How does an actor embody a character? How do they use their body as an instrument of expression?Rethinking the Actor's Body offers an accessible introduction to the fields of neurophysiology and embodied knowledge through a detailed examination of what an actor does with their body.Built on almost a decade of conversations and public seminars by the author Dick McCaw in partnership with John Rothwell (Professor of Neurophysiology at University College London, UK), ...

A practical guide to the principles of teaching and learning movement, this book instructs the actor on how to train the body to become a medium of expression. Starting with a break-down of the principles of actor training through exercises and theatre games, Dick McCaw teaches the actor about their own body and its possibilities including: the different ways it can move, the space it occupies and finally its rhythm, timing and pacing.With 64 exercises supported by diagrams and onli...

What did Bakhtin think about the theatre? That it was outdated? That is ‘stopped being a serious genre’ after Shakespeare? Could a thinker to whose work ideas of theatricality, visuality, and embodied activity were so central really have nothing to say about theatrical practice?Bakhtin and Theatre is the first book to explore the relation between Bakhtin’s ideas and the theatre practice of his time. In that time, Stanislavsky co-founded the Moscow Art Theatre in 1...

Art and Answerability, the work that would become Mikhail Bakhtin’s literary manifesto, was first published in Den Iskusstva (The Day of the Art) on September 13, 1919. Mikhail Bakhtin’s Heritage in Literature, Arts, and Psychology: Art and Answerability celebrates one hundred years of Bakhtin’s heritage.This unique book examines the heritage of Mikhail Bakhtinin a variety of disciplines.To articulate the enduring relevance and heritage of the varied works of Bakhtin, sixteen schol...

The Art of Movement: Rudolf Laban’s Unpublished Writings offers new perspectives on the thinking and practice of Rudolf Laban – one of the pioneers of modern European dance and movement analysis.A wealth of Laban’s previously untranslated writings broadens our understanding of his work through new perspectives on his thinking and practice. Alongside these key primary sources, interviews with Laban’s family and colleagues and editorial commentaries shed new light on the sig...

Published in France in 1987, this is the book in which Lecoq first set out his philosophy of human movement, and the way it takes expressive form in a wide range of different performance traditions. He traces the history of pantomime, sets out his definition of the components of the art of mime, and discusses the explosion of physical theatre in the second half of the twentieth century. Interviews with major theatre practitioners Ariane Mnouchkine and Jean-Louis Barrault by Jean Perret, to...

Rudolf Laban (1879 – 1958) was a pioneer in dance and movement, who found an extraordinary range of application for his ideas; from industry to drama, education and therapy. Laban believed that you can understand about human beings by observing how they move, and devised two complimentary methods of notating the shape and quality of movements.The Laban Sourcebook offers a comprehensive account of Laban’s writings. It includes extracts from his five books in English and from his fou...