TEAM for Actors: A Holistic Approach to Embodied Acting

Laura Bond

Laura Bond’s book, TEAM for Actors A Holistic Approach to Embodied Acting, has just been published.

I’m proud to have a copy on my shelf — and I’m totally honored and excited to have two of my plays included in  it (Appendix C: Scenes by Sam Post for Practice).

Thank you, Laura. Break a leg with this book!

Laura and I have become email friends and I hope to meet her in person one of these days. She’s awesome.

I’m not an actor, but it’s obvious that her book is fresh, innovative, and comprehensive — a valuable

and unique contribution to field. I have no doubt students in schools far and wide will create themselves in these pages for years to come.

TEAM for Actors: A Holistic Approach to Embodied Acting
TEAM for Actors

She’s Chair of the Drama Department at the University of North Carolina, Asheville. She is an Equity actor, theatre director, international workshop instructor, and teacher of acting since 1992.

TEAM for Actors gives you reliable tools for successful

acting and helps resolve a common gap between the mind and body so you can create a dynamic, holistic performance.

Based on Laura Bond’s twenty years of teaching acting and somatic emotion-regulation techniques, TEAM for Actors provides tangible methods for integrating the thoughts, emotions, and actions of expressive behavior into acting. The book incorporates scientific research, traditional acting approaches, and aspects of the Alba Emoting technique, a reliable method for embodying emotions and actions of expression. With Bond’s guidance, you can easily move from theoretical concepts into practical application. She illustrates the TEAM’s use through true stories, practical examples, and original exercises derived from years of experimentation.

Team for Actors Website

Team for Actors Blog

Team for Actors at Createspace

UNC-A Faculty Website

Team for Actors at Amazon.com

a memory walk

Took a pleasant walk tonight, right after dinner.  I needed a couple of miles in order to complete my daily 10k steps.

It was a perfect temperature for walking.  The soft rain kept people inside, and made the evening dark and quiet.  The slick streets reflected the glow of the street lamps. I remember seeing two students walk through the campus parking lot with umbrellas.  Other than that, I had the streets to myself.

Sometimes when I walk, I listen to audio books.  Sometimes I walk with my wife, or my dog.  But I often walk alone and listen to the sounds of the city, or the woods, and give myself space to think, or not think.  It’s good for my spirit, and better for my head, if I enjoy the time away from noise (especially my own noise).

I love walking this time of year.  When it’s too cold, or too wet, I walk in the mall, or even Walmart.  If it’s hot, I walk late at night, usually on dewey grass, after the earth has cooled.  But April, for me, is far from cruel; it’s one of those perfect months.

Usually I’m quite eager to hit my 10k steps goal each day, but tonight I watched the latter half of Glee with my wife and daughter and didn’t feel particularly enthused about rising from the couch and finishing those steps in the rain.  But it’s a compulsion, and I did it.

It was one of those days.  I had worked a good bit, driven to Mooresville to drop off papers, driven to Kannapolis to pick up my car, and visited my mother twice, briefly, in the Alzheimer’s unit at Carillon.  While there, I also had a nice visit with my neighbor.  We’ve lived only a few feet away for 24 years, and she recently moved into the assisted living.  Today’s conversation is probably the longest one we’ve ever had.  I also had a few rather knotty conversations with siblings and health care folks.

As I walked tonight, I was thinking about my mother, whose dementia, for various reasons, has progressed quite rapidly these past couple of weeks.

The thought that came into my head was a book, and a memory.

It’s a common memory, one shared by millions and millions of people.

I remember, as a child, sitting beside my mother on the living room couch, listening to her read me a book — The Little Engine That Could — one of the most popular bedtime books ever read to children by their mothers.

It occurred to me that she set a good example of a little engine that could.

Me?  I’ve had it easy and complained a lot.  But she grew up poor in a Great Depression and World War.  Her parents spoke with an accent.  She had a somewhat ethnic name before ethnic was fashionable, and lived above a downtown store, before that was fashionable.  She once told me that her parents never took a vacation.

She had some ability and fulfilled her potential.  She was a star student and a star reporter.  She raised a large family.  Those who know her would confirm that she was a workaholic.

She’s a person who, when her mother had cancer, would take her to see her sisters in Latvia one last time.  Visiting relatives in the Soviet Union in the 70’s required a bit of scrutiny — and passports and visas, which they did not have.  And because she couldn’t wait weeks to get them, she would go to Washington D.C. and knock on doors and return in three days, with passports and visas.

