Actor Training in Anglophone Countries offers a firsthand account of the most significant acting programs in English-speaking countries throughout the world. The culmination of archival research and fieldwork spanning six years, it is the only work of its kind that studies the history of actor training from an international perspective. It presents the current moment as crucial for student actors and those who teach them. As the profession continues to change, new and progressive approaches to training have become as urgent as they are necessary. Using drama schools and universities as its subjects of inquiry, this book investigates acting programs in the UK, Ireland, the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Among the case studies are the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, National Theatre School of Canada, Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts, and Carnegie Mellon University. All recognized for their distinguished reputations by industry professionals and acting teachers alike, the book examines each program’s pedagogical approach, administrative structure, funding apparatus, and alumni success. In doing so, it identifies the challenges facing acting schools today and offers a new direction for training in the twenty-first century. Actor Training in Anglophone Countries will be of interest to theatre and performance scholars, artists, students, and teachers.

Critical Acting Pedagogy: Intersectional Approaches invites readers to think about pedagogy in actor training as a research field in its own right: to sit with the complex challenges, risks, and rewards of the acting studio; to recognise the shared vulnerability, courage, and love that defines our field and underpins our practices. This collection of chapters, from a diverse group of acting teachers at different points in their careers, working in conservatoires and universities, illuminates current developments in decolonising studios to foreground multiple and intersecting identities in the pedagogic exchange. In acknowledging how their positionality affects their practices and materials, 20 acting teachers from the United Kingdom, the United States, Europe, and Oceania offer practical tools for the social justice acting classroom, with rich insights for developing critical acting pedagogies. Authors test and develop research approaches, drawn from social sciences, to tackle dominant ideologies in organisation, curriculum, and methodologies of actor training. This collection frames current efforts to promote equality, diversity, and inclusivity in the studio. It contributes to the collective movement to improve current educational practice in acting, prioritising well-being, and centering the student experience.

This book comprises of key articles from the 2023 AusAct: The Australian Actor Training Conference that addresses innovative and fresh discussions post-COVID on how the Performing Arts can come out of these times of crisis and maintain their survival. Each chapter looks at a different aspect of the performing arts and discusses our programs and the unique and significant role acting and performance teachers have in our education sector, and their clear contribution to the international creative economies.

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. These essays offer insights from celebrated teachers across the disciplines of acting, voice, and movement and are designed to help actors and instructors find deeper vocal and physical connections to poetic text. Although each dramatic genre offers a unique set of challenges, Building Embodiment highlights instances where techniques can be integrated, revealing how the synthesis of body, brain, and word results in a fuller sense of character experiencing for both the actor and the audience. This book bridges the gap between academic and professional application and invites the student and professional actor into a richer experience of character and story.

The Routledge Companion to Twentieth Century British Theatre and Performance provides a broad range of perspectives on the multiple models and examples of theatre, artists, enthusiasts, enablers, and audiences that emerged over this formative 100-year period. This first volume covers the first half of the century, constructing an equitable and inclusive history that is more representative of the nation's lived experience than the traditional narratives of British theatre. Its approach is intra-national – weaving together the theatres and communities of England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. The essays are organised thematically arranged into sections that address nation, power, and identity; fixity and mobility; bodies in performance; the materiality of theatre and communities of theatre. This approach highlights the synergies, convergences, and divergences of the theatre landscape in Britain during this period, giving a sense of the sheer variety of performance that was taking place at any given moment in time. This is a fascinating and indispensable resource for undergraduate and graduate students, postgraduate researchers, and scholars across theatre and performance studies, cultural studies, and twentieth-century history.

This book offers tools to address the growing and urgent interest in exposing and challenging unconscious biases in the studio, exploiting how actor training uniquely combines elements of education and culture. It is the first practical and rigorous investigation of Pierre Bourdieu’s idea that domination and inequality are embodied in surreptitious ways. This book adapts and develops the techniques of Joan Littlewood and Ariane Mnouchkine that juxtapose the social with the comedic to theatricalise Bourdieusian concepts, inviting critical consciousness and critical praxis in the studio. It constructs the creative intervention Ludic Activism that can be practically applied in an actor training context. Actors from diverse training backgrounds were trained to use Ludic Activism, co-investigating how the Bourdieu-inspired vocabulary and pedagogy can facilitate the acknowledgement and tackling of dispositions during theatre-making. Ludic Activism developed the participants’ social representations into progressive and compassionate versions, reinforcing an understanding and use of their positionality in performance through a set of authorial acting tasks. This book is an advanced study for actors, directors, and teachers of acting for both the training/rehearsal studio and research. The methodology, account of the process, and evaluation of the creative intervention – including illustrations and selected videos that can be accessed on the Routledge website, under the Support Material section, here: https://www.routledge.com/Bourdieu-in-the-Studio-Decolonising-and-Decentering-Actor-Training-Through/Stamatiou/p/book/9781032306070 – demonstrate a decolonising and decentering trajectory for actor training.

Troubling Traditions takes up a 21st century, field-specific conversation between scholars, educators, and artists from varying generational, geographical, and identity positions that speak to the wide array of debates around dramatic canons. Unlike Literature and other fields in the humanities, Theatre and Performance Studies has not yet fully grappled with the problems of its canon. Troubling Traditions stages that conversation in relation to the canon in the United States. It investigates the possibilities for multiplying canons, methodologies for challenging canon formation, and the role of adaptation and practice in rethinking the field’s relation to established texts. The conversations put forward by this book on the canon interrogate the field’s fundamental values, and ask how to expand the voices, forms, and bodies that constitute this discipline. This is a vital text for anyone considering the role, construction, and impact of canons in the US and beyond.