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Antonin Artaud:

Book: https://www.amazon.co.uk/d/Books/Artaud-Theatre-Methuen-drama-books/0413411001/ref=la_B001JOZCVS_1_7?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1486506148&sr=1-7

Play in the style of the theatre of cruelty: Jet of Blood (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jet_of_Blood#Synopsis)

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpfVW6otfyQ

Constantin Stanislavski:

Book: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Actor-Prepares-Bloomsbury-Revelations/dp/1780938438/ref=pd_sbs_14_t_2?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=BEYSB8ZAD7DJVJQCR7CP

Play in the naturalistic style: Mrs Warren's Profession (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mrs._Warren's_Profession)

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0whzQfMN2g

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRYALdgYnkc

Bertolt Brecht:

Book: https://www.amazon.co.uk/d/Books/Brecht-Theatre-Bertolt/1408145456/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1486507366&sr=1-1&keywords=bertolt+brecht

Play in the style of epic theatre: The Skriker (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Skriker)

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-828KqtTkA

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Gyre & Gimble place puppetry at the heart of storytelling. Their work is inspired by the interplay of movement and aesthetic, daringly fusing traditional and innovative techniques. They create compelling characters that lead audiences through fantastical, improbable and even impossible stories.

They collaborate with artists both established and emerging to make new, exciting work. By creating productions that are both original and unconventional, we expand audience’s expectations of what puppetry is capable of, whilst inspiring and nurturing a passion in those discovering the art form.

Gyre & Gimble was founded in 2014 by Finn Caldwell and Toby Olié. Having met whilst performing in the original production of War Horse, they were made associate puppetry directors of the show. They went on to create puppetry for Tori Amos’s musical The Light Princess and co-directed The Elephantom which after a sell out initial run transferred to the West End.

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The Theatre of the Absurd ( is a post–World War II designation for particular plays of absurdist fiction written by a number of primarily European playwrights in the late 1950s, as well as one for the style of theatre which has evolved from their work. Their work focused largely on the idea of existentialism and expressed what happens when human existence has no meaning or purpose and therefore all communication breaks down, in fact alerting their audiences to pursue the opposite. Logical construction and argument gives way to irrational and illogical speech and to its ultimate conclusion, silence.

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Epic theatre was a theatrical movement arising in the early to mid-20th century from the theories and practice of a number of theatre practitioners, including Erwin Piscator, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Vsevolod Meyerhold and, most famously, Bertolt Brecht. The term "epic theatre" comes from Erwin Piscator who coined it during his first year as director of Berlin's Volksbühne (1924—1927). Piscator aimed to encourage playwrights to address issues related to "contemporary existence." This new subject matter would then be staged by means of documentary effects, audience interaction, and strategies to cultivate an objective responseThe epic form describes both a type of written drama and a methodological approach to the production of plays.

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Realism in the theatre was a general movement that began in the 19th-century theatre, around the 1870s, and remained present through much of the 20th century. It developed a set of dramatic and theatrical conventions with the aim of bringing a greater fidelity of real life to texts and performances. Part of a broader artistic movement, it includes Naturalism and Socialist realism. As part of a strategic argument in his day, Stanislavski used the term "psychological realism" to distinguish his 'system' of acting from his own Naturalistic early stagings of the plays. Naturalism, for him, implied the indiscriminate reproduction of the surface of life. Realism, on the other hand, while taking its material from the real world and from direct observation, selected only those elements which revealed the relationships and tendencies under the surface. The rest was discarded.

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Naturalism is a movement in European drama and theatre that developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It refers to theatre that attempts to create an illusion of reality through a range of dramatic and theatrical strategies.  It refers to theatre that attempts to create an illusion of reality through a range of dramatic and theatrical strategies. The three primary principles of naturalism are first, that the play should be realistic, and the result of a careful study of human behavior and psychology. The characters should be flesh and blood; their motivations and actions should be grounded in their heredity and environment. The presentation of a naturalistic play, in terms of the setting and performances, should be realistic and not flamboyant or theatrical.

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Commedia dell’arte is a theatrical form characterized by improvised dialogue and a cast of colorful stock characters that emerged in northern Italy in the fifteenth century and rapidly gained popularity throughout Europe. It translates to "theatre of the professional" and is known as the first form of professional theatre. Performances were based on a set schema, or scenario—a basic plot, often a familiar story, upon which the actors improvised their dialogue. Thus actors were at liberty to tailor a performance to their audience, allowing for sly commentary on current politics and bawdy humor that would otherwise be censored.

