To Be an Actress


Book Description

In To Be an Actress, Nava Shean tells about her life on the stage: from children's theater in Prague to traveling theater in the Czech countryside, to performances of prisoners in Terezin concentration camp, to Israel's national theater, Munich State theater, and her one-woman shows. The common theme that runs through the memoir is Ms. Shean's passion for the theater and her dedication to acting despite excruciating circumstances. The memoir provides first-hand account of life in Terezin concentration camp and the incredible artistic activity under the shadow of the transports to the death camps. It also portrays the author's reconnection with her Jewish heritage against the background of her family's assimilation. Upon her arrival in Israel in 1948, Ms. Shean took part in the development of the Israeli theater, an alliance that continued into the 1980s and culminated in her one-woman show Requiem in Terezin.




To Be an Actress


Book Description

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. Between 1919 and 1961, pioneering Chinese American actress Anna May Wong established an enduring legacy that encompassed cinema, theater, radio, and American television. Born in Los Angeles, yet with her US citizenship scrutinized due to the Chinese Exclusion Act, Wong—a defiant misfit—innovated nuanced performances to subvert the racism and sexism that beset her life and career. In this critical study of Wong's cross-media and transnational career, Yiman Wang marshals extraordinary archival research and a multifocal approach to illuminate a lifelong labor of performance. Viewing Wong as a performer and worker, not just a star, To Be an Actress adopts a feminist decolonial perspective to speculatively meet her as an interlocutor while inviting a reconsideration of racialized, gendered, and migratory labor as the bedrock of the entertainment industries.




An Actress Prepares


Book Description

'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




Mirrors on the stage - I loved an Actress


Book Description

The famous, well-known Hungarian bestseller finally in English language! The Actress is one of Hungary's best-known artists, winner of several state awards. The girl is a college student, determined, young and beautiful - she's a ticket taker at the theatre in the evenings. Their fate unfolds within the walls of a downtown theatre, from an initial friendship to love, and then to an eight-year relationship full of extremes and excitement, set against a backdrop of theatre, a web of interests and the scrutiny of society - a true rarity in the divided art world. Can such an all-consuming love exist, and if so, how does it work? What kind of person is The Actress, what does she write in her secret diary, and how can the "actor's self" be defined? What is the closed, inner world of a real, contemporary, Hungarian theatre like? Who pulls the strings, how are the big decisions made? What is the showcase and what is the product itself? What is the role of the spectator in all this? What goes on behind the curtain? - And how can all this be reconciled with reality? I have been the protagonist in this story for eight years in order to write it credibly. A true story by the young girl - a real drama on stage and in life, with a cathartic finale.




He Would be an Actor


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Equity


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Audition Speeches for Young Actors 16+


Book Description

Finding good, interesting audition pieces is a demanding and difficult process. This revised edition contains over 40 speeches and includes a wide selection of pieces taken from plays written or produced recently, such as Nathan the Wise, All the Ordinary Angels, The Woman Before (first performed at the Royal Court in 2005), Oleanna, (David Mamet), Pygmalion and New Boy. There are speeches for a variety of accents and ages, taken from both classical and modern plays, to suit all audition requirements. There is also an introductory section containing advice from directors and casting directors on how to audition successfully, advice on attending drama schools and how to audition successfully.




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