Building Embodiment: Integrating Acting, Voice, and Movement to Illuminate Poetic Text

Building Embodiment: Integrating Acting, Voice, and Movement to Illuminate Poetic Text offers a collection of strategic and practical approaches to understanding, analyzing, and embodying a range of heightened text styles, including Greek tragedy, Shakespeare, and Restoration/comedy of manners.

These essays offer insights from celebrated teachers across the disciplines of acting, voice, and movement and are designed to help actors and instructors find deeper vocal and physical connections to poetic text. Although each dramatic genre offers a unique set of challenges, Building Embodiment highlights instances where techniques can be integrated, revealing how the synthesis of body, brain, and word results in a fuller sense of character experiencing for both the actor and the audience.

This book bridges the gap between academic and professional application and invites the student and professional actor into a richer experience of character and story.

Baron Kelly is the Vilas Distinguished Professor in the Theatre and Drama Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is a four-time Fulbright scholar and has traveled extensively as a cultural specialist for the United States Bureau of Education and Cultural Affairs teaching and lecturing on the theatre in Russia, Scandinavia, Africa, Europe, London, and Asia. His teaching of acting has led him to teaching and lecturing residencies in more than a dozen countries on five continents.

Karen Kopryanski is an Assistant Professor and the Head of Voice and Speech at Virginia Commonwealth University. She has coached more than 80 theatrical productions in the United States and spent ten years on the faculty of The Boston Conservatory. A 2003 graduate of the ART/MXAT Institute at Harvard University, she is also Reviews Editor for the Voice and Speech Review; an associate teacher of Fitzmaurice Voicework; a recently appointed US Fulbright specialist; and has taught and led workshops in Russia, Italy, Canada, Singapore, Austria, and Turkey.