Creating Solo Performance


Book Description

Creating Solo Performance is an innovative toolbox of exercises and challenges focused on providing you – the performer – with engaging and inspiring ways to explore and develop your idea both on the page and in the performance space. The creation of a solo show may be the most rewarding, liberating and stressful challenge you will take on in your career. This book acts as your silent collaborator as you develop your performance, by helpfully arranging exercises under the following headings: Beginnings Creating character Generating material Using your performance space Technology Endings Collaboration Exercises can be explored in sequence, at random or according to your specific needs and interests as a performer. By enabling you to create a bespoke formula that best applies to your specific subject, area of interest, style and discipline, this book will become an indispensable resource as you produce your solo show.




Making Solo Performance


Book Description

Focusing specifically on solo making and performing, this unique and exciting text allows the experts to speak for themselves. In interviews with Misri Dey, six recognised solo performers working across a range of performance genres – including theatre, dance, live and performance art, site-specific performance, music video and film – provide insightful and practical strategies for creative making and performing processes. Interviewees include Bryony Kimmings, Tim Etchells, Bobby Baker, Mike Pearson, Wendy Houstoun and Nigel Charnock. Engaging and accessible, this is an invaluable resource for undergraduate and postgraduate students of theatre, performance and acting, scholars, lecturers and performance practitioners. It will also appeal to undergraduate and postgraduate students of women's studies, creative writing and the visual arts.




Extreme Exposure


Book Description

Extreme Exposure presents extensive excerpts from the works of more than 50 solo writer/performers, along with prefatory notes to each extract.




Devising Theatre and Performance


Book Description

A hands-on guide for artists, students, and teachers of devised theatre, at any stage of their practice. This book is packed with thoughtful exercises distilled from twenty-five years of interdisciplinary artist workshops and teaching devising and performance making at universities in the United States and the United Kingdom. Created and curated by Leslie Hill and Helen Paris, artists who work internationally at the interface of academia and professional practice, this collection provides exercises for devising, composing, and editing original works. The exercises are clear and accessible, enhanced with vivid examples from contemporary performance practice and relevant political contexts. Moreover, the authors offer tools for giving and receiving feedback, fostering critical reflection, and framing artistic work within academic research contexts. Hill and Paris's compelling approach does more than merely provide performance recipes; it highlights the vital cultural relevance and potential personal impact of the creative explorations that the authors invite us to undertake.




Solo Transformation on Stage


Book Description

SOLO PERFORMANCE ON STAGE by Ronald Rand, Goodwill Cultural Ambassador and world-acclaimed solo performer in 25 countries takes the reader on an intimate journey into the organic process of creating your own solo performance on stage through the 'Art of Transformation' using Stanislavsky's "Method of Physical Actions." The theater is a transcendent communication of the human spirit, flowing from the passion of all those creating in collaboration with each other. Transformation is the embodiment of our joy of being alive. Christopher Plummer calls SOLO TRANSFORMATION ON STAGE "An unforgettable journey of passion, insight and discovery!" Stephen Lang writes in his Foreword "An astonishing outpouring of energy and experience. Ronald Rand brings a way to seek out a greater realization of what life means to you, putting into words what every actor feels in their heart; that what we do is as crucial to life as bread, fire, or salt. A noble and useful book." Step inside Ronald Rand's two-hour transformation into Harold Clurman - how a solo performance is born, takes off and literally changes the face of the world! Experience his insightful experiences with Stella Adler, Harold Clurman, and Jerzy Grotowski, and life-changing 'moments of depth' from some of the world's memorable performers including Cicely Tyson, Paul Robeson, Ira Aldridge, James Earl Jones, Sidney Poitier, Laurette Taylor, and Marlon Brando. SOLO TRANSFORMATION ON STAGE offers over twenty inspiring interviews by performers who have created their own solo plays including Adrienne Barbeau, Billy Crudup, Olympia Dukakis, Eve Ensler, Hershey Felder, Marga Gomez, Julie Harris, Stephen Lang, Tony Lo Bianco, Laurence Luckinbill, Angelica Page, Christopher Plummer, Elizabeth van Dyke, and Ben Vereen. SOLO TRANSFORMATION ON STAGE will speak passionately to experienced actors and students alike, and become an invaluable resource for postgraduate students of theatre and performance, acting lecturers and teachers, and all lovers of theater.




