A complete, key work, which will help children enter into your theatrical practice more easily. Teachers, educators and even facilitators will find in this collection 60 theater training exercises for young actors aged 8 and over. These fun and varied little activities will allow you to address different essential aspects of acting, such as reflection and work on the body, space, breathing and voice, listening and rhythm, relaxation. The children will learn, over the course of the sessions, to overcome their shyness, to control their gestures, their voice and to change their state. This book also offers advice on how to organize a session and training for a show or workshop depending on the time available: three days, a week, a school year. Its aim is to help teachers and participants find all the satisfaction promised by this wonderful source of motivation that is theater.

BOOKLET 74. OUR PERVERSION “Stage narration seduced so many playwrights in Mexico during the last ten years that the difficult thing, for some time now, is finding a text with dialogue. Even more so, with a well-written one. The copy that you have in your hands, reader, is one of those unusual cases,” says Alejandro Ricaño in the presentation of the work, whose characters are two employees of a corporation who “spend their workdays tallying numbers to evade taxes, while they plan that one sleeps with the wife of the other.”

THEATER REHEARSAL BOOKLET 47. BODIES IN PERFORMANCE. IMPROVISATION AND COMPOSITION PRACTICES What are the ways of constructing knowledge in the arts of the body? asks Narciso Telles in this essay, whose research, as an artist-teacher, hasbeen directed at the processes and poetics of acting and improvisation in the theater, particularly when it comes to “poetically and politically confronting the issues of our time.” Narciso Telles is an actor, director and researcher at the Study and Research Group on Creation and Training in Performing Arts at the Universidade Federal de Uberlândia (GEAC/UFU), Brazil.

The Uses of Drama : Acting As a Social and Educational Force: An Anthology Aristotle, Barrault, Brecht, Chambers, Laban, Mariwitz, Stanislavski… this book contains personal selection of writings on the theatre, ranging in time from Aristotle to Brook. Included are such aspects as drama as therapy, drama in education and the search for new drama.

Janet Coleman brilliantly recreates the time, the place, the personalities, and the neurotic magic whereby the Compass made theater history in America. The Compass began in a storefront theater near the University of Chicago campus in the summer of 1955 and lasted only a few years before its players—including David Shepherd, Paul Sills, Elaine May, Mike Nichols, Barbara Harris, and Shelley Berman—moved on. Out of this group was born a new form: improvisational theater and a radically new kind of comedian. “They did not plan to be funny or to change the course of comedy,” writes Coleman. “But that is what happened.”

Process: An Improviser’s Journey Process: An Improviser’s Journey is an invaluable resource for mastering improv. Author, teacher, and improviser Michael Gellman was given a mission by famed improv coach Del Close: “[T]o create improvised one-act plays of literary quality from scratch.” Already steeped in the world of improvisation, he took it upon himself to do this, in the form of a class for other improvisers in which they would build the skills necessary to execute such a seemingly tall order. Scruggs and Gellman’s book, modeled after Stanislavski’s timeless An Actor Prepares, follows a fictional young actor taking Gellman’s real-life class. Scruggs and Gellman introduce readers to Geoff, who has just moved to Chicago to pursue acting. He undergoes the standard trials of audition and rejection before he takes the advice of a fellow actor and turns to improv classes at Second City. At first, Geoff thinks improvisation is about laughs and loosening up, but he soon learns that it is a powerful tool as well as an end in itself. Through Geoff’s eyes, the book introduces readers to key tenets of improvisation: concentration, visualization, focus, object work, being in the moment, and the crucial “yes, and.” His experiences with the…

The Improvisation Game: Discovering the Secrets of Spontaneous Performance Packed with exercises and practical techniques, The Improvisation Game explores how improvisation can be used both to create performance and as an end in itself. It reveals the techniques, structures, and methods used by key practitioners in the field of improvised drama, music, and dance—among them are Keith Johnstone, Max Stafford-Clark, Phelim McDermott, Tim Etchells, John Wright, and Robert Lepage.

With academic erudition and supported by extensive experience as a repentista, the author proposes a study of the improvisation of the décimas following a method that allows us to appreciate both the beauty and the poetic complexity in this stanza frequently used in popular Ibero-American poetry. As Díaz-Pimienta points out, improvisation is “an art so complex and so unknown that it should be tempting to researchers.” This volume is an original and necessary proposal to address new studies of the improvised décima, as well as an invitation to the reader to discover poetic findings in ancient forms that continue to be sung throughout the pan-Hispanic territories, from the expert hand of a born researcher.

Training Using Drama: Successful Development Techniques from Theatre and Improvisation The use of training techniques originally developed for theatre and improvization within the workplace has increased enormously and the effectiveness of the approach is finding many enthusiastic followers. Sometimes actors themselves are brought into an organization to act as catalysts within a training/role-play setting, but increasingly, trainers use the techniques themselves. This guide to using development techniques from theatre and improvization shows how anyone can make use of them. Complete with 50 detailed activities, the book shows how to use storytelling, role-plays and coaching to improve creativity, leadership, teamwork and personal development.

Improvisation and Accompaniment for Social Justice How contemporary activists, artists, and academics oppose oppressive structures of power and unjust social relations to create a more decent and democratic future Insubordinate spaces are places of possibility, products of acts of accompaniment and improvisation that deepen capacities for democratic social change. Barbara Tomlinson and George Lipsitz’s Insubordinate Spaces explores the challenges facing people committed to social justice in an era when social institutions have increasingly been reconfigured to conform to the imperatives of a market society. In their book, the authors argue that education, the arts, and activism are key terrains of political and ideological conflict. They explore and analyze exemplary projects responding to current social justice issues and crises, from the Idle No More movement launched by Indigenous people in Canada to the performance art of Chingo Bling, Fandango convenings, the installation art of Ramiro Gomez, and the mass protests proclaiming “Black Lives Matter” in Ferguson, MO. Tomlinson and Lipsitz draw on key concepts from struggles to advance ideas about reciprocal recognition and co-creation as components in the construction of new egalitarian and democratic social relations, practices, and institutions. Insubordinate Spaces: Improvisation and Accompaniment for Social Justice is from the Insubordinate…