Improv Nonsense: All The Posts This is a book about long-form improv, the art of making up comedy scenes as you go (meaning no script) on a stage. Improv Nonsense was a critically acclaimed blog about long-form improv, written by Will Hines, a teacher and performer from the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre. The blog ranged from Will’s off-the-cuff musings like “New students sure do like to use the name ‘Janice’” to long, detailed essays like “Why are there fewer women then men on improv teams?.” It was sharp, opinionated, made no effort to include the newcomer, interesting, friendly, helpful and often completely wrong. Six years of posts, almost 600 pages of stuff. This book can be obtained in digital format for less than €10

This practical guide presents a wide array of games and exercises designed to develop the players observation, imagination, presentation and self-confidence. This long-awaited new edition has been fully revised and extended, now including example workshops and an index of games to help instructors get the most out of the exercises in rehearsals, workshops and classes. Christine Poulter shares what she has learned from her students over the years, and opens up the language of the book to the worlds of youth work, healthcare, the prison service, ‘customer care’, management training, and secondary school education. This is an essential resource for directors, drama teachers, and students of Drama, Theatre and Performance at all levels. It will also be useful to anyone looking to improve their presentation skills.

John Abbott, author of The Improvisation Book, explains how theatre directors at every level can use improvisation in the rehearsal room. Foreword by Mark Rylance. ‘Improvisation can be used as part of the creative process of rehearsing a play. It can be a fabulous tool for exploration and discovery. It can strengthen the actor’s commitment to their character. And it can create an environment of confidence and spontaneity.’ Packed with useful exercises and improvisation scenarios, and examples from a wide variety of plays, Improvisation in Rehearsal reveals how improvisation enriches and enlivens the creation of characters, back-stories, relationships, shared histories and emotional lives. The book also demonstrates how improvisation can be used as a powerful tool in the foundation of a strong company, and when searching for the hidden depths and dynamics in a scene. Building on his own experience as an actor, director and teacher, Abbott writes with clarity and an infectious enthusiasm which will motivate directors to try the techniques for themselves. As Mark Rylance says in his Foreword, this book ‘will inspire and delight its readers’.

The content of this book is the product of a research process: the object of study is the actor and his creative process for the construction of the character. It is determined that it is during the rehearsal period when the actor lives his creative process, and it is the improvisation the tool that is used to achieve the objective, in particular of the actor when creating his character, and in general of all the other actors and specialists in stage languages, together with the director, to achieve stage dramaturgy as a whole. In these pages the reader will find a methodological proposal that will favor the creation of the character through improvisation, in which he will search, find and define the actions of his character, allowing him the internal and external characterization of the role. We know that this book will be useful to all those who dedicate themselves to the performing arts, professionally or as amateurs, to students and acting teachers; but also, we invite readers in general to learn about the creative mechanisms that an actor faces to build his character.

The objective is to give everyone practical tools to set up theatrical awareness. Working approach: give a central place to the body; learn to manage space: others’ space, one’s own; discover the notion of contact and everything that is experienced even before approaching the text within the group. Breathing, relaxation, letting go, improvisation and imagination are the strong points of these 50 exercises. To guide their choice, the user will find pictograms next to each exercise, indicating their specificity and the number of participants. Finally, details are provided on the progress of a session and the schedule for a typical week.

This book, which is the continuation of 60 theatrical training exercises, proposes a preparatory work , as a workshop, for the representation of a play. With the help of a series of commented exercises, which leave a large part to improvisation, training is proposed for collective listening, concentration, relaxation and dynamization of the body, as well as work on breathing, muscles and the joints.

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.