Building Embodiment: Integrating Acting, Voice, and Movement to Illuminate Poetic Text
February 24, 2025
Karen Kopryanski and Baron Kelly
Meet VCU Authors: Karen Kopryanski and Baron Kelly
Start time: 12:00 p.m.
End time: 1:00 p.m
Location: Online (Zoom)
Description
Building Embodiment offers a collection of strategic and practical approaches to understanding, analyzing, and embodying a range of heightened text styles, including Greek tragedy, Shakespeare, and Restoration/comedy of manners.
These essays offer insights from celebrated teachers across the disciplines of acting, voice, and movement and are designed to help actors and instructors find deeper vocal and physical connections to poetic text. Although each dramatic genre offers a unique set of challenges, Building Embodiment highlights instances where techniques can be integrated, revealing how the synthesis of body, brain, and word results in a fuller sense of character experiencing for both the actor and the audience.
This book bridges the gap between academic and professional application and invites the student and professional actor into a richer experience of character and story.
About the Authors
Karen Kopryanski is an Associate Professor and Head of Voice and Speech in the Department of Theatre at VCUarts. Over the past 20 years, she has taught and led workshops in Austria, Canada, Italy, Norway, Russia, Singapore, and Turkey, and has coached more than 80 productions in the US, including those for Virginia Repertory Theatre, Huntington Theatre, American Repertory Theatre, and Williamstown Theatre Festival. In Virginia, she has been seen onstage at the American Shakespeare Center and in the Cadence/Theatre VCU joint production of The Wolves, and she lent her voice to Stephen Vitiello’s installation whether there was a bell or whether i knocked at the Institute of Contemporary Art. She is a current US Fulbright Specialist, Reviews Editor for the Voice and Speech Review, and an Associate Teacher of Fitzmaurice Voicework.
Baron Kelly is the Marilynn R. Baxter Professor of Theatre and Drama and Vilas Distinguished Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. A four-time Fulbright Scholar, he holds the Colin Cook Professorship in Acting and Directing at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. He has traveled extensively as a Cultural Specialist for the United States Bureau of Education and Cultural Affairs teaching and lecturing on the theatre in Russia; Scandinavia; Africa; Europe; London; and Asia. His teaching of acting has led him to teaching and lecturing residencies in more than a dozen countries on five continents. He is the recipient of the Kennedy Center Gold Medallion in theatre education. In 2022, he was invested in the College of Fellows of the American Theatre. A former Harvard faculty fellow, he has served on the review panel for the National Endowment for the Arts and currently serves on both the Fulbright Review Panel and Editorial Board of the Comparative Drama Conference. He is the author of An Actor’s Task: Engaging the Senses (Hackett Publishing).