Acting techniques

Crossing the Stage brings together for the first time essays which explore cross-dressing in theatre, cabaret, opera and dance.

Shortlisted for the STR Theatre Book Prize 2025The stage of the 1700s established a star culture, with the emergence of such acting celebrities as David Garrick, Susannah Cibber, and Sarah Siddons.

Merely Players?

Futures of Performance inspires both current and future artists/academics to reflect on their roles and responsibilities in igniting future-forward thinking and practices for the performing arts in higher education.

A 2021 Choice Outstanding Academic TitleThe culmination of an innovative practice research project, Michael Chekhov in the Twenty-First Century: New Pathways draws on historical writings and archival materials to investigate how Chekhov's technique can be used across the disciplines of contemporary performance and applied practice.

In Rehearsal is a clear and accessible how-to approach to the rehearsal process.

This three-volume set is a valuable resource for researching the history of American television.

Acting: The First Six Lessons was first published in 1933 and remains a key text for anyone studying acting today.

'As an actress I sit, speak, run, sweat and, simultaneously, I represent someone who sits, speaks, runs and sweats.

Whether you are a young actor seeking to land your first screen role or a workshop leader looking for relevant exercises that won't involve vast technical support, this book belongs on your shelf.

Inclusivity and Equality in Performance Training focuses on neuro and physical difference and dis/ability in the teaching of performance and associated studies.

Need to learn an accent for an audition?

This practical guide presents a wide array of games and exercises designed to develop the players observation, imagination, presentation and self-confidence.

This book gives new insight into acting and theatre-making through phenomenology (the study of how the world shows itself to conscious experience).

The true-life and deeply satiric odyssey of a punk-rock dropout turned porn empire overlord.

This book is a case study into the affective history of Holocaust drama offering a new perspective on the impact of The Diary of Anne Frank, the pivotal 1950s play that was a turning point in Holocaust consciousness.

First published in 1974, Investigating Drama offers a holistic understanding of drama.

Through a close re-examination of Eugene O'Neill's oeuvre, from minor plays to his Pulitzer-winning works, this study proposes that O'Neill's vision of tragedy privileges a particular emotional response over a more "e;rational"e; one among his audience members.

This collection of Applied Improvisation stories and strategies draws back the curtain on an exciting, innovative, growing field of practice and research that is changing the way people lead, create, and collaborate.

In How to Audition On Camera, Casting Director Sharon Bialy answers the twenty-five questions actors ask most frequently about how to nail an audition.

First Published in 2000.

"e;The superheroines of the theater are backand better and bolder than ever.

She was called ';the most beautiful girl in the world,' and during Hollywood's Golden Age of the 1930s and 1940s, she set standards of beauty and sophistication copied throughout the world during the three decades of her film career.

Fifty Key Figures in Latinx and Latin American Theatre is a critical introduction to the most influential and innovative theatre practitioners in the Americas, all of whom have been pioneers in changing the field.

Western civilization and world history are often seen as different, or even mutually exclusive, routes into historical studies.

Investigating more than 70 key concepts relating to the performing arts in more than six non-European languages, this volume provides a groundbreaking research tool and one-of-a-kind reference source for theatre, performance and dance studies worldwide.

We train because we are human and we become human because we train.

On top of a mountain in the middle of a blizzard, you see a figure: eight foot tall, with white matted hair covering his body.

Learn to celebrate the smallest victories and unlock some of life's greatest joys!

Time and Performer Training addresses the importance and centrality of time and temporality to the practices, processes and conceptual thinking of performer training.

Building Embodiment: Integrating Acting, Voice, and Movement to Illuminate Poetic Text offers a collection of strategic and practical approaches to understanding, analyzing, and embodying a range of heightened text styles, including Greek tragedy, Shakespeare, and Restoration/comedy of manners.

What is artistic resonance and how can it be linked to one's life and one's art?

Based on interviews with over forty award-winning artists, How to Rehearse a Play offers multiple solutions to the challenges that directors face from first rehearsal to opening night.

Stanislavsky and Race is the first book to explore the role that Konstantin Stanislavsky's "e;system"e; and its legacies can play in building, troubling and illuminating today's anti-racist theatre practices.

Exercises for Embodied Actors: Tools for Physical Actioning builds on the vocabulary of simple action verbs to generate an entire set of practical tools from first read to performance that harnesses modern knowledge about the integration of the mind and the rest of the body.

The gap between theory and practice in rehearsal is wide.

TV on Strike examines the upheaval in the entertainment industry by telling the inside story of the hundred-day writers' strike that crippled Hollywood in late 2007 and early 2008.

In Collaborative Playwriting, five collectively written plays apply polyvocal methods in which clash and frisson replace synthesis, a dialogic approach to collective writing that has never before been articulated or documented.

This book is an insiders' account of the groundbreaking Moscow production of Chekhov's The Seagull directed by Anatoly Efros in 1966, which heralded a paradigm shift in the interpretation and staging of Chekhov's plays.

'If you're working with Nancy Bishop you know you're in good, accomplished hands, whether you're a director or an actor.

Cold War Theatre, first published in 1992, provides an account of the theatrical history within the context of East/West politics.

Cutting Plays for Performance offers a practical guide for cutting a wide variety of classical and modern plays.

During the 1820s and 30s nautical melodramas "e;reigned supreme"e; on London stages, entertaining the mariners and maritime workers who comprised a large part of the audience for small theatres with the same sentimental moments and comic interludes of domestic melodrama mixed with patriotic images that communicated and reinforced imperial themes.

Creating Improvised Theatre: Tools, Techniques, and Theories for Short Form and Narrative Improvisation is a complete guide to improvised theatre for performers and instructors.

From well-known auteur of the American theatre scene, Anne Bogart, And Then, You Act is a fascinating and accessible book about directing theatre, acting and the collaborative creative process.

The Routledge Companion to Performance Practitioners collects the outstanding biographical and production overviews of key theatre practitioners first featured in the popular Routledge Performance Practitioners series of guidebooks.

'Caution: this book could seriously jeopardise your amateur status' - Robert David MacDonald Do you know your mirror scrims from your mirror balls?

Foundations for Performance Training: Skills for the Actor-Dancer explores the physical, emotional, theoretical, and practical components of performance training in order to equip readers with the tools needed to successfully advance in their development as artists and entertainers.