All Your Best Selves: How the Performing Arts Toolkit Can Help You Thrive Anytime, Any Place and with Anyone by J.J.R. Taylor

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This book is about a new, yet old, approach to how we all engage with our minds and emotions. Through glimpses of the authors life and performing arts career, we can see how closely life and the performing arts can come together. Enough to display the need for all people, performer and non-performer alike, to use the tools and techniques of the fields of acting and improvisation to live richer and fuller lives. These are tools and techniques developed by masters in the craft of understanding how to take apart and put back together the human mind and emotions in multiple ways. Its effects have been proven profound and transformative on the stage. Yet, behind the scenes of life there have been decades of work and research done. In non-entertainment arenas such as education, therapy, the prison system, and children with ASD, parts of the dramatic method have proven to have made a difference and helped in all groups. This isn’t about performing, this is about presence, about how we grow and develop our mind and emotions. Mnemonic methods are discussed and how they benefit the actor and non-actor alike. The work of three masters, K. Stanislavski, S. Meisner and U. Hagen are broken down to display how they work in the arenas of acting, then how they can be use by the reader to grow and develop themselves in life. Improvisation is looked at and how powerful it’s simple games can be. This is a book about all of us and what we can grow into be, if we chose to use the time tested tools we already have.