Ensemble Theatre Making: A Practical Guide

Ensemble Theatre Making: A Practical Guide is the first comprehensive diagnostic handbook for building, caring for, and maintaining an ensemble. Successful ensembles don’t happen by chance; they must be created, nurtured, and maintained through specific actions. Achieving common goals in rehearsal and performance requires group trust, commitment and sacrifice. Ensemble Theatre Making is a step-by-step guide to these processes.

Candid and direct, it considers:

• how to plan and prepare for ensemble work;
• the essential building blocks of ensemble;
• how to identify ensemble behaviors;
• techniques for responding to, and positively redirecting those behaviors.

Tools, techniques and recipes for rethinking ensemble redefine it as a grounded practice, rather than a question of luck. Above all, this significant new work brings decades of experience to the sometimes mystifying questions of what creates ensemble bonds, how to protect them, and how to fix them when they break.

Rose Burnett Bonczek is a professor of theater arts and program head of the BFA in Acting at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, USA, where she specializes in improvisation, directing, and theater pedagogy; she received the Claire Tow Distinguished Teacher award in 2009–10. She has directed professionally and in educational theatre for over 35 years, and is the festival director and co-producer of Gi60: The International One Minute Play Festival, Live US Edition.

David Storck is a professor of Performing Arts at the Savannah College of Art and Design, USA, where he specializes in improvisation and character development. He directs improvised and scripted shows, both professionally and in educational theatre. Since 2000 he has taught ensemble-building workshops to everyone from school children to corporate executives and fellow educators.