This thesis investigates Stanislavski’s unnamed invisible form of communication described within the chapter ‘Communion’ in An actor prepares (1936). The description Stanislavski includes in the chapter is especially difficult to access leading to much neglect in critical studies of Stanislavski’s approach. This thesis explores the concept as it permeated across Stanislavski’s writings and practical work. It then establishes a comprehensive, concise and contained description of the experience Stanislavski sought to achieve through his proposed ‘invisible communication’. Most current literature investigating aspects of this ‘invisible communication’ relate it to Stanislavski’s interest in yoga philosophy and practice. Although Stanislavski did indeed appropriate terms and technique from his readings and interest in yoga practice, this thesis proposes that the concept existed from Stanislavski’s earliest theatrical explorations and helped shape his understanding of acting as art. With the compiled description amassed from Stanislavski’s work, this thesis locates correlations of the experience Stanislavski described within the current paradigm of cognitive studies. These correlations help form a theoretically plausible account of the concept to aid further discussion and evaluation. In addition, this thesis uses abductive reasoning to postulate a working hypothesis accounting for the perception within a framework of current understandings of cognitive function. This thesis is the first stage of a much-needed re-evaluation of Stanislavski’s ‘invisible communication’. With a framework to investigate and discuss ‘invisible communication’ in theoretically plausible manner, this thesis is helpful in future development of performer training and practice.

This practice-based thesis explores, through the creation of three new full-length plays, the ways in which a contemporary playwright might engage with classic mythology, specifically ancient Greek mythology in the development of new work. The plays form a triptych, each inspired by a single, yet interconnected Greek myth: their mythic inspirations are as follows, Sodium (2010-11) Theseus and the Minotaur, Sulphur (2011-12) Ariadne at Naxos, and Silver (2010) Icarus and Daedalus. Non-dramatically extant ancient Greek myths were selected in order to seek to explore dramatic possibilities beyond Greek tragedy. The diverse ways in which this body of work was approached is framed by the influence of contemporary theatre practice. Alongside this creative enquiry, the thesis explores the impetus which prompted practitioners to turn to classical mythology for inspiration over two millennia since the myths were created. Reflection on the processes which led to the creation of these plays in relation to the author’s own highlights potential conflicts between ancient and contemporary theatre practice, and seeks to explore ways in which the juxtaposition between traditional and contemporary approaches to theatre making can spark creative engagements. The fission between tradition and subversion was a key factor in the creation of the plays now presented, offering possible insights into the ways in which contemporary practitioners can benefit from a playful engagement with traditional practice in order to generate new work.

This thesis argues that American experimental theatre practice was one key factor in the development of an important phase in the history of the alternative theatre movement in Britain during the period 1956-1980. The data for this thesis has been collected through interviews, archival work and a review of existing literature on post-war British theatre including the alternative theatre movement. The theoretical superstructure and modes of analysis build upon key concepts and theories in the work of Elizabeth Burns (1972) and Baz Kershaw (1992, 1999). The main historical developments or phenomena referred to are the activities of the experimental theatre groups associated with Jim Haynes, Charles Marowitz, Nancy Meckler and Ed Berman, four expatriate American theatre practitioners living in Britain during the time period 1956 1980. In addition this thesis examines important American based groups, Living Theatre (1947), Open Theatre (1964), La MaMa (1960) and Bread and Puppet (1965), which performed in Britain and which made an impact during the same period. The study also examines a wide range of indigenous British groups, Pip Simmons (1968), Foco Novo (1972-1989), Joint Stock (1974- 1989), as well as institutions, RSC (1961), Royal Court (1956) and individuals such as Max Stafford-Clark, Thelma Holt, John Arden, Anne Jellicoe and the Portable playwrights (1968- 1972) which in one way or another were influenced by American exemplars. It is important to state clearly that this study does not claim that American experimental theatre and performance practices were the only influence on this important phase in the history of alternative theatre in Britain. This study simply claims that prevailing themes as well as American experimental theatre groups and performance practices had a key impact which has not been properly acknowledged or examined by scholars. Such an examination will contribute to a more comprehensive and dynamic understanding of the forces which shaped the alternative theatre movement in Britain.

