“Fog Banks Of Sanctimonious Mystification, Psycho-Jargon And Charlatanism Obscure The Craft Of Acting In Both Europe And The US.”

David Chambers, Preface of Elly A. Konijn “Acting Emotions”

Macbeth`s Birnam Forest Starts To Move
Diderot, Organ Donors and the Feeling of Certainty – Acting and Emotions 1
Meyerhold`s Seat Or The Eye Of The Beholder
The Audio-Video Channel
A Simple Two-Black-Boxes Model
The Baron-Cohen Cousins, Reading the Mind in Claudia Schiffer`s Eyes and the Pre 9/11 Face
The Actor As Engineer
Trapped in Dunning-Kruger
The More Contemporary The Playwright, The More Probable The Play Is Mediocre Or Worse (Rule of Thumb)
The Machines of the 21st Century
Image as Plan
The Key To The Swimming Pool
The 3,50 Question
Essence of Pattern
Behind the Doors

The collection of topics I made here is what I teach and how I teach when I teach acting. It is also the reason why I teach acting. It`s a body of unfinished work-in-progress that I`ve been working on for  the last 20 years in daily struggles, first as an actress, then as a stage director and above all as a teacher for acting, the thing I finally dedicated my professional life to. Everything here is derived from problems that occurred during my practical work again and again over the years, and from my search for solutions.

If my work about acting were a tree, then everything described  here would be the roots, the trunk and the bigger branches, the stuff that carries the weight. The fine branches and the leaves, the real practical work, the lessons, the interventions and micro-interventions in the lessons, the work of the moment,  the playing, are still something else and there would be much more to say about it. This here is just about the footing, which is always there as implicit knowledge, which has to be mentioned now and then during class for orientation and re-orientation and which I as a teacher need, to know what I am doing.

I´m not a researcher, I am not even a theorist, I am a teacher. In order to stay a teacher and in order to stay with teaching and not get lost in some ivory towers of  irrelevant “theory”, I decided to go on with the next steps of writing in close collaboration with my daily teaching. That means I will take the opportunity to write each time one of these topics will come up again in class over the next years. This means it will go really slow, but I consider that a practical tool to maintain relevance and and stay in contact to the people for whom this is. That also means that a lot of this will probably not be written, and of course much will have to grow and improve. I feel no need to contribute to the vast amount of completely irrelevant publications my field and the whole humanities are so infamous for, so some arrangements to keep it intrinsic might be of value.

I write in English because it grows my chances that this will be read at least by a few people who are not my students. I am well aware that a lot here can seem quite odd to people from inside the field and I am also well aware that the whole field is mostly irrelevant for people who are outside the field. As a huge part of what I do here are injections of well-established knowledge from outside the field of acting into the field of acting, it might also happen that the same thing will be too strange  for people from inside the field and a complete banality for people from outside. If one starts a journey one happens to land at strange places.

• The End Of Acting Or The Age Of The Über-Marionette
  • Bowing, Overthrowing – A Personal Tribute To Edvard Gordon Craig
  • Flesh Is An Insufficient Material For Arts – A Quick History Of Bad Acting
  • The Actor Plus Fire Minus Egoism – The Scandalous Introduction Of The Über-Marionette In The Year 1908
  • Eleonora Duse`s Plague Spell And Its Stepwise Execution
    • The Actor In The Copy Machine – How Film Made Theatre Almost Obsolete
    • From Greek To Bleak – How The Humanistic Achievement Of a Successful Citizenship Became a Permanent ICU Case – A Worst Practice Example From German Speaking Countries
    • Macbeth`s Birnam Forest Starts To Move
      • How Technology Is Now Coming For Us From All Sides
    • An End For Human Creativity
  •  Edvard Gordon Craig, The Pen And The Typewriter

• Human Acting Is Dead – Long Live Human Acting!
  • The Trickster In King`s Clothing
  • Human Nature Is Hard To Kill
  • Embodied Gossiping
  • Watching Is Nice, Doing Is Nicer
    • Acting Without Glamour Dreams?
    • The Booming Sector Of Acting Education
    • Local Heroes – The Actors Of Ulmerfeld-Hausmening
  • Distinguishing The Work From The Work

• Employing The Naked Trickster – What Human Acting Could Do For Us In A Difficult Future
  • A Rational Stance For the Arts?