She’s quite weak now, and has virtually lost her ability to speak.  But she still moves around as much as she can, shuffling through the halls of Carillon, investigating every nook and cranny, speaking to others who are similarly afflicted with Alzheimer’s, offering to give those in wheelchairs a helpful push.

Last night, as I slowly walked the halls with her, watching her point at various pictures and rooms and books and papers and people, I couldn’t help but to admire her energy, her desire to keep moving in such a confined but seemingly vast space.

And tonight, as I walked down my street, noticing, across the vacant lot, in the distance, that home I grew up in, thinking about her and how she’s declined so quickly in recent weeks and days, I enjoyed a vivid memory of her reading me that book she and so many mothers read their children, and realized that she was and still is the one who really lives up to that creed:  “I-think-I-can-I-think-I-can-I-think-I-can.”

Sarah Palin reflects on her Presidency in new memoir

In her new memoir: Going Vogue: How I Saved the My Country’s Ass, Sarah Palin fondly remembers her greatest achievements as President of the United States.

Sarah Palin
Sarah Palin

In an interview published yesterday on Craigslist, Palin brushed off questions that reminded her of the fact that she was never elected and therefore never served as President of the United States.

“Aw — now that’s just the left wing liberal commie media trying to pick on me again,” she says.

“I can’t decide what the best thing I did was,” writes Palin, in the soon-to-be-published book.

“It was either eliminating the death tax, capital gains tax, or income tax,” she writes. “Whichever — it worked. There’s no more government spending, and no budget deficit.”

She also credits the end of abortion and birth control as strategies that will have long term benefits for the country.

“The increased reproduction will grow our population and the numbers in our military,” writes Palin. “We need more children to fight in future wars that will make our country safer.”

Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, a strong Palin supporter, fully supports the Palin Presidency.

Michele Bachmann
Michele Bachmann

“Real Americans know Sarah Palin was President,” says Bachmann. “It’s the un-American Americans that try to keep saying she wasn’t the President.”

Carrie Prejean, a Palin intern and former Miss America Pageant contestant, helped Palin write the book.

“This is not only one of the first books I’ve ever worked on,” says Prejean, “but I think the Palin memoir will go down in history as one of the first books I ever read.”

Carrie Prejean
Carrie Prejean

Prejean, a strong opponent of gay marriage who believes people should have sex only with themselves, also believes strongly that Palin was President.

“Saying she’s not President is inappropriate,” says Prejean.

Glenn Beck, of Fox News, noted that Palin’s “book” rhymes with “cook,” as in “cooking the books,” — something Beck claims poor people do on a regular basis.

Beck also points out that Hitler, in fact, did cook books — and that “cook” is “something people do to corn,” which is contained in the word “acorn.”

Glenn Beck
Glenn Beck

“Cook also rhymes with ‘look,'” says Beck. “As in ‘look’ how choked-up I get about loving my country.

“It also rhymes with ‘took,'” he says, “as in they ‘took’ out my appendix so we can ‘took’ back our country.'”

Hype for my new book of plays

cover of An Actor's Dozen
cover of An Actor's Dozen

This is the cover of a book I’m publishing.  Consider this the pre-publication publicity hype.

These days, with print-on-demand, self-publishing can be remarkably easy, and cheap.

It’s also possible, of course, to pay editors and graphic artists, etc.

But it’s nearly free if you do your own editing, typesetting, and design — and upload the files yourself.

Of course, then you get book covers that look like…this.

In a few days, this book will be available on Createspace.com, Amazon.com, the local bookstore (Literary Bookpost), the store at The Looking Glass Artist Collective, and from the trunk of my car.

The media blitz will be minimal — but so was the risk.

It didn’t cost me anything but missed sleep.

I seriously doubt any traditional publisher would have been interested in the least.  The cost is high and the market is small.

If nobody buys it — so what?  It’s stored on a computer and printed only when somebody wants a copy (except for the ones I buy, that will be in the trunk of my car).

If people do buy it, good for me.  I make a few dollars profit per book (instead of the tiny royalty a hypothetical traditional publisher would hypothetically pay, if they would hypothetically publish it ).

If anybody wants to read the plays for free — they’re all here, on the website.  Lots of people do every day.  There’s nothing new in the book other than the more portable form and a little more editorial scrutiny.

This is just to state the obvious:  publishing is really changing.