The performance of Shakespeare represents a distinct challenge for actors versed in the naturalistic approach to acting as influenced by Stanislavsky. As John Barton suggests, this tradition is not readily compatible with the language-based tradition of Elizabethan players. He states that playing Shakespeare constitutes a collision of 'the Two Traditions' (1984, p. 3). The current training-based literature provides many guidelines on analysing and speaking dramatic verse by Shakespeare and others, but few texts include practical ways for contemporary performers to embrace both traditions specifically in a rehearsal context. This research seeks to develop a new actor-centred rehearsal methodology to help modern theatre artists create performances that balance the spontaneity and psychological insight that can be gained from a Stanislavsky-based approach with the textual clarity necessary for Shakespearean drama, and a physical rigour which, I will argue, helps root the voice within the body. The thesis establishes what practitioner Patsy Rodenburg (2005, p. 3) refers to as the need for words, or the impulse to respond to events primarily through language, as the key challenge that contemporary performers steeped in textual naturalism confront when approaching Shakespeare and other classical playwrights. The research offers a rehearsal methodology to meet this challenge. The methodology synthesises Stanislavsky's late-career extension of the 'system' referred to as Active Analysis, and Viewpoints, a technique of movement improvisation derived from contemporary dance by choreographer Mary Overlie and further adapted by directors Anne Bogart and Tina Landau. Active Analysis is an innovative method of textual analysis that centres on a series of improvisations, or études, which serve as successive blueprints toward performance. Viewpoints is a technique that offers a clear and accessible vocabulary related to principles of time and space as a way to create and evaluate stage movement. My study illustrates how these two techniques might be used in tandem to invite actors to discover the need for words in a rehearsal context. This combined methodology was developed through a series of three practical research laboratories related to The Comedy of Errors, As You Like It, and Romeo and Juliet by Shakespeare. A fourth laboratory served to extend the combined methodology to a pre-Shakespearean classical text by focusing on the unattributed medieval morality play Mankind. Accounts of these laboratories are used to illustrate a 'director's anatomy' of the development and implementation of the methodology. The thesis concludes with my proposal for an integrated rehearsal practice that can help contemporary actors experience the language-based performance tradition related to Shakespeare and other classical playwrights. The research contributes to the current literature on playing Shakespeare and others by offering a set of principles and a responsive rehearsal model informed by those principles, whilst also providing illustrations of how they might be employed in the production process. The methodology can be utilised in both educational and professional settings. My deep engagement with Active Analysis and Viewpoints means that I am able to contribute to practice, training and scholarship related to each, extending previous enquiries into these systems. The findings can also be applied more generally to the literature and practice of acting, directing and textual analysis.

