Reinventing Drama: Acting, Iconicity, Performance

(Hardback)

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Dramatic performance involves an intricate process of rehearsal based upon imagery inherent in the dramatic text. A playwright first invents a drama out of mental imagery. The dramatic text presents the drama as a range of verbal imagery. During rehearsal, the actors cultivate this verbal imagery within themselves. The performance triggers this cultivated mental imagery, thereby enabling the actors to reinvent the drama in the presence of an audience. This interplay of dramatic imagery constitutes the heart of the process of iconicity. The premise of iconicity is that in dramatic performance actors use the same neural architecture that people use in their daily lives to execute events. The core of this neural architecture is the brain's capacity for internally generating, reduplicating, storing, and triggering imagery. The process of iconicity draws on the actor's use of this mental capacity. This book explores the principles of iconicity and develops them as a process for acting and staging dramatic performances. This book draws together critical and literary theories and neuropsychology to provide a new artistic process for dramatic performance called iconicity. The first part of the book provides a theoretical perspective on the principles of iconicity. Included are discussions of the nature of dramatic performance, the ideology and process of acting, and the importance of emotions to drama. This initial exploraton of iconicity sometimes refers to practice; however, the ideas presented in the first part of the book largely provide a foundation for the second part, which is more practically oriented. The second part gives close attention to the various components of the iconicity process. It explains dramatic structure and identifies and defines the four strands of iconicity: events, dialogue, interactions, and performance. Throughout the volume, numerous plays are used to provide examples of how the iconicity process works.

Reviews

"All too rarely, someone comes along with a useful, fresh, entirely novel set of ideas about something we've always taken for granted. Shapiro has blended his own original sense of theater with a powerful and well-known system for the understanding of both personal and communicable emotional experience. Unusual for a pathbreaking book, theory leads gracefully into practice as new maps for both acting and directing are offered. Reinventing Drama is sure to excite as much controversy as it does good theatrical production."-Donald L Nathanson Executive Director, The Silvan S. Tomkins Institute Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and Human Behavior, Jefferson Medical College

Author Bio

BRUCE G. SHAPIRO is currently a resident dialogue coach for Village Roadshow Production Services at Warner Bros. Movie World Studios in Queensland, Australia. He was previously Head of Performance and Acting at the School of Drama of the Victorian College of the Arts, and the Artist-in-Residence and Lecturer in Acting, Directing, and Dramatic Literature at Tufts University. He has also taught and directed at the Aboriginal Center for the Performing Arts in Brisbane, Australia, the Academy of the Arts at the Queensland University of Technology, Trinity Rep Conservatory, Stonehill College, the MIT Shakespeare Ensemble, the University of Texas at Austin, the University of South Dakota, and the University of Iowa. He is author of numerous articles, and his books include Divine Madness and the Absurd Paradox: Ibsen's Peer Gynt and the Philosophy of Kierkegaard (Greenwood,1990).