Books in the Performance Books series

"Many high school theatre teachers do not have access to intensive voice instruction. Rena's book will fill that void. It is instructive, concise, easy to understand, and most importantly for the high school student, fun. All high school theatre programs should have Voice and the Young Actor as a textbook." Kim Moore, High School Teacher

Seventy percent of a conversation is conveyed through body language while only 10 percent is the meaning of the words. Here, an expert RADA trainer shows how to use our body so that it will speak more effectively and how to recognize and lose unwanted physical inhibitions.

Clive Barker, trained actors at Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop in its heyday and developed his famous "theatre games" system over 20 years. This re-issue of this classic text now includes a DVD with video material showing Clive Barker teaching his games in a studio and contains background information and first hand material from Clive himself.

This book offers a wealth of resources, critical overviews and detailed analysis of Ivo van Hove's internationally acclaimed work as the foremost director of theatre, opera and musicals in our time. Stunning production photos capture the power of van Hove's directorial vision, his innovative use of theatrical spaces, and the arresting stage images that have made his productions so popular among audiences worldwide over the last 30 years. Van Hove's own contribution to the book, which includes a foreword, interview and his director's notes for some of his most popular shows, makes this book a unique resource for students, scholars and for his fans across the different art forms in which he works. An informative introduction provides an overview of van Hove's unique approach to directing, while five sections, individually curated by experts in the respective fields of Shakespeare, classical theatre, modern theatre, opera, musicals, film, and international festival curatorship, offer readers a combination of critical insight and short excerpts by van Hove's collaborators, the actors in the ensemble companies van Hove works with in Amsterdam and New York, and by arts critics and reviewers.

How has the work and legacy of Augusto Boal's Theatre of the Oppressed been interpreted and practised around the world? What does it look like in different working contexts? This book provides an accessible introduction to the political and artistic principles Boal's techniques are founded on, tracking exemplary practice from around the globe.Using detailed contemporary case histories, theatre artist, scholar and activist Ali Campbell demonstrates how the underlying principles of Boal's practice are today enacted in the work of - among others - an urban network (Theatre of the Oppressed NYC); a rural and developmental theatre organisation (Jana Sanskriti, West Bengal); Boal's original company CTO Rio (Brazil); and a theatre-based group led by learning-disabled adults in the UK (The Lawnmowers Independent Theatre Company). The book concludes with a series of conversations between Campbell and international exponents of the work, envisioning futures for the Theatre of the Oppressed in the shifting political, educational and artistic contexts of the twenty-first century.