Performing Collaboration in Solo Performance


Book Description

The book provides an investigation grounded in creative writing and practice-as-research methodology and explores the issues of authorship and collaborative labour in contemporary performance. This investigation is set in the context of a world more and more characterized by fragmentation, displacement and virtual communication and relationships. It addresses and playfully engages with the following questions: what is a collaborative body? Can a sole performer carry out a collaborative practice ? Can we stand in for others? What forms of “coming-together” might take place when distance remains between those who perform and those who spectate? The book contains the full-length version of the score from A Duet Without You, an original performance piece created between 2013 and 2015 by Chloé Déchery in collaboration with a range of artistic collaborators working inter- and cross-disciplinary, including Karen Christopher, Pedro Iñes, Simone Kenyon, Marty Langthorne, Tom Parkinson, Michael Pinchbeck and Deborah Pearson. Alongside the playtext, the book entails a collection of essays written by independent writers, artists and academics and dedicated to the politics of collaboration, ranging from performative responses and co-authored articles to in-depth theoretical essays. Primary readership will be those teaching, researching or studying in theatre and performance studies, visual arts, fine arts, art history, creative writing, poetry, philosophy or French literature. Will also be of interest to art school students and those with an interest in theatre.




The Playwright's Workbook


Book Description

An invaluable insight into how to write a play, by a practitioner. The book encourages playwrights into a physically active role when writing.




Contemporary Storytelling Performance


Book Description

This book focuses on a rising generation of female storytellers, analysing their innovation in interdisciplinary collaboration, and their creation of new multimedia platforms for story-led performance. It draws on an unprecedented series of in-depth interviews with artists including Jo Blake, Xanthe Gresham-Knight, Mara Menzies, Clare Murphy, Debs Newbold, Rachel Rose Reid, Sarah Liisa Wilkinson, and Vanessa Woolf, while Sally Pomme Clayton’s reflections on her extraordinary four-decade career provide long-term context for these cutting-edge conversations. Blending ethnographic research and performance analysis, this book documents the working lives of professional storytelling artists. It also sheds light on the practices, values, aspirations, and achievements of a generation actively redefining storytelling as a contemporary performance practice, taking on topics from ecology and maternity to griefwork and neuroscience, while working collaboratively with diverse creative partners to generate new, inclusive presences for a traditionally-inspired artform. This book will be of great interest to students, scholars, and practitioners in drama, theatre, performance, creative writing, education, and media.




Drama and Education


Book Description

Drama and Education provides a practical, comprehensive guide to drama as a tool for teaching and learning. It is among the first practical drama and performance textbooks that address brain-based, neuroscientific research, making the argument that creativity is necessary in our lives, that embodied learning is natural and essential, and that contextual learning helps us find our place in society in relationship to other peoples and cultures. As well as a historical and theoretical overview of the field, it provides rationale and techniques for several specific methodologies: linear drama, process-oriented drama, drama for social justice, and performance art. Each approach is supplemented with sample lesson plans, activities, ideas for differentiation, and extensive bibliographies. The topics are discussed from five key angles: • Historical and theoretical foundations • Curricular applications • Practical toolkits for a range of classrooms and learning environments • Different strategies for lesson plans • Extension options for longer workshops. Alongside these core methods, the integration of other innovative forms—from performance art to Theatre of the Oppressed—into drama-based learning is explored, as well as the pragmatic concerns such as assessment, planning, and advocacy for arts learning and arts education partnerships. Drama and Education is the comprehensive textbook for teachers and students on Applied Theatre and Theatre and Education courses.




Queer Dance


Book Description

If we imagine multiple ways of being together, how might that shift choreographic practices and help us imagine ways groups assemble in more varied ways than just pairing another man with another woman? How might dancing queerly ask us to imagine futures through something other than heterosexuality and reproduction? How does challenging gender binaries always mean thinking about race, thinking about the postcolonial, about ableism? What are the arbitrary rules structuring dance in all its arenas, whether concert and social or commercial and competition, and how do we see those invisible structures and work to disrupt them? Queer Dance brings together artists and scholars in a multi-platformed project-book, accompanying website, and live performance series to ask, "How does dancing queerly progressively challenge us?" The artists and scholars whose writing appears in the book and whose performances and filmed interviews appear online stage a range of genders and sexualities that challenge and destabilize social norms. Engaging with dance making, dance scholarship, queer studies, and other fields, Queer Dance asks how identities, communities, and artmaking and scholarly practices might consider what queer work the body does and can do. There is great power in claiming queerness in the press of bodies touching or in the exceeding of the body best measured in sweat and exhaustion. How does queerness exist in the realm of affect and touch, and what then might we explore about queerness through these pleasurable and complex bodily ways of knowing?