Theatre-Making & Processes
Theatre History
Category
Theatre History aims to enlarge our understanding of theatre: the people, events and relationships involved in its development, the causes of change, and the ideas behind new forms of performance.
Video
Lisa Mayo of the Kuna and Rappahannock Nations was a founding member of the Native
American women’s feminist theatre group, Spiderwoman Theater. She was a singer,
actor, and playwright who wrote and performed with Spiderwoman Theater for 35
years.
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Kwei-Armah discusses the impact of August Wilson’s work, including Gem of the Ocean, and attitudes towards African-American and Afro-Caribbean drama.
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In this film, Frayn talks about the nature of live performance, the role of the audience in creating the performance, about creating characters and writing historical drama.
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Peter Hall discusses the West End theatre of the 1950s, antipathy towards the RSC coming to London to perform, and the staging of the first English production of Waiting for Godot and its aftermath.
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During the revival of An Die Musik in 2000, Simmons discusses the origins of the original production and the process of its creation and compares it with the process of recreating it 25 years later.
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Thelma Holt talks about her early career as an actress in the immediate post-war period, changes in the 1950s and 1960s effected by the Royal Court, and her role in developing the fringe theatre scene.
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William Gaskill interviewed by Michael Billington. Gaskill discusses his theatre-going during the war, his experiences at Oxford University, and his work with the Royal Court and National Theatre.
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Brewster on her childhood in Jamaica, training at Rose Bruford and her subsequent career, as well as the difficulties of getting work as a black actress and the experiences of her contemporaries.
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In which Prof. Smeliansky outlines the importance of Stanislavsky’s work in the history of Russian theatre, including Stanislavsky’s relation to Chekhov, Gordon Craig, Meyerhold and others.
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Although best known as a playwright, Brecht was a highly original poet. His poems tell us much about his plays, not least his advocacy of survival in a context of resistance to oppression.
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Katharina Seyferth introduces the forest-based work space of Brzezinka, as she recounts her experience of Grotowski's post-theatrical research known as "Paratheatre" and "Theatre of Sources."
Video
This video features snapshots from two different directing workshops conducted
in October 2017 with two groups of directing students at RESAD (Real Escuela
Superior de Arte Dramático de Madrid) in Madrid, Spain. The workshops
focused on strategies of recontextualization of classical works and of
determining directorial point-of-view.
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This interview sees Jean Benedetti discussing some of the main precepts of Stanislavsky’s work, including Stanislavsky’s relation to Chekhov, Shchepkin, Meyerhold and others.
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The third episode of After My Life in Art, originally broadcast by The Culture Channel, Russia
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The fourth episode of After My Life in Art, originally broadcast by The Culture Channel, Russia
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The fifth episode of After My Life in Art, originally broadcast by The Culture Channel, Russia
Video
Part of an overall documentary series about Russian Theatre in the 1920s, Meyerhold
Theatre and the Russian Avant-garde uses archive material to demonstrate acting
techniques.
Video
A film about Michael Chekhov. Part one covers his early years, family, upbringing, drama school and the beginning of his acting career at the Moscow Art Theatre.
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Michael Chekhov's final years living, acting, and writing in the United States.
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The First Studio becomes an independent theatre with Michael Chekhov as its artistic director.
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Chekhov in one of signature roles, Muromsky in The Case.
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Michael Chekhov goes to German and meets with Stanislavsky in Berlin and discussion between their different views on acting techniques.
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The pre-war years and Michael Chekhov moves his studio moved to a similar location in the United States.
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A film made by Rekha Tandon’s company, Dance Routes, that begins with a description of Odissi’s background as a temple dance tradition, and an account of its basic form and ornamentation.
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A portrait into the early work of Patricia Bardi.
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The Stanislavski Centre Annual Lecture sees a major international figure lecturing based upon their own expertise in the field of Stanislavsky studies every year – in this case, Anatoly Smeliansky.
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This film explores the main themes which led to the founding of The Moscow Art
Theatre and the formation of Stanislavsky’s system of acting.
Video
Sun, Moon and Feather presents a musical comedy-documentary about three Native American sisters growing up Native in an Italian neighbourhood in Brooklyn during the 1930s and 1940s.
Audio
An interview lasting almost two hours, covering the extraordinary breadth of Mike Alfreds’s experience as a theatre director working across different decades, cultures and continents.
Practitioner
Thelma Holt started out as an actress, before working mainly as a producer at the Roundhouse, the National and the RSC. She has played a crucial role in introducing international theatre to Britain.
Related Items
Practitioner
With his insights into acting and directing, Konstantin Stanislavski forged a definitive position in the development of 20th-century theatre, laying the groundwork for innovators such as Grotowski.
Category
The text is the actor’s starting and end point when creating a character, requiring a certain forensic analysis to transform the page into flesh-and-blood character. This process is often intuitive.