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Sanford Meisner was an American actor and acting teacher who developed an approach to acting instruction that is now known as the Meisner technique. While Meisner was exposed to method acting at the Group Theatre, his approach differed markedly in that he completely abandoned the use of affective memory, a distinct characteristic of method acting. Meisner maintained an emphasis on "the reality of doing," which was the foundation of his approach. Meisner, along with a number of other actors in the company, eventually resisted Strasberg's preoccupation with affective memory exercises. In 1934, fellow company member Stella Adler returned from private study with Stanislavski in Paris and announced that Stanislavski had come to believe that, as part of a rehearsal process, delving into one's past memories as a source of emotion was only a last resort and that the actor should seek rather to develop the character's thoughts and feelings through physical action, a concentrated use of the imagination, and a belief in the "given circumstances" of the text. As a result, Meisner began to focus on a new approach to the art of acting. The Meisner technique is an approach to acting which was developed by the American theatre practitioner Sanford Meisner. The Meisner technique is often confused with "method" acting taught by Lee Strasberg, since both developed from the early teachings of Constantin Stanislavski. The focus of the Meisner approach is for the actor to "get out of their head," such as that the actor is behaving instinctively to the surrounding environment. To this end, some exercises for the Meisner technique are rooted in repetition so that the words are deemed insignificant compared to the underlying emotion. In the Meisner technique, there is a greater focus on the other actor as opposed to one's internal thoughts or feelings associated to the prescribed character.

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Antonin Artaud was a French actor, costume designer and writer who revolutionized drama with his "Theater of Cruelty" idea.

He was involved in the surrealist movement as a writer and came up with the idea known as "The Theater of Cruelty," which argued that drama must abandon its emphasis on text and rely on more mysterious, primal expressions of sound, movement and light.

Working as a theatrical producer gave Artaud an insight into the exigencies of the practical aspects of theater, with which he was not happy. Then, in 1931, he saw a Balinese drama at the French Colonial Exposition in Paris and found in this work, which stressed spectacle and dance, the ideal for which he had been searching.

In 1932-1933 he published his first work of dramatic theory, Manifestes du théâtre de la cruauté (Manifestos of the Theater of Cruelty), and in 1935 staged the first work based on his theories, an adaptation of Les Cenci, heavily dependent on the earlier works on that theme by the British poet Shelley and the French novelist Stendhal. Since one of Artaud's theories involved the breaking of the barrier between actors and audience, Les Cenci may be have been the first play ever staged in the round.

This cruelty is a matter of neither sadism nor bloodshed. …" He went on, "I do not systematically cultivate horror … cruelty signifies rigor, implacable intention and decision, irreversible and absolute determination." He added, "It is a mistake to give the word 'cruelty' a meaning of merciless bloodshed and disinterested gratuitous pursuit of physical suffering. … Cruelty is above all lucid, a kind of rigid control and submission to necessity. There is no cruelty without consciousness. …" Yet, at the same time, it must be remembered that in one of his staged works Artaud picked as the theme the Cencis, a tale of rape, incest, and murder; that another of his works concerned the warped and dissolute Roman emperor Heliogabalus, and that one of his favorite British plays was 'Tis Pity She's a Whore, also about incest and murder. What Artaud's Theater of Cruelty had to offer instead of the conventional was a theater in which spectacle played the main role. Instead of poetic language, there would be a series of sounds and " … these intonations will constitute a kind of harmonic balance, a secondary deformation of speech. …" There will be musical instruments, he said, which will be "treated as objects and as part of the set." The lighting will be calculated to produce "an element of thinness, density, and opaqueness, with a view to producing the sensations of heat, cold, anger, fear, etc." The dress should be "age-old costumes of ritualistic intent," while the stage should be "a single site, without partition or barrier of any kind." He adds: "Manikins, enormous masks, objects of strange proportions will appear." As to the set, "There will not be any set." Finally, there will be no script: "We shall not act a written play, but we shall make attempts at direct staging, around themes, facts, or known works."

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Bertolt Brecht was a German poet, playwright, and theatrical reformer whose epic theatre departed from the conventions of theatrical illusion and developed the drama as a social and ideological forum for leftist causes.

