The Actor, Image and Action is a 'new generation' approach to the craft of acting; the first full-length study of actor training using the insights of cognitive neuroscience. In a brilliant reassessment of both the practice and theory of acting, Rhonda Blair examines the physiological relationship between bodily action and emotional experience. In doing so she provides the latest step in Stanislavsky's attempts to help the actor 'reach the unconscious by conscious means'. Recent developments in scientific thinking about the connections between biology and cognition require new ways of understanding many elements of human activity, including: imagination emotion memory physicality reason. The Actor, Image and Action looks at how these are in fact inseparable in the brain's structure and function, and their crucial importance to an actor’s engagement with a role. The book vastly improves our understanding of the actor's process and is a must for any actor or student of acting.

The mistake of interpreting 18th-century theatrical portraits too literally has been made since the 19th-century when a different set of artistic codes prevailed. The image of the 18th-century actor which we can obtain from prints, paintings and pamphlets of the time, is not a collection of visual truths, but a construction based on critical canons, aesthetic prejudices, and commercial motivations prevalent during the period. Through an analysis of the importance of theatre among all the pleasures and pastimes enjoyed by 18th-century Londoners the author presents a detailed picture of the cultural climate inhabited by the actor and his audience. The overwhelming fascination they had with the actor provides the background to an analysis of the function of the theatrical portrait, the burgeoning economy of the engraver, and the illustrator. Concepts of classicism and realism are explored in terms of how Garrick and Kemble will have been viewed in their work. The author also draws an interesting analogy between the aesthetics of action and sculptural representation through the work of Siddons, and goes on to consider the representation of the comic actor and how it was informed by art and art theory.

Generating Images of Stratification is a self-contained presentation of a theoretical research program that deals with a significant explanatory problem relating to social inequality and that constructs generative theoretical models in doing so. In more detail: -Self-contained presentation - In respect to the background sociological facts and theoretical ideas and also the formal methods the book provides clear and simple accounts accompanied by examples. - A theoretical research program - The emphasis is on theory development, involving a series of theoretical models constructed within a core framework of principles and methods. - Deals with a significant explanatory problem relating to social inequality - We know from research that how people perceive the stratification system of a society depends upon their position in that system. So the problem is: What process generates this regularity and thereby explains empirical generalizations about the social structuration of images? - Constructs generative theoretical models - The book is an extended presentation of "generative theory" in sociology, a formal method of producing effective theoretical explanations. Generating Images of Stratification is of interest to mathematical sociologists and formal theorists in sociology; sociologists interested in social stratification; methodologists, both in sociology and in other fields; philosophers of social science; and theoretical scientists and mathematicians who are interested in applying their analytical tools to social science topics.

The Routledge Companion to Michael Chekhov brings together Chekhov specialists from around the world - theatre practitioners, theorists, historians and archivists – to provide an astonishingly comprehensive assessment of his life, work and legacy. This volume aims to connect East and West; theatre theory and practice. It reconsiders the history of Chekhov’s acting method, directing and pedagogy, using the archival documents found across the globe: in Russia, England, America, Germany, Lithuania and Switzerland. It presents Chekhov’s legacy and ideas in the framework of interdisciplinary theatre practices and theories, as well as at the crossroads of cultures, in the context of his forays into such areas as Western mime and Asian cosmology. This remarkable Companion, thoughtfully edited by two leading Chekhov scholars, will prove invaluable to students and scholars of theatre, theatre practitioners and theoreticians, and specialists in Slavic and transcultural studies. Marie-Christine Autant-Mathieu is Director of Research at the National Center For Scientific Research, and Assistant-Director of Sorbonne-CNRS Institute EUR’ORBEM. She is an historian of theatre and specialist in Russian and Soviet theatre. Yana Meerzon is Associate Professor in the Department of Theatre, University of Ottawa. Her book publications include Adapting Chekhov: The Text and Its Mutations, co-edited with Professor J. Douglas Clayton, University of Ottawa (Routlegde, 2012).

This is the classic and best selling book by the founder of Theatre of the Oppressed, Augusto Boal. It sets out the principles and practice of Boal's revolutionary method.

Moving pictures existed for over a decade before anything resembling a star system appeared. Then American cinema went from being devoid of stars to being dependent on them. This is an account of this development in cinema and modern culture.

Images have always stirred ambivalent reactions. Yet whether eliciting fascinated gazes or iconoclastic repulsion from their beholders, they have hardly ever been seen as true sources of knowledge. They were long viewed as mere appearances, placeholders for the things themselves or deceptive illusions. Today, the traditional critique of the spectacle has given way to an unconditional embrace of the visual. However, we still lack a persuasive theoretical account of how images work. Emmanuel Alloa retraces the history of Western attitudes toward the visual to propose a major rethinking of images as irreplaceable agents of our everyday engagement with the world. He examines how ideas of images and their powers have been constructed in Western humanities, art theory, and philosophy, developing a novel genealogy of both visual studies and the concept of the medium. Alloa reconstructs the earliest Western media theory—Aristotle’s concept of the diaphanous milieu of vision—and the significance of its subsequent erasure in the history of science. Ultimately, he argues for a historically informed phenomenology of images and visual media that explains why images are not simply referential depictions, windows onto the world. Instead, images constantly reactivate the power of appearing. As media of visualization, they allow things to appear that could not be visible except in and through these very material devices.