Tag: drama

Posted on

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

Posted on

It’s called groupfunding

Forgive me, I have sinned. I give my plays away, free, online.

And it’s always a pleasure when somebody wants to use one of them in small space or classroom.

I get plenty of requests for scripts from overseas, sometimes for film projects.  What happens after they get the script is anybody’s guess.

The pleasure comes from the request itself, and that’s almost always the last I hear of it. Occasionally I get a thank-you email, sometimes with a photo.

But while there’s satisfaction, there’s also a certain emptiness that comes with the online giveaways to faraway places. I’ve had the urge to see my own work done and thereby grow as an artist from the experience. My first two plays, Coffee Therapy, and another that I don’t care to think about, much less name, were produced first as dinner theatre, here in my lifelong hometown of Salisbury, NC.  Both were done in the upstairs of a local restaurant. I’ve had lots of fun seeing my work produced in Charlotte, and even traveled to New York a couple of times.

But I’ve never had a play produced here, in my hometown, in a theatre. And we have a number of theatres spaces and companies here.

So I recently wrote a play, set a date for production, and put down a deposit at our new, cozy little theatre space downtown, a converted warehouse now known as  Looking Glass Artist Collective.

Since declaring this, things have started to happen.

We’ve had a few readings, with great feedback. And I’ve done a good bit of rewriting based on that feedback.

I started a theatre company, Spoken Space Theatre, and I plan to use this entity to give birth to more of my plays in the future.

Justin Dionne, an energetic, talented young director, has generously agreed to take on the project. He gave the script a careful reading, with more feedback, and suggested more rewrites.

Auditions are two weeks away, and I’m working on the script.

So this is exciting.

Producing my own play, here, offers the opportunity for me to see it, and work on it.

This has its disadvantages.  That is, if it sucks, I’ll be there — and that can be difficult.  And, if it’s great, I’ll be there — and that can be difficult.

And I’m responsible for paying for it.

The deposit for the theatre space was a chunk, and about as much as I can handle.  And I’m assuming we will sell tickets that will bring in some funds.

But there’s still a gap.

So I’m looking for a corporate sponsor or two to put in a thousnd dollars.

And I’m asking friends and family to chip in, via Kickstarter.com. It’s called groupfunding. That sounds better than “asking friends and family for money.”

 

PoochieFund the Project with Kickstarter

There are rewards involved. Anybody who pledges $10 gets a ticket, which is the cost of a ticket. So while it is asking for money, it’s really no different that asking people to buy a ticket in advance.

Kickstarter makes it a game, such that the project gets funded when the goal is met, or not funded at all.

So there’s a bit of drama involved in paying for the drama.

So far, it’s been interesting.  Some of my oldest, dearest friends and family members have chipped in. Many of them live in other states and will not travel to see the show.

And I’m a third of the way there.

Drama.

The play is called Poochie, and it’s about a family dealing with Alzheimer’s Disease.  People who know me think I’ve written a play about my family and my mother.  I didn’t.  I’ve had some experience with this disease (mother and grandmother), but I want to honor them. So instead of writing about my own family, I made one up. Which is the way it should be.

So that’s that.

Want to be a producer? This is your chance. Go to Kickstarter.com.

Posted on

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.