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Review: Le Recital Des Postures at London International Mime Festival 19 January - 20 January 2018
No full textUplift and downfall: Diana Damian Martin reviews Yasmine Hugonnet, as part of London International Mime Festival
Finding a Way: More Tales of Dyslexia and Dyspraxia in Psychophysical Actor Training
No full textThis article proposes a radical paradigm shift for actor training and voice training. Using heuristic practice-based research findings, the article highlights how progressive education methods at the heart of psychophysical actor training dysconsciously discriminate against students who are dyslexic and/or dyspraxic learners. It discusses the psychological and cognitive impact of experiential learning models on neurodiverse acting students and challenges the widely held “truths” in this training. The article draws on the philosophical framework proposed by Jacques Rancière in his discussion of the emancipatory pedagogy of Joseph Jacotot, The Ignorant Schoolmaster, to offer an alternative perspective on actor training that starts from an assumption of equality, rather than a position where equality is a distant objective. The author argues that it is possible to reject a hierarchical expert-novice approach to training and implement a process of collaboration with students as fellow artists. The article reviews the position of knowledge within psychophysical training, and the author rejects the use of a universal language of experiences. The author proposes that, by trusting the student’s ability to learn what is needed, actor trainers can adopt a position of ignorance in relation to a student’s own self-knowledge. Finally, the author incorporates this work into a revised vocal pedagogy that embraces neurodiversity and effectively engages all students’ will to learn with full attention
The Creature in the Corner: A Methodology for Teaching Reflexivity
No full textThe 2018 Reflective Conservatoire Conference will consider how artists, arts organisations, and specialist higher education in the performing arts in particular, can and are already engaging with artistic citizenship within contemporary societies. What are the possibilities for practitioners individually and collectively? How is specialist higher education changing in response to this agenda; what are the implications and opportunities for organisational development and leadership
Laban's Efforts in Action: A Movement Handbook for Actors with On-line Video Resources
No full textAs an actor, awareness of your movement is the key to transformation. By making deliberate physical choices, you can fully and articulately embody different ways of being: you can become someone or something else. Laban's Efforts give you a way of identifying and making these choices. Working with them helps the actor to create wholly present and physically ambitious performances.
This book outlines Ewan's practical process, which allows the actor to understand their own movement and that of others by exploring one key part of Laban's work: the 'Efforts of Action Drive'.
This complete, stage-by-stage, working process has been developed through more than thirty years of work with actors in the studio. Clear instructions for practical exercises are woven throughout the book, as well as exciting ways to apply the work in rehearsal, performance and on set. This allows the actor to learn and apply Laban's Efforts for themselves. Full video and audio resources allow the reader to experience the practical work in action
Maria Casares: l'Espagne, L'Exil et le Repoussoir
No full textMaría Casares has often been displaced onto histories of French theatre as one of the seminal tragédiennes of the twentieth century, a key collaborator of Jean Vilar’s at the Théâtre National Populaire (TNP) between 1954 and 1959 and an important Shakespearean actress (performing roles associated with sexual authority and transgression: Lady Macbeth in 1954, Titania in A Midsummer Night's Dream (Le Songe d'un nuit d'été) in 1959 and Cleopatra in 1975). Her association with two of France’s most dissonant post-World War II playwrights, Jean Genet and Bernard-Marie Koltès further reinforced her status as an outsider, performing ‘otherness’ in her realization of the contradictory mother figures of Les Paravants (1966, 1983) and Quai Ouest (1986). Casares, however, learned French only on her arrival in Paris in November 1936 and her differance, commented on by Roland Barthes in a 1954 essay, was played out on the French stage and screen across both across roles that referenced her Spanish origins as the daughter of a prominent Republican politician, forced to flee Spain as Franco’s rebel forces seized control of the nation. My focus in this article is on ventures seen and presented in Spain, most specifically El adefesio (1976), a play written in exile by Rafael Alberti and directed by José Luis Alonso in Madrid the year after General Francisco Franco’s death. This project, alongside her other Spanish-language ventures, indicates the complex ways in which she ‘performed exile’ to a nation-state haunted by the specters of those who had died or fled during the Civil War and its aftermath
‘Corruption, Capitalism, Class, Memory and the Staging of Difficult Pasts: Barcelona Theatre and the Summer of 2018’
No full textThis article provides reviews of the following 2018 Barcelona productions: Fairfly by Joan Yago, Dir. Israel Solà, Sala Villaroel); Esmorza amb mi (Writer and Dir. Iván Morales, Sala Beckett); La importància de ser Frank (Dir. David Selvas, Teatre Nacional de Catalunya), Medea (Dir. Lluís Pasqual, Teatre Lliure), Oedipus (Dir. Oriol Broggi, Teatre Romea), In Memoriam: la quinta del biberó (Writer and Dir. Lluís Pasqual, Teatre Lliure
And the Vampires Flow Towards the West: The Ecological Poetics of Eastern European Migration in the UK
No full textIn the UK, words used to describe Eastern European countries continuously turn to movement, specifically to ‘flood’, ‘overflow’ and ‘flock’, as well as ‘tide’, and are often accompanied by meteorological language of prediction, including ‘migration flows’ and forecasting. These ecological descriptors evidence a speculative poetics of movement that pertains more widely to migration and its representation, conflating territorial boundaries, geopolitical jurisdictions and the nation-state in a neoliberal, and necessarily transnational circulation, against an unfolding ecological crisis causing irreparable damage across communities. This essay explores the relationship between the representational poetics of Eastern Europeans in the UK, that of movement in the work of two artists from the region, arguing for the emergence of subjectivities of the Anthropocene: plural, ecological and displaced.
The project turns to two distinct, UK-based encounters with bodies that have arrived at movement, through movement, in and around the time of the Brexit referendum, and following on from the termination of transitional measures for A2 EU countries: Polish artist Justyna Scheuring’s Everyone, Merry Go Round (Canal Gallery, London, 2017) and Romanian artists Manuel Pelmus and Alexandra Pirici’s Public Collection (Tate Modern, London, 2016).
The essay is presented as a four-part audio performance, that is in dialogue with a work of speculative fiction which draws together descriptions of choreographic incidents within these works. These are reset in a damaged future landscape as an exercise in representational poetics
Lee Strasberg's Method
No full textLee Strasberg (1901–1982) is a divisive figure whose method of acting is often misunderstood. Few people really know what it is or how it works, or what is its true relationship to the Stanislavski System. This is due to a number of misconceptions about the nature of his training with its emphasis on the development of the sensory imagination. This paper aims to challenge some of the myths about the Method, and to clarify Strasberg’s unique contribution to actor training
Tyrone Guthrie
No full textThis chapter explores the life, work and legacy of the Anglo-Irish theatre director Tyrone Guthrie, with a particular focus on the UK and North America. It argues that Guthrie originated the model of the hybrid artistic, entrepreneurial and bureaucratic figure of the Artistic Director, which came to dominate the Anglophone theatre in the second half of the twentieth century, and that he also exemplifies crucial paradoxes and contradictions to be found in the settler colonial cultures of North America in this period and their relations with their former metropole