Books and Course Manuals
The Human Performer
Exploring Human Expression, Body Language and our Personal Theatre in Everyday Life
from: Author's Note
This book is about how we, as human beings, express ourselves and about the motivating factors behind the acts we make. It offers new ways of seeing and understanding different areas relating to what makes us perform the way we do - the theatre of our face, non-verbal communication - and it gives signposts as to how we can become more effective in our personal theatre and expression.
The writings within this book are designed to offer insights and oblique perceptions that hopefully will interest you in understanding more about human expression and why we do what we do. Wonder is a stream from which we can draw endless refreshment and whilst science does much to help us understand the world we live in, we need to maintain or create space for the more mystical and less empirical elements of living, from which comes enquiry of a holistic kind.
As human beings, we have a design that naturally lends itself to search and explore. Our bodies and faculties are a living laboratory with the capability to sense, register, analyse, feel, calculate, reason, imagine, know, assess, compare, record, digest and ferment. We stay young by trying out new ways, searching for new perceptions and by exercising ourselves in the great multiplicity of our living opportunity. As a species, we are a long way from being fully evolved. We grow by questioning, seeking, exploring and researching. Somehow the pressures of life today mean that we easily become set in our ways – walking the same way, talking the same way, feeling the same way – and we can also become too certain and limited in the answers and pools of knowledge we reach for to help us understand our lives.
Use this book as a prompt. Pick it up, read a few pages, try some things out - let it encourage you to wonder. It is not an academic exposition on life, and nothing in it is meant to infer certainty. Academia can sometimes restrict growth, in that it can dull the faculties with which we can question and come to know things. Any journey of discovery ought to encourage all of our faculties to become involved and enlivened – the thinking, feeling, experiencing and knowing parts of us. The human being is multi-faceted, and to emphasise one or two parts at the expense of the others is to rob us of our fuller possibility.
This world is the great theatre, and we are players on its stage for some brief time. We have to discover our unique part and we do this by searching amongst the familiar in us and around us to hopefully come to new and more insightful eyes.
The Tear
This short book is a series of essays that offer intriguing insights into different styles of theatre and art around the world, and some of the background understandings about their origin and purpose. From Bali to japan, England to China and India, this book offers new ways to think about world theatre and dance. Price £7 plus p+p.
The Tear - Volume II
Due to be published in 2009
Electrobics - The Undiscovered Self
Due to be published in 2009
Articles and Short Writings
Understanding and Managing Our Nerves
Many of us can suffer overactive nerves in situations when we have to perform in front of other people, be it a presentation, being on stage or in small meetings. This six–page ebook gives new ways of thinking about our nerves and why they can give us problems, and includes methods to re–address the roots of this.
Exploring the Challenges in Exhibiting Visual Art
This articles offers approaches and insights into the effective presentation of visual art that will encourage engagement with the works.
The Emotional Performer
What is the emotion and what is it for? This writing explores how we can better understand and harness our emotion to best effect. Available shortly.