The Art of Stillness: The Theater Practice of Tadashi Suzuki

by Paul Allain

For over forty years, Tadashi Suzuki has been a unique and vital force in both Japanese and Western theater, creating and directing many internationally acclaimed productions including his famous production of The Trojan Women , which subsequently toured around the world. An intergral part of his work has been the development and teaching of his rigorous and controversial training system, the Suzuki method, whose principles have also been highly influential in contemporary theater. Paul Allain, an experienced practitioner of the Suzuki method, re-evaluates Suzuki's work, giving a lucid overview of his development towards an international theater aesthetic. He examines Suzuki's collaborators, the importance of architecture and environment in his theater and his impact on performance all over the world. The Art of Stillness is a lively, critical study of one of the most important and uncompromising figures in contemporary world theater.

Genres: Theatre, Nonfiction

288 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2002

About the author

Paul Allain is Professor of Theatre and Performance at the University of Kent, Canterbury. He was nominated for the Times Higher Education Award in Excellence and Innovation in the Arts 2010.

He collaborated with the Gardzienice Theatre Association from 1989 to 1993 and published the book Gardzienice: Polish Theatre in Transition (1997). He co-edited the Cambridge Companion to Chekhov (2000) and his book The Art of Stillness: The Theatre Practice of Tadashi Suzuki was published by Methuen (2002; second revised and expanded edition with DVD 2009) and Palgrave Macmillan, USA (2003). Routledge published his Companion to Theatre and Performance, co-written with Jen Harvie in 2006.

He has since published several edited collections on Grotowski as part of the British Grotowski project.
Most recently he has hosted Professor Richard Schechner at Kent for a Leverhulme Visiting Professorship, and has in 2012 published Andrei Droznin's Physical Actor Training with Routledge, a DVD/booklet. He has contributed extensively to the Routledge Digital Performance Archive.

Reviews

[Sara · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book, while redudant in a lot of ways after reading 'The Way of Acting,' was very informative when it came to Suzuki's staging techniques and how it movement techniques translate to a performance.