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The Director as Collaborator
by Robert KnopfThe Director as Collaborator teaches essential directing skills while emphasizing how directors and theater productions benefit from collaboration. Good collaboration occurs when the director shares responsibility for the artistic creation with the entire production team, including actors, designers, stage managers, and technical staff. Leadership does not preclude collaboration; in theater, these concepts can and should be complementary. Students will develop their abilities by directing short scenes and plays and by participating in group exercises. New to the second edition: updated interviews, exercises, forms, and appendices new chapter on technology including digital research, previsualization and drafting programs, and web-sharing sites new chapter on devised and ensemble-based works new chapter on immersive theater, including material and exercises on environmental staging and audience–performer interaction
A Director Prepares: Seven Essays on Art and Theatre
by Anne BogartA Director Prepares is a thought-provoking examination of the challenges of making theatre. In it, Anne Bogart speaks candidly and with wisdom of the courage required to create 'art with great presence'. Each chapter tackles one of the seven major areas Bogart has identified as both potential partner and potential obstacle to art-making. They are Violence; Memory; Terror; Eroticism; Stereotype; Embarrassment; and Resistance. Each one can be used to generate extraordinary creative energy, if we know how to use it. A Director Prepares offers every practitioner an extraordinary insight into the creative process. It is a handbook, Bible and manifesto, all in one. No other book on the art of theatre comes even close to offering this much understanding, experience and inspiration.
The Director Within: Storytellers of Stage and Screen
by Aron Hirt-Manheimer Rose EichenbaumIn Rose Eichenbaum's latest book on the confluence of art making and human expression, she sits down with thirty-five modern day storytellers--the directors of theater, film, and television. Eichenbaum's subjects speak with revealing clarity about the entertainment industry, the role and life of the director, and how theatrical and cinematic storytelling impacts our culture and our lives. The Director Within includes interviews with Peter Bogdanovich (The Last Picture Show), Julie Taymor (The Lion King), Mel Brooks (Blazing Saddles), Tim Van Patten (The Sopranos, Boardwalk Empire), Hal Prince (The Phantom of the Opera), Barry Levinson (Rain Man), and many others. The interviews are skillfully crafted, sensitively executed, and brimming with honesty and insight. The accompanying portraits demonstrate Eichenbaum's mastery of photography and convey the truth, depth, and intimacy of their subjects. The Director Within is an inspirational, informative, and entertaining resource for anyone interested in creativity, art making, and artistic collaboration. The book includes a listing of works from each of the directors.
The Director's Craft: A Handbook for the Theatre
by Katie MitchellThe Director's Craft is a unique and completely indispensable step-by-step guide to directing for the stage. Written by one of the most adventurous and respected directors working today, this book will be an essential item in every student and practitioner's kitbag. It provides detailed assistance with each aspect of the varied challenges facing all theatre directors, and does so with startling clarity. It will inspire everyone, from the beginner just starting out to the experienced practitioner looking to reinvigorate their practice. Katie Mitchell shares and explains the key practical tools she uses to approach her work with both actors, production teams, and the text itself. She addresses topics such as: the ideas that underpin a play's text preparing improvizations Twelve Golden Rules for working with actors managing the transition from rehearsal room to theatre analyzing your work after a run has ended. Each chapter concludes with a summary of its critical points, making this an ideal reference work for both directors and actors at any stage of their development.
Director's Cut
by Margaret MincksThe director of the Cosgrove Elementary school play learned that directing a play is a great way to make enemies. Casting is not that easy, especially when there are Talented Terrors involved.
The Director’s Idea: The Path to Great Directing
by Ken Dancyger<i>The Director’s Idea</i> is a book that comes out of Ken Dancyger's teaching experience with production students at New York University and with professional producers and editors at the Maurits Binger Institute in Amsterdam. Provides an articulation of the storytelling tools of the director. This is a book about directing for directors and talented individuals who want to become directors.
