In this series of essays, Thomas Leabhart presents a thorough overview and analysis of Etienne Decroux’s artistic genealogy. After four years’ apprenticeship with Decroux, Thomas Leabhart began to research and discover how forebears and contemporaries might have influenced Decroux’s project. Decades of digging revealed striking correspondences that often led to adjacent fields—art history, philosophy, and anthropology—forays wherein Leabhart’s appreciation of Decroux and his "kinsfolk," who themselves transgressed traditional frontiers, increased. The following essays, composed over a 30-year period, find a common source in a darkened Prague cinema where people gasped at a wooden doll’s sudden reversal of fortune. These essays: investigate the source of that astonishment; continue Leabhart's examination of Decroux’s "family tree"; consider how Copeau's and Decroux's keen observation of animal movement influenced their actor training; record the challenging and paradoxical improvisations chez Decroux; and recall Decroux’s debt to sculpture, poster art, sport and masks. These essays will be of great interest to students, scholars and practitioners in theatre and performance studies.

What goes on in the body and mind of an endurance athlete at the limits of performance? How do they relate to the world around and prepare for the task ahead? Offering a refreshing perspective on training in the cross-lighting of aesthetic and athletic processes, this book focuses on the learning, mastery and creative adaptation of technique in performance. From traditional and physical actors to runners, boxers and other sports practitioners, it is about performers: their bodies, trainings and experiences. It interrogates what it means to prepare and train as a performer in the early 21st century. Writing from extensive experience in physical theatre and long-distance running, the author combines insights from both disciplines along with theatre history, sports science and perspectives like embodied cognition and affective science. From the kind of thoughts that go through the mind of an actor or a runner, to the economy and aesthetic of their movement and to how they feel about it, this book sheds light on the performing body and its capacities for action. Topics covered include attentional focus and distraction, affordances and equipment, 'choking' and stage fright, physiological regulation and effort perception, pacing and play, optimal flow and creative improvisation, and intentionality and automaticity in expert performance. The volume presents an informative and thought-provoking account accessible to readers interested in theatre, dance, performance, running, athletics, and sport.

This book examines male dan, a male actor who performs female roles in Chinese theatre. Through the rise, fall and tenuous survival of male dan in Chinese history, Guo Chao reflects the transformations in the social zeitgeist in China, especially the politics of gender and sexuality. The breadth of this study reflects a diversified set of sources, ranging from classical to contemporary texts (texts of jingju plays, memoirs, collections of notation books) and other commentaries and critical evaluations of dan actors (in both English and Chinese languages) to video and audio materials, films and personal interviews. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of East Asian/Chinese studies across the fields of theatre, history, culture and literature.

Mysticism in the Theater introduces theater makers to the power and possibility of using historical mystical ideas to influence all aspects of a production. Historical mysticism represents ideas developed by recognized spiritual thinkers in all religions and time periods: individuals who stilled their ego, and perceived the unity of all, hidden within the apparent multiplicity of existence. This unique manner of spiritual inlay allows theatrical presentations to find the height of artistic expression: art at the intersection of our historical moment and the eternal. This study introduces theater makers to the history of mystical inspiration within performance work and develops strategies for inserting mystical ideas into their productions. The book ties this model into theatre’s history, as mystical ideas and quotes have been inserted into productions from Greek theatre through Shakespeare and into the present day. This book explores how teachings and ideas of specific historical mystical thinkers might influence all aspects of contemporary theatrical productions including writing, directing, acting, stagecraft/set design, lighting design, costume design, sound design, and choreography.

These compact, well-illustrated and clearly written books unravel the contribution of modern theatre's most charismatic innovators and are unbeatable value for today's student.

Etienne Decroux and His Theatre Laboratory is based on the long-awaited translation of Marco De Marinis' monumental work on mime in the twentieth century: Mimo e teatro nel Novecento (1993). Now revised and updated, the volume focuses specifically on the seminal role played by French mime artist and pedagogue Etienne Decroux. Mime is a theatrical form of ancient tradition. In the nineteenth century, it saw both apogee and crisis in the west with the realistic and gesticulating 'white pantomime'. In the twentieth century, it underwent a radical overhaul, transforming into an 'abstract' corporeal art that shunned imitation and narrative, and which instead tended towards the plastic, elliptic, allusive, and symbolic transposition of actions and situations. This book is the result of detailed investigations, based on contemporary accounts and obscure or unpublished materials. Through the examination of the creative, pedagogical, and theoretical work of the 'inventor' of the new mime art, Etienne Decroux, De Marinis focuses on the different assumptions underlying the various modes of the problematic presence of mime in the theatre of the twentieth century: from the utopia of a 'pure' theatre, attributed to the sole essence of the actor, to its decline into a closed poetic genre often nostalgically stuck in the past; from mime as a pedagogical tool for the actor to mime as an expressive and virtuosic means in the hands of the director.

New Theatre Quarterly provides an international forum where theatrical scholarship and practice can meet, and where prevailing dramatic assumptions can be subjected to vigorous critical questioning.

Theatre and Boxing focuses on a problem which is of paramount importance for any theatre practitioner and researcher: the actor’s believable body. This problem has been taken up by Stanislavski, Meyerhold, Artaud, Brecht, Decroux, Copeau, Grotowski, and many others. It is an essential hurdle for all who practice the theatrical craft or want to study it theoretically. This hurdle can be considered one of the foundations of theatre science and of the relationship between technique, politics and ethics. This book tells the story of a revolution in the work of the actor in the early- and mid-20th century, a period in which the focus of theatrical interest shifted from the emotions to the body. The actor’s body became a tool for purveying a dynamic set of actions which often transformed the very actor himself. This new centrality of the body also drew attention to those places in which the body is central: the gym, the boxing ring and the circus with its trapezes and tightropes became, together with the stage, laboratories for the theatre. Thus, in addition to the reformers of the theatre the pages of this book are filled with boxers, acrobats, gymnasts and wrestlers, pursuers of an utopia: the "actor who flies".

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. Each of the chapters is written by an expert on a particular figure, from Stanislavsky and Brecht to Laban and Decroux, and places their work in its social and historical context. Summaries and analyses of their key productions indicate how each practitioner's theoretical approaches to performance and the performer were manifested in practice. All 22 practitioners from the original series are represented, with this volume covering those born before the end of the First World War. This is the definitive first step for students, scholars and practitioners hoping to acquaint themselves with the leading names in performance, or deepen their knowledge of these seminal figures.