Re-Imagining Your Body: Through Playful Exercise - Paperback

by Anthony Stevens (Author)

How do you relate to your body? Uneasily? Awkwardly? If so, this could be the book for you. But it's not aimed at changing your body, it's aimed at changing the way you experience your body and, as a result, the way you think of it and even how you see it in the mirror! To achieve this, RE-IMAGINING YOUR BODY offers you a progressive course of exercises - not the strenuous 'workout' kind but playful exercises, aimed at realizing and releasing your full psychophysical potential. These playful exercises all ask you to engage a 'spiritual muscle' (usually called your imagination) as a means to bring you much more closely and deeply in touch with the rich reality of your embodied self. Not only that, but you can do all of them on your own. All you'll need is a little empty space!The exercises in RE-IMAGINING YOUR BODY have been derived from work in the performing arts. But the book is not aimed at performers, though performers will certainly benefit from it. It's aimed at all those who are prepared to explore, to experiment, to think outside the box, to entertain unconventional thoughts - above all it's for anyone who wishes to discover their true psychophysical nature. After all, Western culture alienates all of us from our bodies in deep and often barely noticed ways. As a result, most of us fail to live fully inside our bodies, struggling to 'live with' them instead. But if we could become more in tune with the huge potential of our 'subject-bodies, ' maybe we would become more in tune with our fellow human beings as well - and with the planet that nurtures us

Author Biography

Anthony Stevens has a B.A. from Cambridge University, an M.A.from McMaster University and a Ph.D. from Leicester University. He is the author of 'How Plays Tell Stories, ' a book about the nature of drama. He taught theatre and drama in universities and schools for nearly four decades, as well as writing, devising and directing plays, usually of an experimental kind. His theatrical work (written, devised or directed) has been performed in England, Wales, Scotland, Greece, Lebanon and Australia. Recently it clicked for him that the work he's been doing with actors and would-be actors - work that explores the subtle interplay of body and mind - could have great interest and huge benefit for non-actors too, in fact for everybody. He has just retired from teaching, much as he loved that work, in order to devote his time to writing. He lives in Cambridge, England, and Patmos, Greece