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The Physical Actor: Exercises for Action and Awareness. By Annie Loui. London: Routledge, 2009; pp. 216.
In her book The Physical Actor: Exercises for Action and Awareness, Annie Loui gathers approaches to teaching movement from a variety of sources, and in a step-by-step process integrates the sum of her influences into a coherent whole that can be applied by the prospective movement teacher directly to the classroom. Movement training for actors is a science unto itself, requiring its teachers to blend their knowledge of the mechanics of the body with an equal understanding of the acting process. The discipline's teachers have experimented with a range of systems since the 1950s, gathering influences from performance traditions around the world, inventing new techniques, and carrying on the legacies of their own teachers. Although a great diversity of pedagogies exists in the United States, there is broad agreement among those in the field that movement training for actors should develop the actor's body as an instrument of expression, and it should link that expression to the actor's kinesthetic, emotional, psychological, and creative life. The Physical Actor maps out an approach to training that forges a connection between physical expression and the acting process.
The title of Loui's book accurately indicates its stance as a comprehensive guide to the physical training of actors. Comprised primarily of practical exercises for the movement studio, the book outlines approaches to warming up, spatial relationships, mime technique, moving with partners, and contact improvisation and composition, all of which emanate from the book's descriptive subtitle Exercises for Action and Awareness. Chapters detail the purpose and progression of exercises and describe, with the helpful assistance of photographs, how each activity will work. Interspersed throughout the book are boxes highlighting commentaries that provide...