From his late twenties Brecht remained a lifelong committed Marxist who, in developing the combined theory and practice of his "epic theatre", synthesized and extended the experiments of Erwin Piscator and Vsevolod Meyerhold to explore the theatre as a forum for political ideas and the creation of a critical aesthetics of dialectical materialism. Statue of Brecht outside the Berliner Ensemble's theatre in Berlin Epic Theatre proposed that a play should not cause the spectator to identify emotionally with the characters or action before him or her, but should instead provoke rational self-reflection and a critical view of the action on the stage. Brecht thought that the experience of a climactic catharsis of emotion left an audience complacent. Instead, he wanted his audiences to adopt a critical perspective in order to recognise social injustice and exploitation and to be moved to go forth from the theatre and effect change in the world outside. For this purpose, Brecht employed the use of techniques that remind the spectator that the play is a representation of reality and not reality itself. By highlighting the constructed nature of the theatrical event, Brecht hoped to communicate that the audience's reality was equally constructed and, as such, was changeable. Brecht's modernist concern with drama-as-a-medium led to his refinement of the "epic form" of the drama. This dramatic form is related to similar modernist innovations in other arts, including the strategy of divergent chapters in James Joyce's novel Ulysses, Sergei Eisenstein's evolution of a constructivist "montage" in the cinema, and Picasso's introduction of cubist "collage" in the visual arts. One of Brecht's most important principles was what he called the Verfremdungseffekt (translated as "defamiliarization effect", "distancing effect", or "estrangement effect", and often mistranslated as "alienation effect"). This involved, Brecht wrote, "stripping the event of its self-evident, familiar, obvious quality and creating a sense of astonishment and curiosity about them". To this end, Brecht employed techniques such as the actor's direct address to the audience, harsh and bright stage lighting, the use of songs to interrupt the action, explanatory placards, the transposition of text to the third person or past tense in rehearsals, and speaking the stage directions out loud.

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The "magic if" asks the actor to begin his work by asking, "What would I do if I were in these circumstances?"

In utilizing this tool, an actor simply asks themselves a what if question about their character. Let’s say they are playing a young man whose objective is to leave his family forever. After getting as much information as they can about the character from the text of the play, there will still be aspects of their character’s back story and present situation that are cloudy or simply not answered by the play.

The manner in which it is employed is simple and direct. As an example, if the character knows close to nothing about their father and it would be useful to have such information then what if question(s) about the father may prove to be helpful. Questions such as what if the character’s father beat him, what if his father ran off, or what if the father died before the character was born may be appropriate.

When an actor starts to ask themselves if questions about the character that they are playing, they can discover whole new elements that can be used anytime they approach the creation or rediscovery of a role.

This enables the actor to put themselves into a certain situation in order to play their character as best as possible.

http://broadwayeducators.com/stanislavski-method-magic-if-and-illusion-of-the-first-time/

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Emotion memory is a technique where the actor uses a emotion they once felt and applies it to how the character is feeling on the assumption it is applicable for example if the character has just been left out by someone the actor would think back to where they in their life felt left out this allowing them to connect to the character and the emotion the character is feeling. however emotion memory although effective needs to be controlled or an actor could loose themselves in their own emotions when they are supposed to be feeling the characters this taking away the actual acting and it becomes self indulgence for the actor as acting is essentially lying.

An example of a use for this is if you're playing a character who's lost a family member, you can take how you felt when you actually lost someone close to you to put them into the emotional position of the character.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affective_memory

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Stanislavski’s real name was Konstantin Sergeyevich Alexeyev but he adopted the stage name of Stanislavski in 1884. Born in 1863 to a life of considerable comfort as a member of one of the most affluent families in Russia, he died in 1938 at the age of 75. His family loved the theatre and he was able to indulge in amateur theatricals as a boy. But when he took a stage name it was to conceal his theatrical work from his family. However, in 1887 he had his father’s approval and eventually became an established figure.

Stanislavsky believed that, through study of the play, analysis of the role, and recall of previous emotions, the actor could arrive at the "inner truth" of a part by actually experiencing the emotions he conveyed to the audience. Furthermore, the actor must never lose control of his creation and must have the technical discipline to repeat his previously experienced emotions at every performance. The actor's interpretations must be unified in the same way that the central idea of the play was realized through the unity of direction, acting, and production design. This training, which aimed at stimulating the artistic intelligence of the actor, developing his inner discipline, and providing perfect control of such external means as voice, diction, and physical movement, came to be known in the United States as the "Method."

In response to criticisms that he had never staged contemporary Communist plays, Stanislavsky directed several dramas of revolutionary significance. Even so, he was attacked by proletarian critics for catering to "progressive bourgeois" audiences. Determined to maintain his integrity and the high standards of production upon which the Moscow Art Theater was founded, he resisted pressures to force his company to perform plays unworthy of its distinguished tradition. Fortunately for Stanislavsky, by the 1930s Communist theoreticians had elected to explain his system in terms of dialectical materialism. The Moscow Art Theater was venerated as the fountainhead of "social realism," and Stanislavsky occupied once again a central position in the Russian theatre.

http://www.encyclopedia.com/people/literature-and-arts/theater-biographies/constantin-stanislavsky
http://www.biography.com/people/constantin-stanislavski-9492018

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Steven Berkoff  is an English character actor, author, playwright and theatre director. He studied mime and drama which is incorporated into his theatre style.

