Features
“Offstage Actions” assists readers in finding ways to use this training in venues outside the theatre. Professional skills are supplemented with personal ones.
ACTING: ONSTAGE AND OFF goes far beyond the usual performance information by offering ways to act one’s life better. Acting teachers uncomfortable with encouraging students to fall in love with acting and pursuing a career where there are few employment options, will feel much better knowing that this text teaches essential life skills and survival tools in their lives outside the theatre.
ACTING: ONSTAGE AND OFF demonstrates how offstage performance can be effectively adapted for the theatre as well as how onstage training can be applied toward leading a full life outside the theatre. This basic approach focuses on life experience rather than on dramatic literature for background material and positions fundamentals such as auditioning as basic skills that can be applied to many areas of life.
Accessible and conversational, the author’s down-to-earth writing style uses original terms – rather than invented vocabulary – for acting concepts and emphasizes the actor’s responsibility for in-rehearsal active contribution and out-of-rehearsal exploration.
A wealth of actor testimony from well-known performers includes insight from both proven veterans and successful newcomers near the ages of the students.
ACTING: ONSTAGE AND OFF delivers a clear interpretation of Stanislavski – the father of actor training as we know it – for modern readers.
Numerous exercises and approaches allow flexible selection and adaptation. Exercises can easily be cut back in scope while written assignments can be adapted into thought-provoking discussion questions and improvisations in those instances where a minimum of academic work is deemed appropriate.