Overview

Acting calls upon inner powers and perceptions, but most of all it calls upon the actor's imagination. In this revolutionary book, Janet Sonenberg offers an entirely new technique for exploring the imagination. The term ""dreamwork"" describes the process by which an individual can free the dreaming mind to explore issues or materials from the waking state. Dreamwork for Actors brilliantly explores the potential of dreams for actor training and development. Dreams, Janet Sonenberg shows, can unlock the actor's autonomous imagination. Working with the noted Jungian analyst Robert Bosnak, she has re-interpreted the acient practice of ""incubating dreams""; in this new technique , the actor seeds the dream with materials from the play under study and then uses the resulting dream. No other acting technique offers the perfromer's own dreams as a means to imaginative and artistic expression. Drawing upon her wide experience as actor and director, Janet Sonenberg shows what dreamwork can do. The result is a new tool with which actors can explore their psyches and enrich their performances.

Full Product Details

9780878301652

Table of Contents

Reviews

Sonenberg's thesis and the elements of the technique are clearly identified and honed in each of her students' journeys and, in a separate chapter, with actor Alan Arkin and son Anthony. <br>-Elizabeth Stifter, Library Journal <br> Mining your dreams, the mother lode of inspiration, is here made practical and useful and oddly safe with such an honest and courageous guide to lead the way. Like all good teachers she doesn't ask you to do anything she hasn't done herself.. <br>-Kathleen Chalfant, actor <br> Soonberg's new acting techniques guide actors in the use of dreams to enrich performance. Her techniques give access to that part of the imagination which emanates from our unconscious.... <br>-Jean-Claude Van Itallie, January 2004 <br> Reading Dreamwork for Actors by Janet Sonenberg was a little like having a really good dream. It needed a little time to draw me in, but once I did, I was fascinated and didn't want it to end. Also like a dream, I was never sure whether to believe what I was reading or not, but so convincing was the journey and the description along the way that the book made me want it to be real. Unlike a dream, , however, when I closed the book on the last page, I was convinced that what Sonenberg reported was no fiction created by the imagination, and I can't wait to try out her discoveries--if not with my college students, then certainly with my colleagues in the profession.. <br>-Dramatics Magazine, March 2004 <br>

Sonenberg's thesis and the elements of the technique are clearly identified and honed in each of her students' journeys and, in a separate chapter, with actor Alan Arkin and son Anthony. -- Elizabeth Stifter, LibraryJournal Mining your dreams, the mother lode of inspiration, is here made practical and useful and oddly safe with such an honest and courageous guide to lead the way. Like all good teachers she doesn't ask you to do anything she hasn't done herself. -- Kathleen Chalfant, actor Soonberg's new acting techniques guide actors in the use of dreams to enrich performance. Her techniques give access to that part of the imagination which emanates from our unconscious.. -- Jean-Claude Van Itallie Reading Dreamwork for Actors by Janet Sonenberg was a little like having a really good dream. It needed a little time to draw me in, but once I did, I was fascinated and didn't want it to end. Also like a dream, I was never sure whether to believe what I was reading or not, but so convincing was the journey and the description along the way that the book made me want it to be real. Unlike a dream,, however, when I closed the book on the last page, I was convinced that what Sonenberg reported was no fiction created by the imagination, and I can't wait to try out her discoveries--if not with my college students, then certainly with my colleagues in the profession. -- Dramatics Magazine

Author Information

Janet Sonenberg is Professor of Theatre at MIT. A stage director who has also worked in television and film, she is the author of The Actor Speaks: Twenty-Four ActorsTalk about Process and Technique. In August 2003 she will be developing her dreamwork technique with the Royal Shakespeare Company. She lives in Cambridge, MA.

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available