The Twenty-Nine Letters: Laban, a poetic grammar for actors

The greatest and most sophisticated resource at an actor's disposal is his body. In this small and delicious book, Sônia Machado de Azevedo creatively develops a body training course in which she calls on students to master their bodies both based on Rudolf Laban's movement theories and a poetic understanding of themselves and the things that surround them. . This book arose from a practical purpose: a body awareness course for actors. But, in the pen and in the acting as a teacher of Sônia Machado de Azevedo, it transforms into true poetic workshops, gaining a color that transcends the technical aspect – which has a point of reference in the ideas of Rudolf Laban –, in order to express a new conception of the body and movement. By opting for the epistolary form, classic and modern, always dated and always transcending its dating, the author marries form and content, using the simplicity of the form to lead us to the complexities of the content. The curious reader, the beginner and the initiated, will all find here not a manual of repetitive exercises, but the exercise, the cultivation of a denaturalization of the common perception of the body, our own and that of others, a call to test the limits of this matter that we inhabit and are, so that we become artisans of our own resignified gestures.