This thesis centres on the 48 hour performance of Lad Broke in Liverpool on the 20th April 2012. This written component addresses a range of ideas that have emerged in relation to the event of durational performance including modes of inscription, the performing body and its position within a network of performance art and writing practice. By examining Lad Broke within the fields of art and wider cultural practices I am able to draw on ideas of duration that include narrative time, boredom and the effects of duration on the performing body and its spectators. I discuss duration within the context of music by examining rhythm, tempo and time signatures alongside the punk movement, where boredom and a need to act/react immediately remain significant factors in my performance and writing practice. I explore inscription as a physical act of writing, mark making and labour in order to position performance and writing as a combined practical and critical enquiry that intersects in the event of Lad Broke. I also examine notions of the inscribed body in relation to the writings of Michel De Certeau, where he describes the body as written by authority and the law. I refer to experimental writing in order to demonstrate how writing can reveal the materiality of duration and time passing, while also discussing the temporal structure of Lad Broke as a continuous present, displacing traditional narrative structures and emphasising the act of 'doing' rather than the production of a complete and finished object. The performing body is considered in a number of contexts that emerge in the performance of Lad Broke. Ideas around the labouring body are especially useful, where I draw on a lineage of labour practices that have informed my performance works. I look at ideas of labour in relation to wider cultural practice, raising questions around displaced masculinity and the role of the artist as cultural worker. I return to punk where alternative labouring practices position the body as a site of resistance and dissidence. This leads to a discussion of networks and the systems of dissemination that allow post sub-cultural groups to express themselves while evading a capitalist economy. I look at the zine as an art form that successfully provides a model of dissemination and autonomy which relates back to the formation of performance art networks, where the sharing of work displaces monetary exchange and subsumption into a capitalist economy. The event of Lad Broke is examined through a series of viewpoints including the performer, the writer and responsive representatives of the performance art network. The event is then offered to I a wider readership in the form of a zine, where the materials and leftovers of Lad Broke are reconfigured as a material response. The content and structure of this thesis discusses and argues for the performing body to be considered as a site of inscription resistant to the commodification of cultural practice. Yet, throughout this work, it is the immediacy of the live event which remains vital, an event which refuses to be recuperated through these written responses.

This dissertation explores how a recent set of practices III contemporary choreography in Europe (1998-2007) give rise to distinctive concepts of its own, concepts that account for processes of making, performing, and attending choreographic perfonnances. The concepts express problems that distinguish the creation of seven works examined here (Self unfinished and Untitled by Xavier Le Roy, Weak Dance Strong Questions by Jonathan Burrows and Jan Ritsema, heatre-elevision by Boris Charmatz, Nvsbl by Eszter Salamon, 50/50 by Mette Ingvartsen, and It's In The Air by Ingvartsen and Jefta van Dinther). The problems posed by these choreographers critically address the prevailing regime of representation in theatrical dance, a regime characterized by an emphasis on bodily movement, identification of the human body, and the theater's act of communication in the reception of the audience. In the works considered here, the synthesis between the body and movement-as the relation of movement to the body as its subject or of movement to the object of dance-upon which modem dance is founded is broken. Choreographing problems, in the sense explored in this dissertation, involves composing these ruptures between movement, the body and duration in perfonnance such that they engender a shock upon sensibility, one that inhibits recognition. Thus problems "force" thinking as an exercise of the limits of sensibility that can be accounted for not by representation, but by the principle of expression that Gilles Deleuze develops from Spinoza's philosophy. "Part-bodies," "part-machines," "movement-sensations," "headbox," "wired assemblings," "stutterances," "powermotion," "crisis-motion," "cut-ending," and "resonance" are proposed here as expressive concepts that account for the construction of problems and compositions that desubjectivize or disobjectivize relations between movement, body, and duration, between performing and attending (to) performance. Developed through a careful analysis of how problems structure these performances, this thesis on expressive concepts further contributes to a redefinition of performance in general by making two additional claims. The first concerns the disjunction between making, performing and attending as three distinct modes of performance that involve divergent temporalities and processes. The second regards the shift from performance as the act in the passing present towards the temporalization of perfonllance qua process, where movement and duration are equated with ongoing transformation, a process that makes the past persist in the present.

The original contribution of this work is its engagement with the conceptualisation of modern bodies and the impact of the bounded body on our understanding of the idea of comfort. The way in which modern bodies are constituted as bounded, immune entities, differentiated from their surroundings, is of paramount importance in defining comfort as protective, compensatory and passive - a zero grade feeling or avoidance of stimuli. Taking a definition of comfort from John Crowley's influential work on the topic as 'a self-conscious satisfaction between one's body and its immediate physical environment' as its point of departure, this thesis interrogates this in-between space to argue for comfort as an affective and intensive experience. Approaching the theme from an interdisciplinary perspective, a genealogical method combined with inspiration from new materialisms challenges dualisms such as nature/culture, body/mind, inside/outside, body/environment and comfort/discomfort. Following the trajectory of work from Nietzsche to Foucault to Deleuze, phenomenological and psychoanalytical ideas of boundedness and identity are displaced with a theory of bodies as fortuitous and dynamic compositions of forces, where affirmative difference replaces negative difference. As a result, the comfort zone, comfortable numbness and sitting comfortably are transformed from states of indifference to intensive events of difference whereby boundaries and borders are reconstituted as thresholds and spaces of transformation.