  • Neither Harmful Nor Boring – A Sufficient Legitimation With Minimalistic Moral Effort
  • Goodies Worth Mentioning
    • The Most Social Of All Arts
      • Productive Communities
      • The Taming Of The Shrews – Narcissism in a Box
      • The Jumping Book Club – Embodied Humanities
      • Quite Touching – The Literal Skin In The Game
      • Systemic Viewpoint Diversity
      • Slow-Thinking Reputation Courts
      • Falstaff and the Universal Human – Mimesis as Hierarchical Regulative
      • Homo Ludens
      • Nathan The Wise, 1945, Berlin: Empathy
    • Know Thyself!
      • Carefully Spun Dreams About Human Condition
      • To Know What A Splinter Is Put One In Your Eye – The One And Only Functional Conscious Bias Training
      • Theodor Abel`s „Operation Called Verstehen“ Or How I Taught My Students To Be Nazis
      • Self-Steering: Acting As Second Order Cybernetics
      • The Colonization of the Self
      • Impasses, Uncertainty, Heuristics – Acting And Fear
      • The Fruitfulness Of The Unsolvable Task
      • The Habit Of Creating Choice
      • No Meta, Just Physical: Mimesis as Self-Transcendance
      • The Calibrated Intuitionist
    • Human Acting As Third Culture
      • A Party for C.P. Snow
      • Human Acting Is About Humans Acting
      • Mashed Red Pills
      • Bertolt Brecht And The Actor Of The Scientific Age
      • „Lehrstück“ Reconsidered
      • The Civilized Actor

• Planks For A New Stage
  • The Powers Of A Sprung Floor
  • The Necessary Reversal Of Supply And Demand Or Why It Is The Audience Who Should Be Paid
  • Income Is Feedback: Why Cost-Coverage Should Be Considered As a Quality Management Instrument In Arts
  • Empirical Dreams
  • Nothing in Art Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution 1
  • The Path Of Private Mastery: Learning From The Martial Arts
  • In Search For A New Polis
  • An Entire-European Province Theatre
  • Teaching Everyone
    • Who Is Everyone? Diversity Reconsidered
      • The Secret of The Individual – Outstanding Actors
      • What Is In The  Bundle Called Talent? Certainties And Guesses
      • The Typical Actor
      • The Introvert Actor – Research Insights
      • Male Brain Actors And A Hypothesis
      • Teaching People From Truck Driver To Pathologist – A Report From Practice
    • Is The Will To Learn A Talent?
    • Each According To His Stretched Possibilities – A Potential Oriented View
    • A Czech Car Workshop, a Multi-Method Method And How To Teach Individuals
    • A Good Method Is Independent From The Teacher
    • The Acting Teacher As Transformational Leader
    • Capsules of Transfer – Why Human Acting Needs Functional Terminology
    • Ethics
    • Teaching Acting in Times of Safe Spaces – A Trigger-Warning Warning

• Towards Method
  • The Amazing Marketing Circus Of The One-Trick-Ponies
  • The “Electro-Method” or why A Good Method Spreads
  • Gurus, Schools And Rules: The Field Of Acting Described As Pre-Paradigmatic
  • Foreseeing Typhus Or How Some Might Not Be Doing What They Think They Are Doing
  • Everything Rotates Around The „Sign“: The Ptolemaic Worldview Of Erika Fischer-Lichte
  • Theatre „Science“ Or How To Make Your Own Field As Irrelevant As Possible
  • Bullshit In Acting
    • “Switch Your Head Off”
    • Self Expression
    • Inside-Outside Dualisms
    • Working “From The Inside” (Feelings!) Is Deep, Working “From The Outside” (Appearance) Is Superficial
    • Head-Heart Dualism
    • Body-Mind Dualism
    • The Text As Enemy
    • The Audience As Enemy
    • The Director As Enemy
    • Over-Nurture
    • Trauma Creep/ Hitler`s Childhood
    • “There Is No Right Or Wrong”
    • Pushing Sound By Willcraft (“Sending”)
    • Predictions of The Past/Just-So Stories
    • Logics of Behaviour/Stanislavski`s Error
    • Robot Voice Ideals
    • Forbidden Gestures
    • Morals On Mimicking
    • “All People Are The Same”
    • “Everyone Does Everything In Search For Love” /Love Creep
    • The Tyranny Of Empathy
    • Overestimation Of Emotions
    • A Normative-Display-Reduced View Of Emotions
    • Hydraulic Models For Emotions
    • “Presence”, A Word Without A Definition
    • The Ideological Obligation Of The Character To “Develop” (East Germany Schools)
    • The Overestimation Of “Will”/Free Willy/ (Grigorian-Paradox)
    • Holism
    • Non-Judging
    • Bluffs Of Method Acting
    • Authenticity
    • Masturbations Of Suffering
    • The Big Lie About Real Emotions
      • Diderot, Organ Donors and the Feeling of Certainty – Acting and Emotions 1
  • 250 Years of Diderot`s Paradox And The Colonization of Mars: A Claim For Progress in Acting
  • Kafka`s Dog
  • Nothing In Art Makes Sense Except In The Light Of Evolution 2
  • Towards Falsifiability
  • Evidence-Based Acting?
