Jasmin Vardimon’s Dance Theatre offers an unusual, intimate insight into the devising and training processes of a choreographer in the midst of her practice. Libby Worth and Jasmin Vardimon take a collaborative approach to recording and exploring the working processes of Vardimon and her company, chronicling the development of specific productions rather than offering a single choreographic blueprint.Focusing on the techniques, strategies and creative activities necessitat...

Anna Halprin traces the life's work of this radical dance-maker, documenting her early career as a modern dancer in the 1940s through to the development of her groundbreaking approach to dance as an accessible and life-enhancing art form. Now revised and reissued, this book:sketches the evolution of the San Francisco Dancers' Workshop, exploring Halprin's connections with the avant-garde theatre, music, visual art and architecture of the 1950s and 60s...

Time and Performer Training addresses the importance and centrality of time and temporality to the practices, processes and conceptual thinking of performer training. Notions of time are embedded in almost every aspect of performer training, and so contributors to this book look at:age/aging and children in the training contexthow training impacts over a lifetimethe duration of training and the impact of training regimes over timeconcept...

This is the definitive guide to writing engagingly about the art of our time. Invaluable for students, arts professionals and other writers, it brims with practical tips that range across the full spectrum of art-writing including academic essays; press releases and news articles; texts for auction and exhibition catalogues, gallery guides and wall labels; op-ed journalism and exhibition reviews and writing for websites and blogs. Gilda Williams, a London correspondent for Artforum, points...

An irreverent, colourful guide to becoming more interesting and successful by gaining self-knowledge and building your confidence and charismaIn addition to having scads of acting and writing credits between them, actor David Gillespie and writer Mark Warren are co-founders of a unique organization. Called The Speechworks, it is a group of performance-based professionals who draw upon their professional expertise to teach clients—including businesspeople, sports st...

In Two Minds is the first comprehensive biography of Jonathan Miller – the story of one of post-war Britain's most intriguing polymaths. Descended from immigrants who fled Tsarist anti-Semitism to become shopkeepers in Ireland and London's East End, Miller was born into an intellectual milieu, between Bloomsbury and Harley Street – the son of a novelist and a leading child psychiatrist. Miller trained as adoctor but then forged a career as a stellar comedian and as a world-renowned theatre...

Musicals are the most popular form of stage entertainment today, with the West End and Broadway dominated by numerous long-running hits. But for every Wicked or Phantom of the Opera, there are dozens of casualties that didn't fare quite so well. In this book, Julian Woolford explores the musical-theatre canon to explain why and how some musicals work, why some don't, and what you should (and shouldn't) do if you're thinking of writing your own.Drawing on his exper...

The fully revised edition of this 'classic' helps teachers give their learners the tools they need to express themselves through a range of stimulating drama contexts. This completely revised edition of the classic title Drama Techniques provides: *150 ideas for interesting and productive fluency practice *a large selection of drama-based techniques which focus learners' attention on communicative tasks or activities *techniques suitable for all levels *clear instructions for the teacher *...

An informative, fun and rather charming essay on the nature and history of one of life’s most desirable assets, Charm, by renowned culture and design critic, Stephen Bayley.Aiming to wound, a schoolmaster wrote on future design-guru Stephen Bayley’s last ever school report “Charm alone will not get him through”. Bayley took this to mean that an affable, genial, outgoing nature was not enough to ensure survival in a harsh world of statistical performance. But survive and flourish is...

Kidnapping, attempted assassination, espionage … not the answers you’d expect to the question ‘what happens when you become a linguist?’But now, reflecting on a long and hugely successful career at the forefront of the field of English Language and Linguistics, David Crystal answers this question and offers us a special look behind the scenes at the adventures, rewards, challenges and pitfalls of his life in language.Both an autobiography and a highly accessible introductio...

This pioneering book introduces students to the practice and art of creative writing and creative reading. It offers a fresh, distinctive and beautifully written synthesis of the discipline. David Morley discusses where creative writing comes from, the various forms and camouflages it has taken, and why we teach and learn the arts of fiction, poetry and creative nonfiction. He looks at creative writing in performance; as public art, as visual art, as e-literature and as an act of community...

A clash between the ideology of growth and the growth of ideas, between control and creativity, between measurement and the immeasurable, between predictability and the fickle muses of inspiration in engulfing our boardrooms.In this scathing swipe at the institutionalised idiocy that is stifling creativity just at the time the world needs it most Gordon Torr draws from the leading lights of creativity research to demolish the myths that surround the generation of ideas in the moder...