Not Magic but Work: An Ethnographic Account of a Rehearsal Process

Description

Newly available in paperback, this is a detailed description of the intensive work process involved in the making of Toy Symphony, a play by Michael Gow, directed by Neil Armfield and brought to the stage for the first time in December 2007 by Company B at the Belvoir Street Theatre in Sydney. Drawing on years of research McAuley rejects simplistic

Gay McAuley is Honorary Professor in the Department of Performance Studies at the University of Sydney -- .

'A welcome contribution to the field' P. Solomon Lennox, Studies in Theatre and Performance, 2013|Alex Mermikides Kingston University Gay McAuley's modest summary of her project as 'an attempt to describe a single rehearsal process' (p. 2) does not do justice to the significance of this volume in furthering our understanding of 'how a group of artists with very different skills, working in a range of different media, come together for an intensive period and produce a single work of art' (p. 4), and in exemplifying the value of rehearsal observation in revealing the 'profoundly collaborative nature of theatrical creation' (p. 4). As a forensic account of Belvoir Street Theatre's staging of Michael Gow's Toy Symphony (2007), this study affirms the international significance of this theatre company to a readership outside of Australia., Alex Mermikides, Kingston University, Contemporary Theatre Review, 30 April 2015 -- .