  • Valid Research on Acting – An Overview
  • A Few Examples For Relevant Research From Outside The Field
  • Integrating Taste As A Fact
  • A Playground Needs Less Rules – Towards Functional Paradigm

• Suggestion for a Playground
  • Meyerhold`s Seat Or The Eye Of The Beholder
  • The Audio-Video Channel
  • A Simple Two-Black-Boxes Model
  • Fleshy Avatars Of Hypothetically Existing People
  • Seeing Humans – A Theatrical Perspective
    • We See Humans In Trees, Why Shouldn`t We See Humans In Humans?
    • The Baron-Cohen Cousins, Reading the Mind in Claudia Schiffer`s Eyes and the Pre 9/11 Face
  • Too Much Is Too Little – The Overwhelming Informational Stream Of Human Behaviour
  • Seeing, Resonating, Details, Rough Estimates
  • The Second Law Of Thermodynamics Is The First Law Of Psychology Is The First Law Of Acting
  • Receiver Sensitivities
  • Artistic Organization As Reduction of Perceptional Entropy
  • Redundancy
  • William Shakespeare and the Emerging Human-Resembling Figures
  • Disruptive Factors That Hinder The Emergence Of A Figure Perceived As Alive And Instead Let Us See The Actor Struggling Which We Then Call Bad Acting (Or A Shorter Title)
  • “Aliveness”, “Naturalism”, “Realness”, “Human-ness”: Overlapping But Distinct Concepts
  • Blurry Figures – „Aliveness“ As Artistic Goal
    • Another “You Know It When You See It”
    • Models, Simplifications, Analogies, Plans, Images
    • Ingredients For Perceptional “Aliveness”: A Finite List?
      • A Moving Triangle Called Hamlet: Action And Agency Detection
      • Zombies
      • “Human-ness” – A perceptional composit
      • Breathing Humanoids
      • “I See That You Feel Therefore You Are” Hunches of Feelings and Sensations As Shots For The Perception Of  “Aliveness”
      • Cartman`s Feelings (Holism Rejected 1)
      • A Robot. And A Broom. Empathy Thresholds 1
      • „Weren`t The White Walkers Jealous When The Night King Rode The Dragon?“ – Thresholds For Theory Of Mind?/Empathy Thresholds 2
      • A Certain Degree Of Unpredictability (Probably With A Range)
    • Tabori`s Marmelade
    • Disorder, Complexity, Randomness, Ambiguity – Naturalistic Figures Are Hard To Read
    • Flat, Vulgar, Stupid, Wrong: What  Naturalism Becomes When Nothing Else Than “Aliveness” Is Important
  • Beyond Naturalism
    • Nothing So Strange As The Naturalism Of Yesterday – Acting Styles As Fashion
    • There Is No Such Thing As a Naturalism: Revisiting Edvard Gordon Craig
    • The FBI Vs. Samy Molcho: Why Acting Expression Is Mostly Not Real Life Expression And Why Most People Still Think It Is
    • Specks, Blind Spots And The Elusiveness Of The Obvious: Even If It Were “Natural” People Wouldn`t Be Able To Cognize It
    • Individual Differences in Receiver Sensitivities And Resulting Preferences, Blind Spots And Indifferences
    • Seeing The Ecliptic – Drama As Perceptional Stencil
    •  Conciseness
      • Achim Benning`s Lukewarm Camomile Tea And The End Of Everything
      • Concise Is Interesting
      • Conciseness As Appeal/ Appeal vs Stimulus/ Target Areas Vs Target Points
      • Recognition And Novelty
      • What Is Important? Where Art Begins
      • The Multifold Possible Targets Of Conciseness
      • Conciseness And The Unconscious
      • From Syllable To Plot: Conciseness In Different Timeframes
      • Arrangements of Concisenesses Seen As Multi-Layer Musical-ish Structure