Directors in Rehearsal: A Hidden World
by Susan ColeFirst Published in 1992. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Directors in Rehearsal: A Hidden World
by Susan Letzler ColeSusan Cole's firsthand, moment-by-moment account of the rehearsal sessions of acclaimed directors and actors offers a view of what is often hidden from the public eye: what actors and directors do when they prepare a dramatic text for performance. Directors in Rehearsal is based on hundreds of hours observing and recording the directorial work process of such prominent directors as Robert Wilson, Peter Sellars, and JoAnne Akalaitis working with well-known actors and actresses, including Kevin Kline, Amanda Plummer, and David Warrilow, on texts ranging from Shakespeare and Chekhov to the Wooster Group's recent experiments. The result of her extensive research is a rare behind-the-scenes look at ten theatre directors, five women and five men, rehearsing actual productions--Broadway and off-Broadway, political and experimental, text-centered and company-created. An epilogue compares the rehearsal process in professional and college theatre. Directors in Rehearsal will be of interest to directors and actors, drama teachers and students, critics and theatre historians, practitioners and audiences.
Directors On Directing
by Helen Krich Chinoy Toby ColeNow that directors such as Stephen Spielberg, George Lucas, and Francis Ford Coppola are celebrated along-side movie stars, it is hard to imagine that little more than a century ago the director was a nameless, faceless entity-an overseer of workflow in the shuffle of shadows offstage. In surveying the pioneers who transformed theater into the dynamic art form it is today, Directors on Directing presents a timeless collection of writings offering insight into what it means to direct and how to better appreciate theatrical performances.
The Director's Toolkit (The Focal Press Toolkit Series)
by Robin SchraftThe Director’s Toolkit is a comprehensive guide to the role of the theatrical director. Following the chronology of the directing process, the book discusses each stage in precise detail, considering the selection and analysis of the script, the audition process, casting, character development, rehearsals, how to self-evaluate a production and everything in between. Drawing on the author’s own experience in multiple production roles, the book highlights the relationship between the director, stage manager and designer, exploring how the director should be involved in all elements of the production process. Featuring a unique exploration of directing in special circumstances, the book includes chapters on directing nonrealistic plays, musicals, alternative theatre configurations, and directing in an educational environment. The book includes detailed illustrations, step-by-step checklists, and opportunities for further exploration, offering a well-rounded foundation for aspiring directors.
The Director's Vision: Play Direction From Analysis To Production
by Louis E. Catron Scott ShattuckThe pursuit of excellence in theatre is well served by the latest edition of this eminently readable text by two directors with wide-ranging experience. In an engaging, conversational manner, the authors deftly combine a focus on artistic vision with a practical, organized methodology that allows beginning and established directors to bring a creative script interpretation to life for an audience
The Director's Voice
by Arthur BartowForemost stage directors describe their working process: JoAnne Akalaitis, Arvin Brown, René Buch, Martha Clarke, Gordon Davidson, Robert Falls, Zelda Fichandler, Richard Foreman, Adrian Hall, John Hirsch, Mark Lamos, Marshall W. Mason, Des McAnuff, Gregory Mosher, Harold S. Prince, Lloyd Richards, Peter Sellars, Andrei Serban, Douglas Turner Ward, Robert Woodruff, and Garland Wright.
The Director's Voice, Vol. 2
by Jason Loewith"Directors today are equipped with a larger toolbox than their forerunners, standing on their shoulders as well as those of pioneers in non-Western theater, experimental visual art, community-based theater, and the ever-evolving commercial theater scene."-- Jason LoewithThis second volume presents a cross-section of the most diverse and dynamic stage directors defining today's American theater, in conversation with director/producer Jason Loewith. A follow-up to the immensely popular first volume, which has sold over eighteen thousand copies, much has changed in the twenty years since The Director's Voice debuted. "The nonprofit model has been turned on its head," Loewith notes. "Institution-building is out for these directors; creating a distinctive voice from a multiplicity of influences is in." Together, these directors sketch a compelling portrait of the art form in the new century.Interviews include: Anne Bogart, Mark Brokaw, Peter Brosius, Ping Chong, David Esbjornson, Oskar Eustis, Frank Galati, Michael Kahn, Moisés Kaufman, James Lapine, Elizabeth LeCompte, Emily Mann, Michael Mayer, Marion McClinton, Bill Rauch, Bartlett Sher, Julie Taymor, Theatre de la Jeune Lune (Barbra Berlovitz, Steven Epps, Vincent Gracieux, Robert Rosen, and Dominique Serrand), George C. Wolfe, and Mary Zimmerman.Jason Loewith is a producer, director, and writer. He has served since 2002 as artistic director of Chicago's Next Theatre Company, where he conceived, co-wrote, and produced Adding Machine: A Musical, which had an award-winning run off-Broadway.
