Series: Theatre Makers

In life, I want students to be alive and on stage I want them to be artists - Jacques Lecoq Jacques Lecoq was one of the most inspirational theatre teachers of our age. In The Moving Body, he shares with us first-hand his unique philosophy of performance, improvisation, masks, movement, and gesture, which together form one of the greatest influences...

In the early 1930s, during his first years of exile and 20 years before the publication of his seminal work To the Actor, Michael Chekhov made his first incursion into the challenging task of writing about an actor’s experience and his vision of the craft. This important, though largely forgotten, work (the so-called Paris Manuscript) was handwritten in German. In...

Published here in its entirety in English, Artaud’s Revolutionary Messages collects Antonin Artaud’s political, aesthetic, and philosophical writings during his travels to Mexico in 1936. Written around the same time as his seminal work The Theatre and its Double, it captures a crucial point in Artaud's life shortly before he was admitted to a mental asylum in which he was...

Award-winning British playwright Leo Butler looks back over 25 years of writing for the stage and his extensive experience teaching and mentoring emerging playwrights through the Royal Court Young Writers' Programme. With honesty and humour, Leo Butler shares his experiences from his working-class upbringing in Sheffield, including his disastrous state education, his years on the dole, to his breakthrough into...

In The Theatre and Its Double, first published in 1938, Antonin Artaud puts forward his radical theories on drama and theatre, which he saw as being stifled by conservatism and a lack of experimentation. Containing the famous manifestos of the ‘Theatre of Cruelty’, this collection of essays analyses the underlying impulses of performance, provides suggestions on a physical-training method for...

In Ramón Griffero’s seminal work, The Dramaturgy of Space, the playwright and director describes his aesthetic philosophy and theoretical approach to theatrical creation, illustrating his theory through practical application in a series of exercises. As well as touching upon some of Griffero’s own work, like Cinema Utopia (1985), Tus deseos en fragmentos (2003), Fin del eclipse (2007) and El azar...

Renowned theatre and film director Nancy Meckler delves into her hugely varied experiences in the rehearsal room and shares examples of tried-and-tested “tools” to bring a play to life. Meckler encourages you to interrogate, play, experiment and to use her methods as a starting point to begin creating your own unique directing toolkit and finding your own style. The examples...

What is artistic resonance and how can it be linked to one's life and one's art? This latest book of essays from legendary theatre director Anne Bogart considers the creation of resonance in the artistic endeavour, with a focus on the performing arts. The word 'resonance' comes from the Latin meaning to 're-sound' or 'sound together'. From music to physics,...

Is there a fundamental connection between New York's Elevator Repair Service's 9-hour production of The Great Gatsby and a Kathakali performance? How can we come to appreciate the slowness of Kabuki theatre as much as the pace of the Whatsapp theatre of post-Arab Spring Turkey? Can we go beyond our own culture's contemporary definition of a 'good play' and think...