Play-acting: Thirty-two Theatre Workshop Activities That Create Performance - by Luke Dixon

Play-Acting is an inspired book of theatrical beginnings-jumping-off points for actors, teachers, and directors. Drawing upon his thirty years of designing and leading theater workshops, Luke Dixon goes to the heart of contemporary theater practice.

Whether drawing upon Japanese butoh, Shakespearean verse, or African rhythms, these thirty-two workshops cover a wide range of activities-voice warm-ups, body work, the exploration of theatrical space, life games, dreamtime, sense and chakras, working with the spine, and much, much more.

More than a collection of exercises, Play-Acting is constructed to take the user on a journey from learning about the anatomy of the individual actor's body to the performance of narrative by a group of actors. With tips on what you might expect to experience as an actor, teacher, or director, along with ideas on how to exploit the unexpected in performance, Play-Acting is a book to be read again and again.

A clear, incisive and inspirational book.

John Fox, Welfare State International

A great book for performing arts students or for teachers or fledgling directors new to devising…a very useful addition to performing arts libraries.

Total Theatre Magazine

I find this book packed with information and ideas, an enormous support in the classroom.

Clare Davidson, Director and Professor of Acting College of Santa Fe

Luke's book manages to be a pleasant, wit and very useful reading for theatre practitioners. It's an important material for actors, directors, drama students and everyone who wants to get a taste on the process of getting on the stage. Whatever the country or language he is doing it.

Ramiro Silveira, Director, Poa Em Cena Brazil

This book is an effective introduction to theatre interaction in which technical accuracy promotes individual inventiveness.

Eugenio Barba

An excellent book with an international accent; it is original, stimulating and packed with new ideas for students, actors and directors. I fully recommend it to all.

Leon Rubin, Director, director trainer, Professor of Drama and Theatre Arts at Middlesex University, England.

US Edition:

English Edition:

Playwriting: A Practical Guide - by Noel Greig

		What makes a story work? Playwriting offers a practical guide to the creation of text for live performance, and contains a wealth of exercises for all individuals and groups involved in making theatre. It can be used in a range of contexts: either as a step-by-step guide to the creation of an individual play, as a handy resource for a teacher or workshop leader, or as a stimulus for the group-devised play. The result of Noel Greig's thirty years' experience as a playwright, actor, director and teacher, Playwriting is the ideal handbook for anyone who engages with playwriting and is ultimately concerned with creating a story and bringing it to life on the stage.



The Forbidden Lesson A play for young people - Bilingual edition; English and Albanian
.
.
		The Forbidden Lesson resulted from a playwrights’ workshop organized in 2004 by the Center for Children’s Theatre Development in Prishtina, Kosovo, one of theatre nomad’s collaborators on Faraway Nearby. The text for The Forbidden Lesson is the result of collaboration between five young playwrights with the final montage of the text created by Jeton Neziraj and Doruntina Basha. The play itself is about the need that young people have for knowledge and honesty from their parents and teachers, knowledge that the older generation is often reluctant, or too afraid to share. This is the forbidden lesson of the title. The play is about sexuality and taboo. Parents in Kosovo don’t talk to their children about sexuality, or, more often, when they do, they try to deceive them, because it is considered a “shameful world” about which children should not know. The Forbidden Lesson, in a poetic approach, explores the intimate world of children and youth and its clash with adult prejudices. The Forbidden Lesson was performed for the first time at the Dodona Theatre in Prishtina, on September 30^th 2004. £5 Book available direct from theatre nomad



At Break of Day - by Noel Greig

At Break of Day is the story of two soldiers who make an epic journey home after a long war, encountering many different people on the way. Events become more and more dreamlike, indeed nightmarish, taking them not just along the road home but through a whole century and its conflicts. Along the way they quarrel, make up, quote Shakespeare, fight, comfort each other, joke, escape from prison, and betray each other. One of them records his thoughts in a notebook. Interwoven with the story of the soldiers is that of a young woman who has made her own journey to a distant land, to discover what happened to her great-grandfather. He disappeared after a long-distant war and she searches the battered notebook that once belonged to him for clues. The play presents an absurd universe where time and place shift alarmingly and which is haunted by the echoes of great disasters and great hopes, great poetry and great sorrow.

Tambora – Songs from a Xhosa Township

'Tambora is the name of an African drum. Songs, dances and rhythms are essential to Xhosan life and music is integral to who we are. Our group is composed of Xhosan women who live in New Brighton Township, outside Port Elizabeth, Eastern Cape, South Africa. Some of us are studying at the University of Port Elizabeth, some at the Technikon and some work at jobs. Tambora is our real life.'

£10

CD available direct from theatre nomad

Woza Mama - Grahamstown and Great Mongeham women's photographs of their lives - by Sarah Ainslie

'This Project involved two groups of women, one from the township of Grahamstown, South Africa and the other from Great Mongeham, Kent, England. Each woman was given a disposable camera, kindly donated by Kodak, and asked to make a portrait of their lives during a period of two to fourteen days. I then collaged each woman's photographs onto an A2 board.
The result is an extraordinary insight into their daily lives. This is especially important for the women in Grahamstown as most of them had never used a camera before. It is also important for everyone to feel that photographs can be of the most mundane things or experiences, and yet may be the most relevant to our lives. Generally we have a record of life made up of special events and people dressed-up and behaving their best rather than about the ordinary moments of our lives. This has been a wonderful experience and I hope that for the women it has gone some way for them to show their life in photographs.

The result is an extraordinary insight into their daily lives. This is especially important for the women in Grahamstown as most of them had never used a camera before. It is also important for everyone to feel that photographs can be of the most mundane things or experiences, and yet may be the most relevant to our lives. Generally we have a record of life made up of special events and people dressed-up and behaving their best rather than about the ordinary moments of our lives. This has been a wonderful experience and I hope that for the women it has gone some way for them to show their life in photographs.

The idea for this project came about in South Africa in 1999, when I was taking photographs for Theatre Nomad from Deal, Kent at the Grahamstown Festival. Gill Maylam took me into a township where she had helped set up an arts project called Umthathi (this is the Xhosa word for sneeze wood, which is the symbol of strength and protection) and here met some of the women. Afterwards I realised I wanted to take more photographs but also what seemed more interesting would be for the women to take photographs of their own daily experiences. I became interested in the idea of involving a group of women in a village in Kent to do the same project and then to exhibit all the work together along with the portraits I had taken.'

£5 Book available direct from theatre nomad

SOUTH AFRICAN THEATRE IN THE MELTING POT:

Trends and Developments at the Turn of the Millennium - by Rolf Solberg

A collection of interviews with South African playwrights examining the way South African theatre has adapted to the social and political situation in South Africa since 1994. Includes interviews with Brett Bailey, Antjie Krog, William Kentridge, Duma Ka Ndlovu, Reza de Wet, Walter Chakela, Miki Flockmann, Thuleni Mtshali, and Lesego Rampolokeng.

£15 Book available direct from theatre nomad