accurately captures the complexity and multidirectionality of contemporary scattered and ubiquitous practices of adaptation. The Editors argue that the process of moving stories or their elements across different media platforms and repurposing them for new uses results in the production of hybrid transtextualities. The book demonstrate how hybrid textualities augment narrative and literary forms as goals of their world-building, finding unexpected sites of cross-pollination, expansion, and appropriation in spoken-word and dance performance, (auto)biographical comics, advertising, Chinese Kun opera, and popular song lyrics. This yoking of hybridity and transmediality yields not only diversified and often commercialized aesthetic forms but also enables the emergence a unique cultural space in-between, a mezzaterra capable of addressing current political issues and mobilizing broader audiences
Adaptation and Illustration: New Cartographies (Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture)
by Shannon Wells-Lassagne Sophie AymesThis collection examines the relationship between illustration and adaptation from an intermedial and transcultural perspective. It aims to foster a dialogue between two fields that co-exist without necessarily acknowledging advances in each other’s domains, providing an argument for defining illustration as a form of adaptation, as well as an intermedial practice that redefines what we mean by adaptation. The volume embraces both a specific and an extended definition of illustration that accounts for its inclusion among the web of adaptive practices that developed with the rise of new media and intermediality. The contributors explore how crossovers may contribute to reappraise their objects, and rely on a transmedial and interdisciplinary corpus exploring the boundaries between illustration and other media such as texts, graphic novels, comics, theatre, film and mobile applications. Arguably adaptation, like intermediality, is an umbrella term that covers a variety of practices and products, and both of them have been shaped by intense debates over their boundaries and internal definitions. Illustration belongs to each of these areas, and this volume proposes insight into how illustration not only relates to adaptation and intermediality but how each field is redefined, enriched and also challenged by such interactions.
Adaptation and the New Art Film: Remaking the Classics in the Twilight of Cinema (Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture)
by William H. MooneySince the 1990s, the expropriation of canonical works of cinema has been a fundamental dimension of art-film exploration. Rainer Werner Fassbinder provides an early model of open adaptation of film classics, followed ever more boldly by the Coen Brothers, Chantal Akerman, Alex Carax, Todd Haynes, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, Baz Luhrmann, and Olivier Assayas. This book devotes chapters to each of these directors to examine how their films redeploy landmark precursors such as City Lights (1931), Citizen Kane (1941), Rome Open City (1945), All About Eve (1950), and Vertigo (1958) in order to probe our psychological, philosophical, and historical situations in a postmodern société du spectacle. In broadly diverse ways, each of these directors complicates received notions of the past and its representation, while probing the transformative media evolution and dislocation of the present, in film art and in society.
Adaptation Before Cinema: Literary and Visual Convergence from Antiquity through the Nineteenth Century (Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture)
by Lissette Lopez Szwydky Glenn JellenikAdaptation Before Cinema highlights a range of pre-cinematic media forms, including theater, novelization, painting and illustration, transmedia art, children’s media, and other literary and visual culture. The book expands the primary scholarly audience of adaptation studies from film and media scholars to literary scholars and cultural critics working across a range of historical periods, genres, forms, and media. In doing so, it underscores the creative diversity of cultural adaptation practiced before cinema came to dominate the critical conversation on adaptation. Collectively, the chapters construct critical bridges between literary history and contemporary media studies, foregrounding diverse practices of adaptation and providing a platform for innovative critical approaches to adaptation, appropriation, or transmedia storytelling popular from the Middle Ages through the invention of cinema. At the same time, they illustrate how these forms of adaptation not only influenced the cinematic adaptation industry of the twentieth century but also continue to inform adaptation practices in the twenty-first century transmedia landscape. Written by scholars with expertise in historical, literary, and cultural scholarship ranging from the medieval period through the nineteenth century, the chapters use discourses developed in contemporary adaptation studies to shed new lights on their respective historical fields, authors, and art forms.