The Actor Training Reader

Book excerpt: The Actor Training Reader is an invaluable resource for students and teachers of acting, offering access to a wide range of key texts that identify, explore, illuminate and interrogate the challenges, practices and processes involved in training the modern actor. A companion volume to the highly-acclaimed Actor Training (Hodge 2010), this book collects key writings by influential actor training practitioners of the twentieth century, introduced with essays from leading academics in the field of actor training. Key practitioners included are: Eugenio Barba; Anne Bogart; Bertolt Brecht; Peter Brook; Michael Chekhov; and Konstantin Stanislavsky. The book sets established, widely used texts alongside less well-known ones in order to trace the development of actor training from the pioneering advances of Eastern Europe to the acting games of Augusto Boal. The texts are grouped into thematic sections rather than chronologically in order to encourage a comparison of different approaches to similar aspects of the craft. Each section will have a specially commissioned introductory essay by an expert in that area of actor training, which will bring context, critical engagement and contemporary relevance to the extracts and offer provocations for further discussion.