WAntoine Marie Joseph Paul Artaud, better known as Antonin Artaud, was a French writer, poet, dramatist, visual artist, essayist, actor and theatre director, widely recognized as one of the major figures of twentieth-century theatre and the European avant-garde, and known for his raw, surreal and transgressive themes. He conceptualized the Theatre of Cruelty movement with essays and plays, and wrote experimental texts with themes of introspection, mysticism, drug use, unorthodox politics and his experiences with schizophrenia.
WEugenio Barba is an Italian author and theatre director based in Denmark. He is the founder of the Odin Theatre and the International School of Theatre Anthropology, both located in Holstebro, Denmark.
WAugusto Boal was a Brazilian theatre practitioner, drama theorist, and political activist. He was the founder of Theatre of the Oppressed, a theatrical form originally used in radical left popular education movements. Boal served one term as a Vereador in Rio de Janeiro from 1993 to 1997, where he developed legislative theatre.
WAnne Bogart is an American theatre and opera and film director. She is currently one of the Artistic Directors of SITI Company, which she founded with Japanese director Tadashi Suzuki in 1992. She is a Professor at Columbia University where she runs the Graduate Directing Concentration and is the author of three books of essays on theater making: A Director Prepares; And Then, You Act; and What's the Story. She is a co-author, with Tina Landau of The Viewpoints Book, a "practical guide" to Viewpoints training and devising techniques. Conversations with Anne, a collection of interviews she has conducted with various notable artists was published in March 2012.
WEugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht, known professionally as Bertolt Brecht, was a German theatre practitioner, playwright, and poet. Coming of age during the Weimar Republic, he had his first successes as a playwright in Munich and moved to Berlin in 1924, where he wrote The Threepenny Opera with Kurt Weill and began a lifelong collaboration with the composer Hanns Eisler. Immersed in Marxist thought during this period, he wrote didactic Lehrstücke and became a leading theoretician of epic theatre and the Verfremdungseffekt.
WJoseph Chaikin was an American theatre director, actor, playwright, and pedagogue.
WMikhail Aleksandrovich "Michael" Chekhov was a Russian-American actor, director, author and theatre practitioner. He was a nephew of the playwright Anton Chekhov and a student of Konstantin Stanislavski. Stanislavski referred to him as his most brilliant student.
WJacques Copeau was a French theatre director, producer, actor, and dramatist. Before he founded the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier in Paris, he wrote theatre reviews for several Parisian journals, worked at the Georges Petit Gallery where he organized exhibits of artists' works and helped found the Nouvelle Revue Française in 1909, along with writer friends, such as André Gide and Jean Schlumberger.
WEdward Henry Gordon Craig, sometimes known as Gordon Craig, was an English modernist theatre practitioner; he worked as an actor, director and scenic designer, as well as developing an influential body of theoretical writings. Craig was the son of actress Dame Ellen Terry.
WNikolai Demidov is Russian Theatre practitioner. One of the first three teachers of the Stanislavski's system, trained and officially recognized by Konstantin Stanislavski.
WTim Etchells is an English artist and writer based in Sheffield and London. Etchells is the artistic director of Forced Entertainment, an experimental performance company founded in 1984. He has published several works of fiction, written about contemporary performance and exhibited his visual art projects in various locations. Etchells' work spans performance, video, photography, text projects, installation and fiction. He is currently Professor of Performance and Writing at Lancaster University
WNikolai Nikolayevich Evreinov was a Russian director, dramatist and theatre practitioner associated with Russian Symbolism.
WDario Luigi Angelo Fo was an Italian actor, playwright, comedian, singer, theatre director, stage designer, songwriter, painter, political campaigner for the Italian left wing and the recipient of the 1997 Nobel Prize in Literature. In his time he was "arguably the most widely performed contemporary playwright in world theatre". Much of his dramatic work depends on improvisation and comprises the recovery of "illegitimate" forms of theatre, such as those performed by giullari and, more famously, the ancient Italian style of commedia dell'arte.
WDanielle Galligan is an Irish actress, theatre maker, and poet.
WJerzy Marian Grotowski was a Polish theatre director and theorist whose innovative approaches to acting, training and theatrical production have significantly influenced theatre today. He was born in Rzeszów, in South-eastern Poland in 1933 and studied acting and directing at the Ludwik Solski Academy of Dramatic Arts in Kraków and Russian Academy of Theatre Arts in Moscow. He debuted as a director in 1957 in Kraków with Eugène Ionesco's play Chairs and shortly afterwards founded a small Laboratory Theatre in 1959 in the town of Opole in Poland. During the 1960s, the company began to tour internationally and his work attracted increasing interest. As his work gained wider acclaim and recognition, Grotowski was invited to work in the United States and he left Poland in 1982. Although the company he founded in Poland closed a few years later in 1984, he continued to teach and direct productions in Europe and America. However, Grotowski became increasingly uncomfortable with the adoption and adaptation of his ideas and practices, particularly in the US. So, at what seemed to be the height of his public profile, he left America and moved to Italy where he established the Grotowski Workcenter in 1985 in Pontedera, near Pisa. At this centre he continued his theatre experimentation and practice and it was here that he continued to direct training and private theatrical events almost in secret for the last twenty years of his life. Suffering from leukemia and a heart condition, he died in 1999 at his home in Pontedera.