Director Aleks Sierz describes Berkoff's theatre as "in-yer-face"

The language is usually filthy, characters talk about unmentionable subjects, take their clothes off, have sex, humiliate each another, experience unpleasant emotions, become suddenly violent. At its best, this kind of theatre is so powerful, so visceral, that it forces audiences to react: either they feel like fleeing the building or they are suddenly convinced that it is the best thing they have ever seen and want all their friends to see it too. It is the kind of theatre that inspires us to use superlatives, whether in praise or condemnation.

http://www.stevenberkoff.com/biog.html

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Akram Khan is an English dancer of Bangladeshi descent. His background is rooted in his classical kathak training and contemporary dance.

Akram Khan is one of the most celebrated and respected dance artists today. In just over fifteen years he has created a body of work that has contributed significantly to the arts in the UK and abroad. An instinctive and natural collaborator, Khan has been a magnet to world-class artists from other cultures and disciplines.

Khan’s work is recognised as being profoundly moving, in which his intelligently crafted storytelling is effortlessly intimate and epic. Described by the Financial Times as an artist “who speaks tremendously of tremendous things”, a recent highlight of his career was the creation of a section of the London 2012 Olympic Games Opening Ceremony that was received with unanimous acclaim.

http://www.akramkhancompany.net/company-profiles/akram-khan/

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Bob Fosse was an American dancer, musical theatre choreographer, director, screenwriter, film director and actor.

Fosse took an early interest in dance, displaying unusual skill. His parents supported his interest, enrolling him in formal dance training. By his early teens, Fosse was dancing professionally in local nightclubs. It was here that he was first exposed to the themes of vaudeville and burlesque performance.

Fosse faced opposition from directors and producers who considered his material was too suggestive. He decided to take on the role of director as well as choreographer in order to maintain the integrity of his artistic vision in Hollywood as well as on Broadway.

Chicago
Pippin

http://www.biography.com/people/bob-fosse-9299517#dancing-career
http://www.fosse.com/features/fosse_an_introduction.html

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Matthew Bourne is an English choreographer. His work includes contemporary dance and dance theatre.  He has been said to be the most audience-conscious artist. He does not go into detail about his works because he wants the audience to have their own interpretations. He is noted for his uniquely updated interpretations of traditional ballet.

The Car Man
Play without words
Edward Scissorhands
Nutcracker

http://new-adventures.net/matthew-bourne

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Contemporary dance:
Contemporary dance is a style of expressive dance that combines elements of several dance genres including modern, jazz, lyrical and classical ballet. Contemporary dancers strive to connect the mind and the body through fluid dance movements.
In terms of the focus of its technique, contemporary dance tends to combine the strong and controlled legwork of ballet with modern dance's stress on the torso, and also employs contract-release, floor work, fall and recovery, and improvisation characteristic of modern dance. Unpredictable changes in rhythm, speed, and direction are often used in this type of dance.
http://dance.about.com/od/typesofdance/f/What-Is-Contemporary-Dance.htm

Jazz dance:
Jazz is a dance form or dance that is matched to the rhythms and techniques of jazz music, developed by American blacks in the early part of the 20th century. http://www.dictionary.com/browse/jazz-dance

Tap dance:
Tap dance is a step dance tapped out audibly by means of shoes with hard soles or soles and heels to which taps have been added. A kind of dance in which you wear special shoes with metal plates on the heels and toes and make tapping sounds with your feet.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/tap%20dance

Ballet dance:
Ballet is a classical dance form demanding grace and precision and employing formalized steps and gestures set in intricate, flowing patterns to create expression through movement. A theatrical entertainment in which ballet dancing and music, often with scenery and costumes, combine to tell a story, establish an emotional atmosphere, etc.
http://www.dictionary.com/browse/ballet

Street dance:
Street dance is a dance style—regardless of country of origin—that evolved outside dance studios in any available open space such as streets, dance parties, block parties, parks, school yards, raves, and nightclubs. The term is used to describe vernacular dances in urban context. The term itself comes from the fact that the dances were made in urbanised cities. There no rules to “street dance” as improvisation and freestyle is emphasized. It is hard to define, but it is basically freely expressing music with one’s body.
https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Street_dance

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Compositions: This is a choreographed dance or piece of music. Dance choreography is also known as dance composition as it has been created and then has been put into practice by the choreographer.

Motif and development: This is a movement or gesture creating a short movement phrase which has the potential to be developed further on in the dance. A movement motif functions as choreographic device within the full choreography. It can contain the essence for the completed piece and is usually repeated with integrity and manipulated/changed throughout the dance.

Structure - This is the arrangement of and relations between the parts and elements of a complex piece such as a dance or a story. In dance these structures can be:
-AB (binary)
-ABA (ternary)
- ABACA (rondo)
-theme and variation (A, A1, A2, A3)
-narrative