Book Club

Living Pictures Book Clubs are workshops that mine the ideas and exercises from a theatre book in a practical environment.

A group of directors and actors meet monthly and spend a weekend together, working practically to understand how the ideas in a given text can be applied to scenes from a play. These workshops are practical, peer-led and designed to test the ideas of a book rather than your own practice. Directors prepare a section of the book each and lead a session with the group which tests the ideas in that chapter. Actors learn a scene from a particular play (this year we are working on The Seagull and As You Like It, last year we worked on Three Sisters) and come with an open mind to explore the ideas that the directors introduce.

Book Clubs are a fantastic opportunity to inform your process with the ideas of leading theatre practitioners, having gained a genuine understanding in an unpressurised rehearsal room environment. Book clubs also provide a forum for networking in a situation where focus is on gaining a shared understanding, rather than talking up your CV. They are an opportunity to work with new directors/ actors and establish a common language with which we can talk about theatre.

Feedback from previous book clubs has included:

Book clubs have really altered the way I direct

As an actor it is good to be constantly trying different ways of working: book club gives an opportunity to apply all the books that you read at drama school to a text and see if they work for you.

An opportunity to try ideas out in practice without the pressure of a production situation, as well as being able to watch and interact with other directors - both are invaluable and rare.

Books we will explore in the first half of 2009 include:

• How to Stop Acting by Harold Guskin
• Speaking Shakespeare by Patsy Rodenburg
• A Challenge for the Actor by Uta Hagen
• From Word to Play by Cicely Berry
• The Tape Recorded Sessions by Lee Strasberg
• Playing Shakespeare by John Barton

If you have previously attended a Living Pictures workshop and would like to get involved, please email a CV and a paragraph about why you are interested to living.pictures@yahoo.co.uk

The Club is open to both actors and directors - the only criteria is a desire to learn. The cost will be minimal (Usually about £10). We are able to keep the cost down due to the generous support from The Jerwood Space. Subsidised rehearsal facilities provided by the Jerwood Space.

The Story so far... Living Pictures Book Club at the Jerwood...

As theatre makers we read a great many "theatre books" - books on directing and acting or descriptions of a particular practitioner's process, but relatively little of what we read ends up in our practice. What we actually do in the rehearsal room tends to derive from things we have done practically, either in training, workshops or while working as assistant directors or actors. Living Pictures set up the Book Club to combat this problem, by creating a forum in which directors and actors can try applying the ideas from theatre books in an open, low-pressure environment. It also provides a forum for directors and actors to learn how to work together and investigate their collaborative process away from the pressures of the rehearsal room.

The Structure of the Book Club

The book club takes place over a weekend. In advance of the weekend, the directors have read a theatre book and prepared an hour and a half's session in which they apply a chapter or theme of the book to Three Sisters. The actors do not read the book, but they do read Three Sisters and they learn a short scene, in case any of the exercises require them to be off book. At the start of the weekend the company warms up, gets to know each other and then begins work. After each hour and a half session the actors feedback about what elements of the exercise were helpful to them and the directors feed back about how they read the results of the exercise. Over the course of the weekend we work through the book in chronological order. At the end of the weekend, there is a summing up session in which all participants share their thoughts on the book and describe which elements they will take into their directing or acting process.

What we have learned so far

The two books we have explored so far are The Actor and the Target by Declan Donnellan and Different Every Night by Mike Alfreds. Both books surprised participants; exercises we were highly sceptical about proved transformative and exercises we were certain would work had uninspiring results. We all took several elements from each weekend that we were certain we would integrate into our working processes. Here is a selection of feedback from the workshops:

Usually if I don't understand or agree with something I read I just forget/ignore it, but having to really address the difficulties in the book, and work through them together produced some amazing results!

GREAT Value for money

A great way of getting people together to learn from each other, it helps that everyone is involved in everything.

It definitely has value as continuance in training and maintenance of skills and flexibility for a performer. It also seems to be very useful as a forum for directors where they can expose themselves to different techniques and processes in a safe space outside the usual constraints of time which come with a typical rehearsal process.

I love the fact that I am learning as well as being a facilitator for other people's learning... a really valuable experience for actors and directors.

The space is warm, light, ideal. It's good to be able to work at the Jerwood.

It beats reading the book alone at home by a mile!... keep 'em going!

The books that we worked on in 2008 were:

• The Actor and the Target by Declan Donnellan
• Different Every Night by Mike Alfreds
• The Stanislavsky Toolkit by Bella Merlin
• Why is that so Funny? by John Wright
• Viewpoints by Anne Bogart and Tina Landau
• The Art of Acting by Stella Adler