WUta Thyra Hagen was a German-American actress and theatre practitioner. She originated the role of Martha in the 1962 Broadway premiere of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Edward Albee, who called her "a profoundly truthful actress". Because Hagen was on the Hollywood blacklist, in part because of her association with Paul Robeson, her film opportunities dwindled and she focused her career on New York theatre.
WInternationalist Theatre is a London theatre company founded by South African Greek actress Angelique Rockas in September 1980. The company was originally named New Internationalist Theatre, with an intention to pursue an internationalist approach in its choice of plays as well as "a multi-racial drama policy, with an even mix of performers drawn from different cultural groups", The Stage, April 1981.
WTadeusz Kantor was a Polish painter, assemblage and Happenings artist, set designer and theatre director. Kantor is renowned for his revolutionary theatrical performances in Poland and abroad. Laureate of Witkacy Prize – Critics' Circle Award (1989).
WJalal Khoury was a playwright, theatre director, comedian and artistic editor.
WSimon Montagu McBurney, is an English actor, playwright, and theatrical director. He is the founder and artistic director of the Théâtre de Complicité, London. He has had roles in the films The Manchurian Candidate, Friends with Money, The Golden Compass, The Duchess, Robin Hood, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 1, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Magic in the Moonlight, The Theory of Everything, and Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation. He was the choir master in The Vicar of Dibley.
WVsevolod Emilyevich Meyerhold was a Russian and Soviet theatre director, actor and theatrical producer. His provocative experiments dealing with physical being and symbolism in an unconventional theatre setting made him one of the seminal forces in modern international theatre.
WAriane Mnouchkine is a French stage director. She founded the Parisian avant-garde stage ensemble Théâtre du Soleil in 1964. She wrote and directed 1789 (1974) and Molière (1978), and directed La Nuit Miraculeuse (1989). She holds a Chair of Artistic Creation at the Collège de France, an Honorary Degree in Performing Arts from the University of Rome III, awarded in 2005 and an Honorary Doctor of Letters from Oxford University, awarded 18 June 2008.
WHeiner Müller was a German dramatist, poet, writer, essayist and theatre director. His "enigmatic, fragmentary pieces" are a significant contribution to postmodern drama and postdramatic theatre.
WAbhilash Pillai is an Indian theater director, both pedagogue and scholar of contemporary Indian theatre.
WSreejith Ramanan is an Indian contemporary theatre director, actor, theatre maker, researcher and theatre-trainer who has been described by the media as "a versatile Indian contemporary theatre actor". Over the course of his wide-ranging career, he has also worked as a choreographer, stage designer, theatre technical director, Sound and Lighting designer. He is best known for his collaborations with cross-cultural theatrical adventures with notable numerous artists, theatre directors, including Hiroshi Koike, Dr Phillip B Zarrilli, Uichiro Fueda, Ram Gopal Bajaj, S.Ramanujam, Abhilash Pillai, Leela Alaniz, Kok Heng Leun and Terence Crawford
WAngelique Rockas is an actress, producer and activist. Rockas founded Internationalist Theatre in the UK with patron Athol Fugard. The theatre featured multi-racial casts in classical plays, breaking racial barriers that were once accepted norms for theatrical performances.
WDeepan Sivaraman is an Indian theatre director, scenographer and academic. He is the founder of Oxygen Theatre Company based in Delhi. He is from Thrissur, Kerala. Sivaraman received Charles Wallace India Trust Award in 2003, Kerala Sangeetha Nataka Akademi Award and Mahindra Excellence in Theatre Awards in 2011 and 2010, respectively. Deepan served as the Artistic Director for the International Theatre Festival of Kerala(ITFOK) for 2014 edition which had a curatorial focus on transition, gender and spectatorship. Deepan Sivaraman currently is an Associate Professor of Performance Studies at School of Culture and Creative Expressions at the Ambedkar University in Delhi.
WKonstantin Sergeyevich Stanislavski was a seminal Soviet and Russian theatre practitioner. He was widely recognized as an outstanding character actor and the many productions that he directed garnered him a reputation as one of the leading theatre directors of his generation. His principal fame and influence, however, rests on his 'system' of actor training, preparation, and rehearsal technique.
WYevgeny Bagrationovich Vakhtangov was a Russian-Armenian actor and theatre director who founded the Vakhtangov Theatre. He was a friend and mentor of Michael Chekhov.