      • Edding On Watercolor – Emphasizing as Unseeing The Irrelevant
      • Empathizing, De-Empathizing – 2 Possible and Maybe Core Artistic Goals And Their Different Targets Of Conciseness
        • Helene Weigel, Meryl Streep: Two Mothers Courage And A Suggestion For A Multi-Method Investigation
      • Ivan Nagel`s “Shock Of The Recognizable”
      • The Composits That Induce Empathy: Consciously Working on the Unconscious
      • Grasping The Backsides Of The Mirrors – A Fictional Dialogue Between Robert Musil And Konrad Lorenz
      • Hard To Sculpture – Challenges For Conciseness In  Acting
      • Conciseness And Taste
    • Conciseness, Bottom-Up
      • Innate Individual Conciseness As An Essential Part Of Acting Talent
      • How Many Actor Centered Methods Neglect The Topic
      • „You can’t be boring. Life is boring. The weather is boring. Actors must not be boring.“ A Tribute To Stella Adler
      • Selection By Casting And Finally By Audience
      • Developing Individual Conciseness As One Goal Of Acting Education
      • “Outstandingly Average”, “Concisely Ambiguous” And Other Surprising Twists Of Individual Conciseness, Especially For Type-Cast
      • A Big Within-Individual Range Of Possible Concisenesses: The Universal Actor As An Ideal
    • Top-Down Conciseness/Emphasizing With An Intent
      • Allegory, Type, Figure, Character, Person
      • Vis Comica
      • An Image Worth More Than A Thousand Words – Edvard Gordon Craig`s Black Figures
      • Recognizing yourself in a Stranger or Recognizing a Stranger in Yourself: Stanislavski and Brecht
        • Had Bertolt Brecht Had Better Actors…
        • The Alienation Of The Alienation Effect Or The Marketing Mistakes Of Bertolt Brecht
      • Sheldon Cooper – The Extreme Individual As Perceptional Prototype
      • Walter White, Jesse Pinkman – Individuals As Essence
      • Simple Characters /A Sufficient Degree Of Wholeness/One-Ness As Useful Simplification (Blockbuster-Acting)
      • Clearly Pointing Towards Human Enigma/Büchner, Schnitzler, Cekhov: The Physicians Among The Playwrights And Their Intellectual Modesty
    • “Aliveness” Beyond Naturalism – The Pyramid of Form And Mastery
  • If You Know What You do You can Do what you Want
    • A Super-Tool for the Embodied Organization Of Human Experience
    • Purpose needs Ethics
    • The Proof Of The Pudding Is In The Eating

• Operation Manual For The Actor
  • The Multilayer-Multifunction Survival Machine
  • The Instrument That Plays Itself
  • The Actor As Engineer
  • Essence of Pattern
  • Being No One
  • Parts and Functions
  • How Changing One Thing May Change Everything – Problems And Chances Of Complexity
  • The Smell In The Cave Of The Tigress/Billiards/Indirect Impact
  • The Ever-Changing Tool Kit
  • The Individualized Tool Kit
  • Deep Reading
    • Trapped in Dunning-Kruger
    • The More Contemporary The Playwright, The More Probable The Play Is Mediocre Or Worse (Rule Of Thumb)
    • Hieroglyphes And Detectives
    • Opening The Text
    • Read Until It Becomes Interesting
    • The Playwright As “The Other”
      • As Selflessly As Possible: Taking The Authors Viewpoint
      • Authors And “Menschenbild”
      • You Can Stretch The Authors Viewpoint But You Cannot Ignore It
      • Intimate Quarrels
      • Teaming Up With The Playwright
    • Meryl Streep`s “Unheard Voices Of Dead People”
    • Neighbours
