Performance Movement And The Body

Investigating a range of influential movement training practices, this ambitious book considers the significance of professional training to performers and their bodies. Performance training approaches are examined within their wider social and cultural contexts, illuminating their evolution in response to the changing context of theatre practice and production. Adopting a rigorous critical angle, Mark Evans' approach is at the cutting-edge of Theatre scholarship, drawing on interviews with recognised practitioners and considering the implications for movement and the body in the digital age. Engaging and enlightening, this is essential reading for undergraduate and postgraduate students of Theatre, Drama and Performance wishing to understand and contextualise the theories behind performance training.

12 contemporary approaches to the human body that are being used by performers or in the context of performance training.

In Stability, Sport, and Performance Movement, renowned physiotherapist and performance consultant Joanne Elphinston teaches that sporting technique is rooted in movement efficiency, stability, symmetry, and balance. These elements work together to ensure that physical restrictions and inefficient muscle recruitment patterns don’t inhibit technical movement goals. The right muscles firing at the right time, and in the right sequence, can help athletes achieve their full physical potential. Elphinston provides clear explanations using applied sports examples, shows how to evaluate movement accurately, and provides a detailed method for improving performance. Filled with Performance Movement guides readers through an approach that has been used with international-level athletes in every sport. A major focus is on injury prevention. Athletes sustain injuries and want to know why they have them and how to prevent them. Sports medicine professionals need to know how to relate their rehabilitation back to sports-specific movement, and coaches need to understand the relationship between injury prevention and performance. This practical guide presents new ways to understand stability as it pertains to injury prevention in sport, bridging the gap between sports science and sports medicine.

Since the turn of the century, Performance Studies has emerged as an increasingly vibrant discipline. Its concerns - embodiment, ethical research and social change - are held in common with many other fields, however a unique combination of methods and applications is used in exploration of the discipline. Bridging live art practices - theatre, performance art and dance - with technological media, and social sciences with humanities, it is truly hybrid and experimental in its techniques. This Companion brings together specially commissioned essays from leading scholars who reflect on their own experiences in Performance Studies and the possibilities this offers to representations of identity, self-and-other, and communities. Theories which have been absorbed into the field are applied to compelling topics in current academic, artistic and community settings. The collection is designed to reflect the diversity of outlooks and provide a guide for students as well as scholars seeking a perspective on research trends.

Through a study of the contemporary German film movement the Berlin School, Olivia Landry examines how narrative film has responded to our highly digitalized and mediatized age, not with a focus on stasis and realism, but by turning back to movement, spectacle, and performance. She argues that a preoccupation with presence, liveness, and affect—all of which are viewed as critical components of live performance—can be found in many of the films of the Berlin School. Challenging the perception that the Berlin School is a sheer adherent of "slow cinema," Landry closely analyzes the use of movement, dynamism, presence, and speed in a broad selection of films to show how filmmakers such as Christian Petzold, Angela Schanelec, Thomas Arslan, and Christoph Hochhäusler invoke the pulse of the kinesthetic and the tangibly affective. Her analysis draws on an array of film theories from early materialism to body theories, phenomenology, and contemporary affect theories. Arguing that these theories readily and energetically forge a path from film to performance, Landry traces a trajectory between the two through which live experience, presence, spectacle, intersubjectivity, and the body in motion emerge and powerfully intersect. Ultimately, Movement and Performance in Berlin School Cinema expands the methodological and disciplinary boundaries of film studies by offering new ways of articulating and understanding movement in cinema.

Before athletes can become strong and powerful, they need to master the movement skills required in sport. Athletic Movement Skills covers the underlying science and offers prescriptive advice on bridging the gap between scientist and practitioner so coaches and athletes can work together to achieve dominance.

"This book explains how fitness enthusiasts and athletes can mobilize the fascia in order to improve function, flexibility, and performance, and to reduce pain and risk of injury"--