The Expressive Actor is an innovative guide to training your body, mind, and spirit to deliver top-notch dramatic performances. Master teacher Michael Lugering’s pioneering approach and smart exercises synthesize the traditionally disparate disciplines of acting, voice, and movement into one unified method by placing you in direct contact with the physical sensations that are responsible for expressing your body’s deepest, richest thoughts and feelings.
Lugering leads you through a series of voice and body exercises and a companion set of improvisational studies. His full-body actor’s workout increases physical and vocal expressiveness by building the requisite dexterity, flexibility, strength, and freedom you need. Meanwhile the improvisations expand your emotional expressiveness by developing an awareness of and control over impulse, spontaneity, and creativity. The techniques in The Expressive Actor are repeatable, ideal for daily preparation, and can be practiced alone or with others to keep the voice and body ready for the demands of rehearsal and performance.
Part inspiration and part perspiration, Lugering’s technique is thoroughly researched and brings together recent discoveries in philosophy, somatic psychology, neuroscience, and aesthetics to create a powerful new way to train your voice, your body, and your feelings. Physical, intuitive, and fundamental, The Expressive Actor will plumb your body for the same kinds of energy and information that highly intellectualized actor-training methods of the twentieth century pull from the brain, then show you how to join them to create spectacularly human performances.
Whether you act Shakespeare or Simon, Wycherley or Wasserstein, Molière or Mamet, train the total actor inside you with the ideas and etudes in The Expressive Actor. You’ll changeforever how you communicate with yourself, with other actors, and with your audience.