    • A Cup Of Coffee With Mariedl
    • Puzzles And Questions
    • Degrees Of Resolution
    • 3D-Reading
    • The Play As A Balanced System Of Weights
    • Touching, Weighing, Palpating, Tasting
    • Changing Perspective
    • Contrasting Cases
    • Patterns
      • Pattern Recognition As A Phase of Learning
      • The Differences Between A Scene and Real Life
      • Narrative Patterns, Basic Plots, Twisted Plots
      • 1 000 000 Micro Plots
      • 36 Dramatic Situations
      • Story As Meta-Pattern
      • Family Resemblances
      • Patterns of Dialogue/ Social Interaction Patterns
      • The Rules of Convention
      • The Other
      • Centre of Story
      • Contrasts
      • Contradictions
      • Dialectics on a Ladder
      • Curves, Branches, Mirror Images, Variations
      • Protagonist, Antagonist, Multiple Protagonists, Mentor Antagonists
      • Hierarchies
      • Morgan`s Canon
      • Bacteria, Tubes, Fish, Reptiles, Mammals, Primates
      • Rhythms as Relevance Markers
      • Stanislavski Action Units
      • Patterns of Unpredictability
      • Multistable Image
      • The Meaning Of A Story As A Statistical Problem
      • Beats/Bits
      • Traits, Pathologies, Typologies, Prototypes
  • Techniques of Enrichment
    • Taking Responsibility For Your Own Intuition And Imagination
    • Feeding-In A Lot Of World
    •  What is it like to be a Lady Macbeth?
    • Carefully Building A Personal Archive Of Well-Evaluated Life Experience/ The Artistic Voice Of The Individual
    • From Anecdote To Research
    • The Nature Of The Art – An Elastic Reading List For The Civilized Actor And A Menschenbild Worthy The 21st Century
    • 10% Talking, 90% Listening (Rule Of Thumb)
    • Meta-Patterns
    • A Distillation
  • The Ember Core
  • The Spark
  • The Situation
  • Markers Of Conciseness
  • Mimesis
    • Imitation As Transformation
    •  Mimicry and Rest-Magic-Thinking
    • The Role and the Observer
    • Stareotypes
    • Lagaan – How to Mimick A Cricket Game
    • Jenna`s Simulation
    • Fake-Bicycling
    • The 3D Crackling Heat-Radiating Logfire-Smelling Artificial Log Fire
    • Do What A Thief Does And You Will Become A Thief
  • A Boat On A River Or Endless Freedom In Narrow Frames
  • How to Create Choice from Absolute Freedom
  • You Are a Black Box
  • The Half-Blind Seeress Or Why Trial And Error Is Crucial
  • Disappointment Is A Teacher
  • Enduring The Not Yet Knowing
  • Going Slow, Stepping Away From The Goal, Goal Adjustments
  • Fuck Authenticity – How The Fear Of Being Inauthentic Hinders Any Kind Of Self-Transcendance
  • Authenticity Reversed: How The Subjective Feeling Of Being Inauthentic Can Serve As An Indicator That You Are Actually Doing Something New
  • Keeping The Ember Core Alive
  • The First Rule of Thumb: Rules of Thumb Usually Work
  • Some Basic Rules of Thumb
    • The Answer To Your Question Is Probably “It depends.”
    • The Playwright Is Probably Smarter Than You.
    • Your First Idea Is Probably Not Interesting.
    • “No Risk, No Fun. That`s What My Mother Said.”
    • There Is Probably A Lot You Don`t Know Yet
    • You Haven`t Probably Reached Your Maximal Quality Yet
    • Play Shakespeare in a way that people don`t wander off to the bear fight next door
    • The main arousal is never in the hands
    • You Will Probably Benefit From Developing Your Own Rules Of Thumb.
