In his most recent work and with his usual perceptiveness, Seymour Sarason probes the topic of teaching as a performing art. Refreshingly, Dr. Sarason focuses on the often-overlooked role of teachers in galvanizing an audience—their students. Sarason argues that teachers will better engage learners if they are prepared in the artistry of doing so. Sarason sees teachers as actors and thus uses the traditions of stage performance to inspire ways to foster connections between teachers and students. Sarason elucidates how the rehearsal processes actors undergo and the direction they receive, for example, would be similarly beneficial for educators. Recognizing that implementing his ideas would require a profound rethinking of teacher training programs, Sarason urges why they are crucial to excellence in education. As always, Sarason’s writing is rich with insight garnered from 45 years of teaching and a lifetime devotion to educational issues. His book is essential for teachers and teacher educators and an excellent resource for anyone interested in educational topics. “Once again, Sarason, like other great teachers and artists, has us pause at the moral center of what we thought we knew long enough to recognize truths we might otherwise neglect. Just as he guided our understanding of school cultures and school reform, this book reshapes what we previously thought of as ‘the art of teaching’.” —Jeannie Oakes, Professor of Education at University of California, Los Angeles “Seymour Sarason thinks he has something new to say. Indeed, he has. Furthermore, he writes about a domain anyone who has taught in educational institutions identifies with immediately but is almost barren of attention. There are insight, great writing, and passion here, but don’t look for a repetition of anything Sarason has written before. To the thousands of psychologists, sociologists, and teachers of teachers already nourished by Sarason’s writing, this book will add the audience of teachers in and out of schools that he has always wanted to reach.” —John Goodlad, Co-director, Center for Educational Renewal, University of Washington, and President, Institute for Educational Inquiry

"Twenty-seven contributors--artists, cultural professionals, scholars, a journalist, grantmakers--were asked this question: 'Are the arts essential?' In response, they offer deep and challenging answers applying the lenses of the arts, and those of the sciences, the humanities, public policy, and philanthropy. Playing so many parts, situated in so many places, these writers illustrate the ubiquity of the arts and culture in the United States. They draw from the performing arts and the visual arts, from poetry and literature, and from culture in our everyday lived experiences. The arts, they remind readers, are everywhere, and--in one way and another--touch everyone"--

Across the world, performing arts programmes are increasing in number, scope and professionalism. They attract increasing academic and media attention. Theoretical and applied research, organizational evaluation reports, documentary films and journalism are detailing prison arts and creating recognition that this body of work is becoming a valued part of the correctional enterprise. There is a growing body of evidence that suggests music, theatre, poetry and dance can contribute to prisoner wellbeing, management, rehabilitation and reintegration. Performing Arts in Prisons: Creative Perspectives explores prison arts in Australia, the United States, the United Kingdom and Chile, and creates a new framework for understanding its practices.

CHOICE 1997 Outstanding Academic Books This is the first full-length study in English of Japan's folk performing arts covering such topics as the different categories of presentations, public policies affecting the folk performing arts, performance events within and without communities, and the folk performing arts in literature. Throughout, it addresses issues concerning the survival and preservation of traditional culture in contemporary Japan. Once largely unknown outside of their local community settings, Japan's folk performing arts have today captured universal attention. In Japan, almost every municipality is home to one or more of the diverse dramatic, dance, narrative, and musical presentations that make up the folk performing arts. They can be seen at events that range from long-established festivals to newly created folk-culture and tourist programs. Since the 1920s, a growing body of work by folklorists, theater historians, and other academic specialists, together with literary treatment by well-known authors, brought the folk performing arts into the national cultural spotlight. The postwar Cultural Properties Protection Law conferred on them the status of legally designated cultural assets.

The essays in this volume explore the borderland between ecology and the arts. Nature is here read by a number of contributors as 'cultural', by others as an 'independent domain', or even as a powerful process of exchange 'between the human and the other-than-human'. The four parts of the volume reflect these different understandings of nature and performance. Informed by psychoanalysis and cultural materialism, contributors to the first part, 'Spectacle: Landscape and Subjectivity', look at ways in which particular social and scientific experiments, theatre and film productions and photography either reinforce or contest our ideas about nature and human-human or human-animal relations and identities. The second part, 'World: Hermeneutic Language and Social Ecology', investigates political protest, social practice art, acoustic ecology, dance theatre, family therapy and ritual in terms of social philosophy. Contributors to the third part, 'Environment: Immersiveness and Interactivity', explore architecture and sculpture, site-specific and mediatised dance and paratheatre through radical theories of urban and virtual space and time, or else phenomenological philosophy. The final part, 'Void: Death, Life and the Sublime', indicates the possibilities in dance, architecture and animal behaviour of a shift to an existential ontology in which nature has 'the capacity to perform itself'.

William Esper, one of the leading acting teachers of our time, explains and extends Sanford Meisner's legendary technique, offering a clear, concrete, step-by-step approach to becoming a truly creative actor.Esper worked closely with Meisner for seventeen years and has spent decades developing his famous program for actor's training. The result is a rigorous system of exercises that builds a solid foundation of acting skills from the ground up, and that is flexible enough to be applied to any challenge an actor faces, from soap operas to Shakespeare. Co-writer Damon DiMarco, a former student of Esper's, spent over a year observing his mentor teaching first-year acting students. In this book he recreates that experience for us, allowing us to see how the progression of exercises works in practice. The Actor's Art and Craft vividly demonstrates that good training does not constrain actors' instincts—it frees them to create characters with truthful and compelling inner lives.