Building Character: The Art and Science of Casting

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Building Character: The Art and Science of Casting

Performing Arts > Dance - General

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PublisherUniversity of Michigan Press
Book FormatPaperback
ISBN-139780472053766
PublishedMar 10 2018
Dimension8.9 X 5.9 X 0.7 inches
Weight 0.7 pounds
BISACPerforming Arts > Dance - General
Categories(Single Author) Asian American
LanguageEnglish

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Book Description

What can we learn about how we understand each other and ourselves by examining the casting we find on stage and film--the casting we find perfect and the casting we find wrong? Building Character examines how the process of casting an actor in a part creates a character and how this can be usefully understood through deploying theories from the cognitive sciences. A casting director may match the perceived qualities of an actor with the perceived qualities of the character, but the combination is also synergistic; casting a character creates qualities. While casting directors do this professionally, all of us do this when we make sense of the people around us. This book argues that we build the characters of others from a sea of stimuli and that the process of watching actors take on roles improves our ability to cast those roles in our daily lives. Amy Cook examines the visible celebrity casting, such as Robert Downey Jr. as Ironman or Judi Dench as Bond's M, the political casting of one candidate as presidential and another as weak, the miscasting of racial profiling and sexual assault, and the counter casting that results when actors and characters are not where or who we expect.

Author Bio

Amy Cook is Associate Dean for Research and Innovation and Professor in English. Cook specializes in the intersection of cognitive science and theatre with particular attention to Shakespeare and contemporary performance.

Her book, Building Character: The Art and Science of Casting (University of Michigan Press, 2018), was published in March 2018. She has also published Shakespearean Neuroplay: Reinvigorating the Study of Dramatic Texts and Performance through Cognitive Science, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) and Theatre, Performance and Cognition: Languages, Bodies and Ecologies (Methuen, 2016), co-edited with Rhonda Blair.

She received her Ph.D. from University of California, San Diego (2006), had a postdoc at Emory and accepted a position at Indiana University before coming to Stony Brook.

Source: Stony Brook University

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