  • Whatever Works Works or why Orthodoxy Is Marketing
  • Balancing On Shoulders Of Illusory Giants/Exploiting Dead Teachers
    • Stanislavski
    • Craig
    • Meyerhold
    • Brecht
    • Tschechow
    • Adler
    • Grotowski
    • Meisner
    • Kogan
    • Boleslavsky
    • Cohen
  • Machine Models in Teaching Acting
    • Technology Analogies, Pierce Quote
    • The Image as Machine
    • Classical Mechanics
      • Kleist`s  and Craig`s Hanging Marionettes – A Limited Model
      • Gravity-Resisting Marionettes
        • Passive Dynamic Walking Robots
        • Acting Fun With Visual Body Image: Sack Person, Skeleton Person, Antenna Person, Pelvis With 4 Arms, Twistable Sponge, Tadpole Person, Stick Figure, Your Head Is Just Another Vertebrae, Inversed Pendulums, Inversed Stacked Pyramids, Terracotta Person, Bow Person, Leading Body Parts
        • The Future Robots of the 1980s
          • Voices
          • Movement Patterns
        • Atlas` Balance, Atlas` Center of Gravity And Why He Still Can`t Dance/ Shrugging at Atlas
      • The Machines of the 21st Century
        • Computer Analogies
        • Loops
        • Remote Control Experiments
        • Universal Romeo Audioguide
        • Interactional Hands
        • Social Robots
        • Voices
      •  Steering
        • • Mental-Physical Coordination
          • Image as Plan
          • Inside A Moving Blueprint
          • Plans and Structure of Behaviour
          • Boxes Within a Box Within a Box With Other Boxes Within a Box With Other Boxes
          • Stanislavski`s Proto-Cybernetics
          • “But He Has No Method”/The Engineer`s View/ Moshé Feldenkrais On Stanislavski`s “System”
          • A Children`s  Caravan, High Voltage Lines, the Curie Laboratory And Rolling In A Bridge With The Hands On The Ankles – A Tribute To Moshé Feldenkrais
          • A Vehicle Named Love
          • Meta-Tasks, Tasks, Subtasks
          • On Differentiation
            • Task Units: The Narrow Frame Of Resolution We Work In/Our Biggest And Smallest Task Units (Holism Rejected 2 )
            • Action Units That Can Be Perceived Can Be Changed: Practicing Slo-Mo Self-Perception
            • Improvisation, Variation, Change Of Direction/ Starting To Play/Palpating
            • Taking Apart A Scene And Potential Tasks And Actions
            • Heuristic Decisions
            • Raw First Drafts
            • Three Options
            • White Spots, Placeholders, Provisionals
            • Bugs
            • Love Your Consonants – Falling In Love With Details/Fiddling
            • Parts Don`t Add Up, Adventures Of Complexity/Relationships/Non-Linearity
            • Trajectories
            • Smearing
            • “Line Of Life”
            • Integration
            • From Multi To Complex – How Many Tasks Is Playing One Piano ?
            • The Sister Act Fallacy or Why Each Degree of Freedom is a Degree of More Control
  • The Organization Of Life in Space and Time: How Movement is Key
    • In Australia Actors Perform The Other Way Round – Acting And Gravity
      • Gravity And Story: Striving, Stucking, Calories And Adaptations
    • The Multi-Sensory Body-Image
      •  A Rubber Hand
      • Sensory Body Image: Inhabiting Yourself/Degrees Of “My-Ness”
      • In Terms Of Function/A Map Means Control/Proprioception
      • A Suspect For Individual Differences In Responsiveness And Hypothetical Implications For Teaching
      • A Question About Absorption
      • Unstable Balance, Potential Energy and Acture
      • The Vertical, Human Dignity And The Exuberant Human
      • Balance Is The Freedom To Fall In Any Direction
      • Dynamic Balance As Microstory
      • Playing With Efficiency/The Character`s Balance Management
    • Freedom, Control And Appearance
      • Feedforward Problems
      • The Terrifying Black Void: A More Humane Ramp for K.S. Stanislavski
      • Pelvis Problems
      • Permeability Vs. Involvement/Active Involvement As Workaround/Provisional/Starter For Lack Of Permeability
      • Momentum And Control
    • Practical Levers
      • Imposing Rigid Movement/Behavioural Patterns As Pump For Creating New Options
      • Hand Lessons
        • Hands are Traitors
        • Conscious-Unconscious: Continuum of Steerability
        • Informationish
        • Cooking Show
        • Structuring Hands
        • Communicating Hands: Gesture As Distance Touch
        • Illustrators, Manipulators and Others (Ekman, Friesen)
        • The Main Arousal is Never in the Hands: Connecting Hand Work to Breath and Pulse
        • Travel Partner Speed Dating
        • Individual Hands
      • Your Face Is A Mask  – Inspirational Confusions
        • Vissotzki`s Nightmare
        • Edvard Gordon Craig On Henry Irving
        • Oscar Wilde On Masks
        • Ekman, Fridlund And Others: Universality Of Facial Display?
