The Director As Collaborator

The Director as Collaborator teaches essential directing skills while emphasizing how directors and theatre productions benefit from collaboration. Good collaboration occurs when the director shares responsibility for the artistic creation with the entire production, including actors, designers, stage managers and technical staff. Leadership does not preclude collaboration; in theatre, these concepts can and should be complementary. Students will develop their abilities by directing short scenes and plays and by participating in group exercises.

The Director as Collaborator teaches essential directing skills while emphasizing how directors and theater productions benefit from collaboration. Good collaboration occurs when the director shares responsibility for the artistic creation with the entire production team, including actors, designers, stage managers, and technical staff. Leadership does not preclude collaboration; in theater, these concepts can and should be complementary. Students will develop their abilities by directing short scenes and plays and by participating in group exercises. New to the second edition: updated interviews, exercises, forms, and appendices new chapter on technology including digital research, previsualization and drafting programs, and web-sharing sites new chapter on devised and ensemble-based works new chapter on immersive theater, including material and exercises on environmental staging and audience–performer interaction

This volume examines the work of directors Jacques Copeau, Theodore Komisarjevsky and Tyrone Guthrie. It explores in detail many of the directors' key productions, including Copeau's staging of Molière's The Tricks of Scapin, Komisarjevsky's signature season of Chekhov plays at the Barnes Theatre and Guthrie's pioneering direction of Shakespeare's plays in North America. This study argues that their work exemplifies the complexity and novelty of the role of theatre directing in the first three-quarters of the 20th century, as Komisarjevsky was in the middle of the genesis of directing in Russia, Copeau launched his directorial career just as the role was gaining definition, and Guthrie was at the vanguard of directing in Britain, at last shaking off the traditions of the actor-manager to formulate the new role of artistic director.

Shortlisted for the STR Theatre Book Prize 2023 A manifesto for the future of playwriting, this book challenges you to be a part of that future in the belief that it is fundamentally important to write plays. Plays help us understand ourselves, others, and the world around us. Reading this book, you will be challenged to learn your craft, explode what you know, prioritise what is important to you, and write in the way that only you can write. Most books on playwriting explain how to create a believable character in a story driven by plot. This book, however, goes even further in its exploration of the playwright's most valuable tool: theatricality. By learning from the past, and the present, the playwrights of tomorrow can create new, vivid, theatrical drama for the future. This manifesto also examines the process of writing, the art of collaboration, and the impact of writing on a playwright's mental health. It identifies the highs and lows, as well as the trials and tribulations, of life as a playwright in today's world. Theatre is a living artform. It is time for playwrights to acknowledge that fact and to celebrate the unique, primal thrill that a live theatre experience offers us. The future of playwriting is in your hands. Do you accept the challenge?

He's a warrior, a Finnish special forces soldier, who cut down scores of enemy troops while operating on his own behind Red Army lines during the Soviet invasion of his homeland in 1939. After that, he joined a Waffen SS brigade so that he could personally wage war deep inside Russia. Now in December of 1944, he is in Manhattan, sent by Nazi Germany to pave the way for an operation, which, if successful, will claim the lives of tens of thousands of Americans. While Germany's purpose for the mass killing of civilians on American soil at this late point in the war is to leverage the Roosevelt Government into a truce aimed at holding off further Allied advances into Western Europe after Normandy, the battle-hardened Finn is privately on a mission of his own. Driven by hatred of the United States for what he views as it ongoing support of efforts to crush Finland and bring it under Soviet control, he devises a murderous retaliatory plan, and once settled in New York, secretly sets out to implement it. In doing so, he uses his skills as a solo operator to adapt to a menacing environment, evade the FBI, and brutally eliminate anyone seen as an obstacle to his violent objective.

Aesthetics and Film is a philosophical study of the art of film. Its motivation is the recent surge of interest among analytic philosophers in the philosophical implications of central issues in film theory and the application of general issues in aesthetics to the specific case of film. Of particular interest are questions concerning the distinctive representational capacities of film art, particularly in relation to realism and narration, the influence of the literary paradigm in understanding film authorship and interpretation, and our imaginative and affective engagement with film. For all of these questions, Katherine Thomson-Jones critically compares the most compelling answers, driving home key points with a wide range of film examples including Wiene's The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari, Eisenstein's October, Hitchcock's Rear Window, Kubrick's The Shining and Sluizer's The Vanishing. Students and scholars of aesthetics and cinema will find this an illuminating, accessible and highly enjoyable investigation into the nature and power of a technologically evolving art form.

Explores the films, practitioners, production and distribution contexts that currently represent American womens independent cinemaWith the consolidation of aindie culture in the 21st century, female filmmakers face an increasingly indifferent climate. Within this sector, women work across all aspects of writing, direction, production, editing and design, yet the dominant narrative continues to construe amaverick white male auteurs such as Quentin Tarantino or Wes Anderson as the face of indie discourse. Defying the formulaic myths of the mainstream achick flick and the ideological and experimental radicalism of feminist counter-cinema alike, womens indie filmmaking is neither ironic, popular nor political enough to be readily absorbed into pre-existing categories. This ground-breaking collection, the first sustained examination of the work of female practitioners within American independent cinema, reclaims the adifference of female indie filmmaking. Through a variety of case studies of directors, writers and producers such as Ava DuVernay, Lena Dunham and Christine Vachon, contributors explore the innovation of a range of female practitioners by attending to the sensibilities, ideologies and industrial practices that distinguish their work while embracing the ain-between space in which the narratives they represent and embody can be revealed.Key FeaturesCovers American womens independent cinema since the late 1970sAnalyses the work of acclaimed but critically overlooked female practitioners such as Kelly Reichardt, Christine Vachon, Miranda July, Kasi Lemmons, Nicole Holofcener, Mira Nair, Lisa Cholodenko, Megan Ellison, Lynn Shelton, Ava DuVernay, Mary Harron and Debra GranikDistinguishes four different approaches to analysing womens independent cinema through: production and industry perspectives; genre and other classificatory modalities; political, cultural, social and professional identities; and collaborative and collectivist practicesContributorsJohn Alberti, Northern Kentucky UniversityLinda Badley, Middle Tennessee State UniversityCynthia Baron, Bowling Green State UniversityShelley Cobb, University of SouthamptonCorinn Columpar, University of TorontoChris Holmlund, University of Tennessee-KnoxvilleGeoff King, Brunel University, LondonChristina Lane, University of MiamiJames Lyons, University of ExeterKathleen A. McHugh, UCLAKent A. Ono, University of UtahLydia Papadimitriou, Liverpool John Moores UniversityClaudia Costa Pederson, Wichita State UniversityClaire Perkins, Monash UniversitySarah Projansky, University of UtahMaria San Filippo, Goucher CollegeMichele Schreiber, Emory UniversitySarah E. S. Sinwell, University of UtahYannis Tzioumakis, University of LiverpoolPatricia White, Swarthmore CollegePatricia R. Zimmermann, Ithaca College