Acting 2.0: Doing Work That Gets Work in a High-tech World - Softcover

Abeson, Anthony

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1575259028 ISBN 13: 9781575259024

Publisher: Smith & Kraus Pub Inc, 2016

Synopsis

Anthony Abeson s actor-training is an amalgam of his work with Peter Brook, Jerzy Grotowski, Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler and Harold Clurman. Many of his students have gone on to successful careers in theatre, film and television. In his book "Acting 2.0: Doing Work that Gets Work in a High-Tech World" Mr. Abeson discusses the consequences of the American acting culture s emphasis on using rather than developing talent. In the opening of his book he says "I want to empower you with practical tools with which to do good work that gets work in the room work on the stage and screen that inspires all of us, that arouses not prurience or violence but that precious something, intangible but of inestimable value, that is being destroyed from our lives : our humanity.

About this title

About the Author

Anthony Abeson s high school summers were always spent in summer stock, acting and directing, along with all the other jobs summer theater required: stage managing, set construction,
lighting design, etc. Teaching surfaced even then. His earliest memory is of writing the name Konstantin S. Stanislavski on a blackboard in front of bewildered children s theater apprentices. While at Columbia University he made his off-Broadway
debut as an actor and assistant director at the Sheridan Square
Playhouse in a repertory company whose director introduced him to Lee Strasberg and the Actors Studio. He was unable to attend his graduation due to his appointment by the Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council as a resident actor and director of the Canterbury Theatre Company in Christchurch, New Zealand, that country s first international, professional theater, where he worked with actors from all over the U.K. (As a twenty-two-year-old American, it was a challenge to direct actors whose previous director had been Laurence Olivier.) While there, Anthony also served as the director of the Experimental Theatre Laboratory of the
Christchurch Academy of Dramatic Arts, that country s first training academy.
In 1968 he began his long collaboration with Jerzy Grotowski, first as an actor at the Centre Dramatique National du Sud-Est in Aix-en-Provence, and later, in the early 1970s, as a participant/
assistant in Grotowski s first Special Project in a forest outside of Philadelphia. Further collaboration occurred under the auspices of the Instytut Aktora in Wroclaw and Brzezinka, Poland. In 1972 Anthony was invited to join Peter Brook, former
director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, at his Centre Inter-
2.0.indd 163 12/21/2015 12:29:11 PM
164 Anthony Abeson national de Recherche Théâtrale, in Paris, where he participated as an actor in the Centre s exploration of the effect of nonlinear language on the actor s process. The research was facilitated by
the deliberate inclusion of actors from Japan, Africa, France, and other countries, with hardly any common language between them. Instead, during Anthony s stay, the verbal impulse was
channeled into ancient Greek and/or bird calls and applied to situations created by Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath s husband, who went on to become the poet laureate of England. In 1968, Anthony started a theater company, the Ensemble
Theatre Laboratory, a project of both the New York State Arts Council and the New Mexico State Arts Commission. One of
its founding members was the late actor-monologist Spalding Gray, whose ironic version of their Missouri tour of The Tower of Babel, can be found in his A Personal History of the American
Theatre. During this time, Anthony continued to be exposed to Lee
Strasberg and the Actors Studio, becoming one of the youngest people ever to address a special session of the Studio with Lee. As a member of the Directors Unit of the Studio, he was taught by Harold Clurman. He was honored to have been a guest in both their homes. In 1973 Anthony began another theater company, the Washington
Theatre Laboratory of Washington, D.C., with the support of the National Endowment for the Arts and the D.C. Arts
Commission. The company s training program marked the start of many careers, including those of Caroline Aaron and Karen Allen. Selected as a seminal archetype of the experimental theater movement in America, its archival materials are housed in the
permanent collection of the Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee Theatre Research Institute at Ohio State University. For more than twenty-five years, Anthony has been an acting
teacher and coach in New York City. Many of his acting students have gone on to successful careers in theater, film, and television.

Edition details

• Publisher: Smith & Kraus Pub Inc
• Publication date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1575259028
• ISBN 13: 9781575259024
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 165