        • The Rough Estimates of Unconscious Perception
        • Susanna Bloch`s Alba Emoting – Mirroring-Like Facial Display As Starter For Social Interaction
        • Neutral Mask – The Face is A Part of the Body
        • No Photos, but Sequences: Dynamic Patterns in Facial Display/ Slo-Mo Perception (/Self-Perception)  With Or Without Technical Aids
        • The Most Honest Face
      • Breath – Autonomous But Steerable/ The Flexible Sternum As Marker Of Conciseness
      • Gaze
      • Speech As Intent And Action
      • Phonemonology
      • Uttered physicality: Speech and Movement/ You Hear the Movement
      • Prosody
      • Differentiations And Contradictions
        • Rhythms
        • Amplitudes, Contrast And An Optimum Of Novelty Per Minute
        • Amplitudes, Contrast And An Optimum Of Novelty Minutes Per Hour
        • Phrasing Of Movement, Movement As Musical Structure/Kinetic Melodies/ Graphs of Acceleration
        • Textures
    • Personality and Movement
      • Neutrality
    • Standing Straight With Your Shoulders Backwards – Jordan Peterson`s Rule No 1 As High Effort Communicative Body Function Vs Social Body Function In Feldenkrais Method: A Cross-Lecture Including Erving Goffman And Bertolt Brecht`s Concept Of “Habitus”
    • Space As Social Space: Territory, Habitat, Distances
    • Feldenkrais Method As A Means To Develop A Functional And Manageable Body Image For The Actor
    • Ankles, Angles, Angels: Eshkol/Wachman`s Very Practical Spheres
    • The Childhood Biography Of Your Character Won`t Tell You How Quickly To Lift The Coffee Cup
  • Status Games – Working From Hierarchical Structure And Dynamics
    • The King Is Always Played By The Others – A Guided Experiment
    • Handshakes
    • No-Brain Herring
    • Alpha Chimps
    • The Gestures Of The Political Opposition
    • Who Leads In Couple Dancing? Tricky Leader-Follower Dynamics
    • Yorkshire Terriers
    • From Marc Anton To Kriemhild: Public Speeches As Sophisticated Status Games
    • Cooperation And Its Games
  • Impulse, Affect, Sensation, Feeling, Emotion. Thought. Pain.
    • The Actor And The Lie Detector
    • Two Drowned Boys
    • Fun With Helene Weigel
    • No Emperor, Just Clothes: Acting Emotions – A Study By Elly Konijn
    • Emotion And Task – An Action-Oriented View
      • Emotional Breath Patterns – A Useful But Limited Approach
      • Emotional Display As Social Action
      • The Emotion is in the Action
      • Temperature, Thermometre
    • Female Tears Are Always Real – Degrees Of Emotional Involvement From Mirroring To Being Overwhelmed As Goal-Oriented Behaviour. A Model For Acting
    • Sweat, Snot, Puke, Spit, Piss And Others: Excretion And Emotion – Neglected Inspirations
    • Rhythms And Structures Of Thought
    • Thought as Affect
    • Pain And Suffering
      • Pain As Importance
      • Indifference – Boleslavsky And The Fly
      • Limits of Empathy
      • Pleasures Of Violence
      • Compassion As Judgement
      • Pain in The Eye
  • Better Bias, Better Acting
    • Antigone, The Righteous Princess Of The Amazonas
    • Nazi-Glasses
    • Who Walks You To The Fridge?
