SKU: 978-1-60182-183-6 Building Images, Part Three, of Five Approaches to Acting Series

Building Images, Part Three in the Five Approaches to Acting Series by David Kaplan is the third part in the Five Approaches to Acting Series. By popular demand of instructors and students alike, all five of David Kaplan's approaches to acting have been unbundled into separate acting textbooks to allow instructors to pick and choose the approaches that best fit their methodology of teaching acting.

Here is David Kaplan on the essentials of Building Images, Part Three in the Five Approaches to Acting Series:

There was, for a time, an ongoing war between actors who worked from the outside in, like Laurence Olivier with his fake noses, or those who worked from the inside out, like the disciples of Lee Strasberg with their emotional memories. Yet these opponents had something essential in common to their approach to acting: what an actor does is create an image of himself. Some approaches to acting stress images are only to be taken from personal experience, the best, perhaps the only potent images, they claim, come from childhood. Some approaches to acting declare the most usable images are fantasies, the more outlandish the more freeing for performers and audiences.

The source of an actor’s imagery may be different, but the techniques for applying them in rehearsal and performance are remarkably similar. Building Images, Part Three includes practical techniques for an actor to build imagery — external and internal — in rehearsal. Building Images, Part Three offers strategies for text analysis based on imagery, and offers strategies for maintaining and deepening imagery in performance. Building Images, Part Three gives examples in film and from the history of acting. It separates “the Method” from Stanislavsky’s System and explains why an actor would want to use one, or neither.

Gluing on a nose or soul-searching for emotional memories, when actors discover images that move them to play, those images — whatever their source — can be built up with an approach that ignites a performance with an inner flame.

All five of David Kaplan's approaches to acting are available together with an additional part that deals with comparing, choosing and combing the different approaches in his The Collected Series: Five Approaches to Acting. This is an excellent acting textbook that deals with theory and practice for both beginning and seasoned actors.

About the Author

David Kaplan is an author and theater director who stages plays around the world with professional companies in indigenous languages and settings. He is a former Fellow at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center in Austin, Texas, the repository of Tennessee Williams’ literary estate. He has experience directing Williams’ repertory around the world.

In 2003 Mr. Kaplan staged Tennessee Williams’ The Eccentricities of a Nightingale in Cantonese at the Hong Kong Repertory Theater. Seasons past include directing the first Russian production of Tennessee Williams’ Suddenly Last Summer (the subject of a TASS documentary), a Sufi King Lear in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, performed in the Uzbek language and broadcast on Uzbek television; Genet’s The Maids in Ulaan Baator, Mongolia, performed in Mongolian. In America he has staged his own adaptation of The Circus of Dr. Lao in Los Angeles, Tennessee Williams’ The Traveling Companion at WestBeth in New York, and Williams’ Frosted Glass Coffins in Birmingham, Alabama. He is the curator of the Provincetown Tennessee Williams Festival.

David Kaplan is also the author of Tennesse Williams in Provincetown (Hansen Publishing Group, 2007) and articles on such varied subjects as Eudora Welty and Andres Segovia, the history of Shakespeare productions in Central Asia, the American monologist Ruth Draper, the twenty-first century freaks of Coney Island USA. His translations of Chinese poetry from eighteenth century Japan will appear in the journal Alehouse early 2007.