Provoking theater

Smith and Kraus

2003

XVI, 327 p.

Career development series

1-57525-332-1

Provoking Theater is an interview with Kama Ginkas, the acclaimed Russian Theater director. Through co-author John Freedman's format of «questions and monologues», Ginkas offers no simple formulas for making theater. Yet, as we follow his lively leaps of fancy and winding digressions, we feel ourselves in the presence of a master creator; one who is able to penetrate into the murky secrets of the creative process. Ginkas' monologues illuminate a range of topics of great interest to theater students and professionals. The centerpiece of Provoking Theater is a chapter entitled «The Pathology of the Actor». Here Ginkas expresses the excruciating complexity of his relationship to the «material» and how this relationship gives life to his theatrical imagination. His understanding of the nature of the actor, his insights into the ways one must work with these hypersensitive artists, whose sole instruments are their bodies and psyches, are astonishing in their profundity. Provoking Theater is about a man whose passion is theater. It is about taking risks and making demands. It is about how people make theater and how one man made an artist of himself. It is also the story of a child who survived the Holocaust and whose life and art became inextricably intertwined. Kama Ginkas describes himself as a Russian director fro Lithuania with a Jewish accent. Trained in the Russian school of psychological realism, steeped in the Stanislavsky systemand bearing the mark of the Russian avant-garde as it was developed by Vsevolod Meyerhold, Ginkas' art is a blend of intercultural influences and his own iconoclastic vision. His Russian productions at Moscow's New Generation Theater are magnets for directors, actors, and critics from many countries who are in search of the bes in cutting-edge theater. His challenging productions of K. I. from «Crime» and We Play «Crime» by Dostoevsky and The Lady with the Lapdog at the American Repertory Theater, were major theater events int the United States in 2003.

Драматический театр русский, Драматический театр, Режиссерское искусство

Английский