Good morning.
Following my recent posts on my time working with Triple Action Theatre in Poland I was contacted yesterday by the very actor I described in my first Frozen Poland blog. I have had very little contact with Maciej over the years but he had seen the blog and we plan to Skype tonight to catch up. He contacted me to pick up on our story and to remind me too of the things we did in 1981 as part of the Kalambur Festival.
Coincidentally I also got a message from Phelim McDermott, (Director) who I spent some time with in the eighties when he was making his solo piece 'The Cupboard Man' with Julia Bardlsey (based on Ian McEwan's book) which went on to great success at the Edinburgh Festival. He sent me the image above which is a paper about the training of Triple Action Theatre, produced by Peter Hulton through his Dartington Series of Theatre Papers. Funnily enough when sifting through things recently in the loft I found my own copy. It is in the fourth series and is available digitally at
http://spa.exeter.ac.uk/drama/research/exeterdigitalarchives/media_listcatalogue.php?type=102.
There are five series dating from 1977-1986 and these are seminal works in theatre practice and a great resource for students. Peter continues to make films about practice driven by his particular curiosity about theatre making, and his forensic eye for detail and authenticity.
Much of the influence on my own work with actors has its core in this early work in the eighties with Triple Action. It was typical of the physical theatre work of the time, such as that of director Mike Alfreds with his influential touring company Shared Experience. There was a desire to break through the comfortable relationship of performer and audience and to invite a genuine co-creation between them. Mike Alfred's work was and still is seminal and had a huge impact on me when I first saw it at the St Luke's Theatre in Exeter when I was a student.
In the Seventies, Alfreds did away with elaborate sets, costumes and lighting to return the focus to the actor, embodying the philosophy in Shared Experience, performing his own adaptations of literary classics on the scale of The Arabian Nights, Bleak House and A Handful Of Dust. His equally acclaimed Chekhov productions led to an associate directorship at the National Theatre in the mid-Eighties, climaxing in a multi-award-winning Cherry Orchard with Sheila Hancock, who described him as "the perfect director to coax a performance out of me".
In the digital age Alfreds is passionate about the essential "live" quality of theatre. He points to the exciting things that happen in rehearsal that almost never happen in performance. "Those electric moments where an actor opens up and discovers something amazing or where two actors suddenly take off in a scene. That is usually contained and neatly reproduced and the impact is lost. The truthfulness, the immediacy and vivacity, the spontaneity, the daring and vulnerability, all the things that actors have, must be worked on to give them freedom.
"I have auditioned hundreds of actors and again and again they tell me that although they've been busy, they've had no useful experience. They haven't been pushed or changed. It's because there's no real process and I don't believe you can give anything to an audience unless you go through something. You can give them tricks or externals like timing or charm or your standard repertoire, but to give audiences something real the actor must stretch him or herself." (Independent 1996)
To achieve this, he and his actors create a complete infrastructure and framework, breaking texts down into simple actions and then connecting the actors back to it once they have made all sorts of discoveries about character and motivation. "They do an awful lot of work on the environment and space, their relationships, style and what the play's actually about, hopefully embodied in a very organic way through the very long and elaborate rehearsal process. Then, whatever they choose to play will be right, because it's true to that particular moment. They have to give up getting, say, a laugh on a specific line. You must be absolutely in the moment, playing whatever the moment demands."
If that sounds like all talk and no action, Alfreds refutes the charge. "I make them forge the work on the floor. They have to discover by doing. Get them free with the text so they never do it the same way twice."
Triple Action was another such training stable, although the work was darker and touched on murkier themes, obsessed as director Steve Rumbelow was with the unleashing of the power of shamanism. Essentially though, both directors placed the actor's creativity at the centre of their process, by cultivating a "creative field" in which to explore essential human myths and themes. This encouraged a whole group of young performers (including me!) to see themselves as architects and authors of emotion and physicality.
These were heady times, and whilst I would never want to be back in the same context now as things have moved so far away from those Thatcher year preoccupations, much of the methodology has become part of my DNA, and I use it unconsciously and consciously on a daily basis and share it with and teach it to the actors and students I work with.
Have a good Sunday.
Much of the influence on my own work with actors has its core in this early work in the eighties with Triple Action. It was typical of the physical theatre work of the time, such as that of director Mike Alfreds with his influential touring company Shared Experience. There was a desire to break through the comfortable relationship of performer and audience and to invite a genuine co-creation between them. Mike Alfred's work was and still is seminal and had a huge impact on me when I first saw it at the St Luke's Theatre in Exeter when I was a student.
In the Seventies, Alfreds did away with elaborate sets, costumes and lighting to return the focus to the actor, embodying the philosophy in Shared Experience, performing his own adaptations of literary classics on the scale of The Arabian Nights, Bleak House and A Handful Of Dust. His equally acclaimed Chekhov productions led to an associate directorship at the National Theatre in the mid-Eighties, climaxing in a multi-award-winning Cherry Orchard with Sheila Hancock, who described him as "the perfect director to coax a performance out of me".
In the digital age Alfreds is passionate about the essential "live" quality of theatre. He points to the exciting things that happen in rehearsal that almost never happen in performance. "Those electric moments where an actor opens up and discovers something amazing or where two actors suddenly take off in a scene. That is usually contained and neatly reproduced and the impact is lost. The truthfulness, the immediacy and vivacity, the spontaneity, the daring and vulnerability, all the things that actors have, must be worked on to give them freedom.
"I have auditioned hundreds of actors and again and again they tell me that although they've been busy, they've had no useful experience. They haven't been pushed or changed. It's because there's no real process and I don't believe you can give anything to an audience unless you go through something. You can give them tricks or externals like timing or charm or your standard repertoire, but to give audiences something real the actor must stretch him or herself." (Independent 1996)
To achieve this, he and his actors create a complete infrastructure and framework, breaking texts down into simple actions and then connecting the actors back to it once they have made all sorts of discoveries about character and motivation. "They do an awful lot of work on the environment and space, their relationships, style and what the play's actually about, hopefully embodied in a very organic way through the very long and elaborate rehearsal process. Then, whatever they choose to play will be right, because it's true to that particular moment. They have to give up getting, say, a laugh on a specific line. You must be absolutely in the moment, playing whatever the moment demands."
If that sounds like all talk and no action, Alfreds refutes the charge. "I make them forge the work on the floor. They have to discover by doing. Get them free with the text so they never do it the same way twice."
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| Director - Mike Alfreds |
Triple Action was another such training stable, although the work was darker and touched on murkier themes, obsessed as director Steve Rumbelow was with the unleashing of the power of shamanism. Essentially though, both directors placed the actor's creativity at the centre of their process, by cultivating a "creative field" in which to explore essential human myths and themes. This encouraged a whole group of young performers (including me!) to see themselves as architects and authors of emotion and physicality. These were heady times, and whilst I would never want to be back in the same context now as things have moved so far away from those Thatcher year preoccupations, much of the methodology has become part of my DNA, and I use it unconsciously and consciously on a daily basis and share it with and teach it to the actors and students I work with.
Have a good Sunday.
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