Dirty Story and Other Plays
by John Patrick Shanley"In the appallingly entertaining Dirty Story . . . Mr. Shanley has expanded his focus from the intimate to the international to create one of the liveliest, boldest and--against the odds--funniest studies ever of a subject that even hard-core satirists tend to approach on tiptoe."--Ben Brantley, The New York TimesThree new works by Pulitzer Prize-winning author John Patrick Shanley, one of our country's most politically current and theatrically elastic playwrights. In Dirty Story a couple of sadomasochistic writers fight over rights to their New York City loft, in this sexy satire of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that is "astonishing," says Tony Kushner, "The analysis of the Middle East in this play is dead on, exactly perfectly pitched." In his dark comedy Where's My Money? Shanley takes on marriage, infidelity and divorce lawyers in a play that is "so harsh, it's funny--terrifying, but funny," (The New York Times). And in his Sailor's Song, love becomes an act of courage, in this seaside romance about the certainty of death, the brevity of youth, and the importance of now.John Patrick Shanley's Doubt won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the Tony Award for Best Play, and was chosen as best play of the year by over 10 newspapers and magazines. His other plays include Danny and the Deep Blue Sea, Four Dogs and a Bone, Psychopathia Sexualis and Savage Limbo. He has written extensively for TV and film, including Moonstruck, for which he won an Academy Award for best screenplay.
Dirty Work at the Crossroads
by Bill JohnsonGay '90s Melodrama / 3m, 7f / This play tells in laughable style the tear jerking story of Nellie Lovelace, an innocent country girl. Munro, the viper, has a wife in Ida Rhinegold, belle of the New Haven Music Halls, but that does not prevent him from pursuing Nellie and tearing her from the arms of her dying mother (whom he has poisoned). Nor does it prevent him from driving Adam Oakhart, the blacksmith's son, to drink, from blackmailing rich Mrs. Asterbilt, or from bewitching her daughter, Leonie. There are a number of places in the plot where old time songs are introduced. The text contains full directions for production. Suggestions for the music, all business tableaux, curtain calls, etc., are there. May be performed by all male or female casts which add to its mirth provoking possibilities.
Disability and Contemporary Performance: Bodies on the Edge
by Petra KuppersDisability and Contemporary Performance presents a remarkable challenge to existing assumptions about disability and artistic practice. In particular, it explores where cultural knowledge about disability leaves off, and the lived experience of difference begins. Petra Kuppers, herself an award-winning artist and theorist, investigates the ways in which disabled performers challenge, change and work with current stereotypes through their work. She explores freak show fantasies and 'medical theatre' as well as live art, webwork, theatre, dance, photography and installations, to cast an entirely new light on contemporary identity politics and aesthetics. This is an outstanding exploration of some of the most pressing issues in performance, cultural and disability studies today, written by a leading practitioner and critic.
Disability and Theatre: A Practical Manual for Inclusion in the Arts
by Stephanie Barton FarcasDisability and Theatre: A Practical Manual for Inclusion in the Arts is a step-by step manual on how to create inclusive theatre, including how and where to find actors, how to publicize productions, run rehearsals, act intricate scenes like fights and battles, work with unions, contracts, and agents, and deal with technical issues. This practical information was born from the author’s 16 years of running the first inclusive theatre company in New York City, and is applicable to any performance level: children’s theatre, community theatre, regional theatre, touring companies, Broadway, and academic theatre. This book features anecdotal case studies that emphasize problem solving, real-world application, and realistic action plans. A comprehensive Companion Website provides additional guidelines and hands-on worksheets.
