Professor Emeritus
barton@uoregon.edu
541-346-4177
105 Villard Hall
Courses:
Advanced Acting – Acting Shakespeare, Lyric Performance, NLP for Actors, Auditioning, Theatre for Change
“Studying acting is one of the best ways to learn how to live and act your life better. It is also one of the best ways to feel full of possibility. When my son was three , he asked his friends if they loved going up to their daddy’s offices and they said no. He responded ‘Don’t you love playing with the stuffies, swords, masks, funny hats, and bouncy balls ?’ I realized how blessed I am to teach something requiring toys. In acting classes , we are privileged to re-awaken childhood wonder and to shape it into adult plans.”
Research Interests:
Acting Pedagogy, Shakespeare, Period Styles, Voice, Empirical Research, Neuro Linguistic Programming ,Theatre for Social Change
Awards and Accomplishments:
Best Book Award-Association of Theatre in Higher Education
American Heritage International Teaching Grant to London
American College Theatre Festival- Outstanding Acting Coach
ACTF Commendations- Awards for Excellence in Directing
Artist's Enrichment Research Award
Theatre Association Prominent Researcher Award
National Parks & Planning Commission Theatre Award
U.S. Professional Development Achievement Award
National Theatre Research Imperatives Task Force
Scholar's Circle Award
U.S. Community Theatre Association Playwriting Award
Certified NLP Practitioner
Publilcations:
Books-
- Acting: Onstage and Off (Wadsworth Cengage) Now in its fifth edition, this one of the most highly used acting texts, due in part to its emphasis on the need for students to learn to act their lives as equal in importance to acting in plays or films.
-Theatre in Your Life (with Annie Mc Gregor) is a multicultural guide to theatre on a global level, with full attention to African and Asian theatre as well as American ethnic performance. It relates live theatre to media experiences and to the challenges of everyday life.
- Life Themes is a companion anthology featuring plays discussed in to Theatre in Your Life and offering a blend of established (DEWG- Dead European White Guys) and less represented playwrights.
- Style for Actors: A Handbook for Moving Beyond Realism (Routledge)guides performers in the acting demands of Greek, Shakespearean, Restoration, and Eighteenth Century and other plays that move outside realism into "stylization".
-Voice: Onstage and Off (with Rocco Dal Vera, Wadsworth) the first voice book to synthesize vocal production and technique into a single, integrated approach and to trace vocal problems to their psychological (rather than remaining focused on physiological) causes.
Articles/column-
Numerous articles for Theatre Journal, Theatre Topics and other journals and chapters in various books. Robert’s column “Many Right Ways” appears in each edition of The Voice and Speech Review.