This thesis examines the complex role and presence of a range of images and ideas of architecture, as well as cruelty, in the work of Antonin Artaud, Jean Genet, and Samuel Beckett. It argues that the obsessive and varied presence of these ideas offers a substantial connection between the thought and drama of the three writers, and that it is linked to major issues in the political and cultural history of the time. Chapter 1 serves as an introduction to the thesis and places architecture and cruelty in the literary and creative culture of post-war France. Chapter 2 examines the urgency of these terms within the specific, historical framework of post-liberation France. Chapter 3 focuses on Artaud and issues of fragmentation, occupation, and resistance in his oeuvre between 1940 and 1948. Chapter 4 focuses on issues of imprisonment, aesthetics, and revolution in the work of Jean Genet. Chapter 5 examines issues of architecture, resistance, and fragmentation in the late plays of Samuel Beckett. In this chapter we will also examine the vital role Beckett's wartime resistance activity played in informing the architecture of the late drama. All of our subjects explore architecture and cruelty in their different and personal ways: Genet in terms of prisons; Beckett in terms of extreme personal states that can be linked to the resistance; and Artaud through a system of revised revolt and personal resistance. In the introduction and at a number of points in the thesis I explore both the connections and differences between the uses of architecture and cruelty by the three writers, and the range of ways in which these uses relate to the politics and philosophies of the era. The thesis argues in its conclusion that architecture and cruelty, used in both literal and metaphorical senses, can be seen to unite the work of Artaud, Genet, and Beckett more closely than has hitherto been acknowledged. The thesis has also proposed ways in which we can see the plays of Genet and Beckett as a form of cruel theatre, in a sense that serves to define and extend Artaud's notoriously complex and ambiguous ideas of theatrical 'cruaute'.

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Despite acceptance that physical activity serves as a protective agent against the burden of non-communicable disease, half of all adults in the developed world remain insufficiently physically active. The promotion of physical activity is therefore of paramount importance to public health researchers and practitioners. Dance, as a leisure or social activity, can play a role in the engagement of adults in physically active pursuits that are not necessarily thought of as traditional exercise per se. This is especially important for those individuals not currently meeting physical activity guidelines and is fully congruent with the current public health message that "some activity is better than none". A holistic exploration of Latin dance was undertaken in this thesis in the context of physical activity and psychosocial health promotion in non-clinical adults. The research encompassed a quantitative assessment of physiological and psychological measures related to dance. Over a 3 yr period, eighty-four women and men were enrolled in a series of four interrelated Latin dance (salsa) and Latin-themed aerobic dance (Zumba fitness) studies. Research grade motion sensing and heart rate monitors were used to evaluate the physiological responses to dance, and a novel activity-specific value calibration method was developed to process the data. The monitors, which are small and unobtrusive to wear, were then utilised for collection of data during performance of dance in naturalistic settings. Psychological measures associated with dance participation were captured using previously validated questionnaires. Results indicate that Latin dance elicits physiological responses representative of moderate to vigorous physical activity when performed primarily for leisure purposes. Modest improvements were observed post-dance in measures of cardiorespiratory fitness, body composition, and inflammatory biomarkers in relation to cardiovascular health. Moreover, participation fostered interest, enjoyment, and a positive psychological outlook, and enhanced well-being, mood, and health-related quality of life with large magnitude effects. The findings of this thesis may be relevant for researchers and practitioners interested in the efficacy of dance as an expressive and creative medium for the promotion of physical and mental health.