Disability, Health, and Happiness in the Shakespearean Body (Routledge Studies in Shakespeare)
by Sujata IyengarThis book considers early modern and postmodern ideals of health, vigor, ability, beauty, well-being, and happiness, uncovering and historicizing the complex negotiations among physical embodiment, emotional response, and communally-sanctioned behavior in Shakespeare's literary and material world. The volume visits a series of questions about the history of the body and how early modern cultures understand physical ability or vigor, emotional competence or satisfaction, and joy or self-fulfillment. Individual essays investigate the purported disabilities of the "crook-back" King Richard III or the "corpulent" Falstaff, the conflicts between different health-care belief-systems in The Taming of the Shrew and Hamlet, the power of figurative language to delineate or even instigate puberty in the Sonnets or Romeo and Juliet, and the ways in which the powerful or moneyed mediate the access of the poor and injured to cure or even to care. Integrating insights from Disability Studies, Health Studies, and Happiness Studies, this book develops both a detailed literary-historical analysis and a provocative cultural argument about the emphasis we place on popular notions of fitness and contentment today.
Disability, Public Space Performance and Spectatorship
by Bree HadleyIn Disability, Public Space Performance and Spectatorship: Unconscious Performers, Bree Hadley examines the performance practices of disabled artists in the US, UK, Europe and Australasia who re-engage, re-enact and re-envisage the stereotyping they are subject to in the very public spaces and places where this stereotyping typically plays out.
Disability Works: Performance After Rehabilitation (Performance and American Cultures #8)
by Patrick McKelveyA cultural history of disability, performance, and work in the modern United StatesIn 1967, the US government funded the National Theatre of the Deaf, a groundbreaking rehabilitation initiative employing deaf actors. This project aligned with the postwar belief that transforming bodies, minds, aesthetics, and institutions could liberate disabled Americans from economic reliance on the state, and demonstrated the growing optimism that performance could provide job opportunities for people with disabilities.Disability Works offers an original cultural history of disability and performance in modern America, exploring rehabilitation’s competing legacies. The book highlights an unexpected alliance of rehabilitation professionals, deaf teachers, policy makers, disability activists, queer artists, and religious leaders who championed performance’s rehabilitative potential. At the same time, some disabled artists imagined a different political itinerary for theatrical practice. Rather than acquiescing to the terms of productive citizenship, these artists recuperated rehabilitation as a creative resource for imagining and building a world beyond work. Using previously unexplored archives, Disability Works portrays the history of disabled Americans’ performance labor as both a national aspiration and a national problem. The book reveals how disabled artists and activists ingeniously used rehabilitative resources to fuel their performance practices, breaking free from the grasp of rehabilitation and fostering more just institutions.From state-funded “sign-mime” to Black modern dance, community theatre to Stanislavskian actor training, speculative activism to epistolary performance, Disability Works recovers an expansive repertoire of aesthetic and infrastructural investigations into the terms of how disability works in modern American culture.
The Disappearance of the Little Pigs
by Billy St. JohnComedy / 8m, 8f / Nursery Land characters, both human and animal, coexist in this goofy 1940s spoof of classic film noir detective stories for grown-up kids. When her triplets disappear, Mrs. Pig hires detective Jack B. Nimble. Jack and his klutzy secretary Miss Muffet suspect B. B. Wolf. Characters from Humpty Dumpty and Henny Penny to Jack and Mrs. Sprat become involved in the investigation before Jack finds the missing boys and earns a dubious award: a kiss from a pig.
Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s “Dirty War”
by Diana TaylorIn Disappearing Acts, Diana Taylor looks at how national identity is shaped, gendered, and contested through spectacle and spectatorship. The specific identity in question is that of Argentina, and Taylor's focus is directed toward the years 1976 to 1983 in which the Argentine armed forces were pitted against the Argentine people in that nation's "Dirty War." Combining feminism, cultural studies, and performance theory, Taylor analyzes the political spectacles that comprised the war--concentration camps, torture, "disappearances"--as well as the rise of theatrical productions, demonstrations, and other performative practices that attempted to resist and subvert the Argentine military.Taylor uses performance theory to explore how public spectacle both builds and dismantles a sense of national and gender identity. Here, nation is understood as a product of communal "imaginings" that are rehearsed, written, and staged--and spectacle is the desiring machine at work in those imaginings. Taylor argues that the founding scenario of Argentineness stages the struggle for national identity as a battle between men--fought on, over, and through the feminine body of the Motherland. She shows how the military's representations of itself as the model of national authenticity established the parameters of the conflict in the 70s and 80s, feminized the enemy, and positioned the public--limiting its ability to respond. Those who challenged the dictatorship, from the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo to progressive theater practitioners, found themselves in what Taylor describes as "bad scripts." Describing the images, myths, performances, and explanatory narratives that have informed Argentina's national drama, Disappearing Acts offers a telling analysis of the aesthetics of violence and the disappearance of civil society during Argentina's spectacle of terror.
Discipline and Desire: Surveillance Technologies in Performance
by Elise MorrisonDiscipline and Desire examines how surveillance technologies, when placed within the frames of theater and performance, can be used to critique and reimagine the politics of surveillance in everyday life. The book explores how rapidly proliferating surveillance technologies, including drones, CCTV cameras, GPS tracking systems, medical surveillance equipment, and facial recognition software, can be repurposed through performance to become technologies of ethical witnessing, critique, and action. While the subject of surveillance continues to provoke fascination and debate in mainstream media and academia, opportunities to critically reflect upon and, more importantly, to imagine alternative, creative responses to living in a rapidly expanding surveillance society have been harder to find. Author Elise Morrison argues that such opportunities are being created through the growing genre of "surveillance art and performance," defined as works that centrally employ technologies and techniques of surveillance to create theater, installation, and performance art. Introducing readers to a broad range of surveillance art works, including the work of artists and activists such as Surveillance Camera Players, Jill Magid, Steve Mann, Hasan Elahi, Wafaa Bilal, Blast Theory, Electronic Disturbance Theater, George Brant, Janet Cardiff, Mona Hatoum, and Zach Blas, Discipline and Desire provides a practical and analytical framework that can aid the diverse pursuits of new media-arts practitioners, performance scholars, activists, and hobbyists interested in critical and creative uses of surveillance technologies.
Discovering Shakespeare's Meaning: An Introduction to the Study of Shakespeare's Dramatic Structures
by Leah ScraggIn this useful guide, Leah Scragg indicates some of the ways in which meaning is generated in Shakespearian drama and the kinds of approaches that might lead to a fuller understanding of the plays. Each chapter focuses on one aspect of the dramatic composition, such as verse and prose, imagery and spectacle, and the use of soliloquy, and explores how this contributes to the overall meaning. Written in a clear and helpful style, Discovering Shakespearian Meaning enables students to discover the meaning for themselves.
Discovering Stage Lighting
by Francis ReidThis guide to the fundamentals of stage lighting includes a series of projects to allow experimentation, discussion and analysis. The necessary equipment is described in relation to its purpose, along with checklists and hints for practical use. The practical handling of light, with observation of the relationship of cause to effect, is central to the study of stage lighting. Rehearsal pressures usually restrict the time available for experimenting with lighting for a performance, but laboratory-style projects can be used to enable specific lighting problems to be solved.The core of this book is a series of 'discovery' projects using minimal resources, to explore the use of light in the theatre, with particular emphasis on the interaction of conflicting visual aims. The projects cover all the major scenarios likely to be encountered by lighting students and have been tried and tested by the author, who has taught lighting students all over the world for over 30 years. The book has been updated to include more on safety and the latest technology including:- fixed instruments using the new lower wattage high efficiency lamps in combination with dichronic reflectors- an increase in the availability, reliability, range and usage of 'moving light' technology based on remotely controlled instruments.New lighting projects have also been added.If you are studying the art and craft of stage lighting this book is an excellent working manual that will provide you with the technical knowledge and skill to cope with a range of lighting situations.