    • Elephants
    • A Bias Called “Truth” -Susan Batson`s Battles Of Pure Subjectivities
    • Steelmanning Nora`s Husband
  • You Beyond Yourself/ Feedback Systems
    • How To Work From Touch
      • Touch and Feedback/Touch Is Always Real
      • Touch By Sound
      • Touch By Gaze
      • Touch By Smell
      • Touch By Temperature
      • Touch By Skin
      • Feather On Skin – How there Is No „Inside“ vs „Outside“ so You Can Work From Both
      • Deep Touch
      • Touch By Movement/By Being Watched/Touching A Pre-Motor Cortex
        • Distance Tickling
        • The Moment Before The Handshake
        • How To Carry A Table Downstairs With A Stranger
        • Keeping Together in Time/Processionary Moths
        • Rabbi Jacob
        • Ubu In Chains Or The Difficulty to March Out Of Tact
        • The Reputational Cost Of Mimicry And Some Other Insights From Research
        • Basic Contagions – From Laughter To Yawning
      • Touching Air
      • Touching Things
      • Touching People
      • Phrasing Of Touch/ Touch As Musical Structure
      • Textures Of Touch
    • Inner Sensations/Affect including Thought As Inner Sensation/Affect
    • Long Body, Extended Phenotype and the Color of the Lipstick
    • Animistic Props
    • The Partner Is Always „The Other“
    • Interpersonal Feedback-Loops And „Realness“ – Engineering The Partner
    • Make The Partner Perform Great (For Selfish Reasons)
    • Co-Engineers Of Societies In Motion: The Actor As A Team worker
    • Chain Reactions, The Role Of The Director And How To Scratch An Ensemble Scene
  • Conciseness In Practice
    • Achim Benning/ People Must Listen
    • Playing for the Blind
    • Japanese Tourists
    • Make it Idiot Proof (Playing for the Idiots)
    • Splitting the Audience
      • 10/90, 50/50
      • The One Viewer
      • Addressing Groups
      • The Shakespeare Way
    • The Impression of “Owning It”
    • Practices of Redundancy
    • Playing With The Perception Of The Audience
    • The Power Of Clear Intent
    • Even more Clear Intent – How To Create A Multistable Figure
    • Following The Conciseness Of The Play – Against Ornament/ David Mamet
    • Conciseness By Magnitude/ Super-Egg/ More Space, More Time, More Calories
    • The Other Conciseness/Simple Wins
    • Contrast/Surprises/Priming/Noise Reduction/Topsy-Turvy/Doubling/
    • Beauty
    • Examples
  • How To Establish Quality Standards
    • The Instrument That Improves Itself
      • How Do I Know I Learn?
      • The Key To The Swimming Pool
      • A Century About Learning: Disillusionments But Still Some Unexplored Paths
      • It`s Ok To Not Feel Ok: Suffering From One`s Own Insufficiency As a Necessary Precondition for Development/ Cultivating Professional Self-Hate
      • Imposing Simplistic Rigid Patterns as Intuition Pumps: Constraint and Creativity
      • Valentin/Karlstadt: Clarinet Lesson
      • It`s Not About Muscles, It`s About Neurons: Working On Function
      • On Integration/ Habit/The Problem of Transfer/Multifold Connecting
      • Choose Your Compulsions Well
      • Sparring Partners
      • Contagious Importance: On the Responsability For Working From the Core Of One`s Own Existence
    • Audience Means Test Run /Back To Meyerhold`s Seat
      • The 3,50 Question
      • Was The Spark Strong Enough To Lighten Up The Faces?
      • Listen To Your Audience: How Not So Articulated People Who Are Maybe Even Assholes Can Still Be Right And How You Can Exploit That
      • Who Should Not Like What You Do? The Benefits Of A Good Enemy
    • Evaluate, Encapsulate
    • Never Ever Do Worse Again/ Rigour
    • Don`t Go For Moments Of Glory – Go For Solidity/How Good Are You When You Are Sick?
    • The Repetition Is The Change – On Practicing
      • Here we are now please don`t train us – Exercise in the age of entertainment
      • Repetition And Repeatability
      • Magnitudes! Why We Should Compare Our Time Investment To That Of Musicians
      • Drops From A Watertap: How To Repeat Things When Nothing Is Ever The Same Again
      • Randomness And Variation: Training And Live Performance, Learning From Sports (Same Topic As Integration etc)
      • The Diligent Green Pencil/ A Tribute to my eighth grade math teacher
    • Effective Arts?!
  • Beauty And Truth