Monthly Archives: May 2017

Reflections of a First Year Acting Student – Part II:

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Royal Conservatoire of Scotland – BA Acting

 By Harri Pitches

This is the second installment in a serialized account of a First Year BA Acting student at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland (RCS).  It is a first-hand account of the experience of embarking on the rigorous and holistic training offered at that institution and intends to provoke responses from students who undergo such training, or those who teach them.

The End of the First Term

As I come to the end of my first major ‘chunk’ of time at the RCS, ready to throw myself into the challenges and renewed excitement that 2017 at the conservatoire will doubtless bring, I find myself reflecting on what I have learned, and how I’ve found the whole drama school experience so far. The question everyone has asked me since I’ve been back in my Yorkshire hometown for the Christmas holidays has been ‘Is it what you thought it would be?’ The answer to this is not as simple as ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Continue reading →

New Publication and Book Launch: Stanislavsky in the World

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I am delighted to announce that, after five years of work,  Stanislavsky in the World: The System and its Transformation across Continents, has just been published, co-edited with Dr Stefan Aquilina of the University of Malta.

 

More information can be found by following this link: http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/stanislavsky-in-the-world-9781472587886

The book maps the movement of Stanislavsky’s system across five continents, revealing undiscovered paths of transmission and examining wider questions of embodied history and tradition building. To make its point, it focuses on practices beyond Russia and the US – for too long accepted blindly as the two most-developed seats of Stanislavskian practice – and introduces readers and practitioners to new routes in Europe, Asia, Africa, Australasia and South (Latin) America. We were joined by an internationally broad network of 18 scholars and practitioners to take on some knotty and current questions – of transformation, translation, appropriation and resistance. The book will undoubtedly make a significant contribution to Stanislavsky studies but recent research on theatre and interculturalism, globalisation, and postcolonialism will also be boosted by these findings.

 

Contributions include:

  • Marie-ChristineAutant-Mathieu’s discussion of selected affinities between Stanislavsky and the French Theatre Tradition;
  • Franco Ruffini’s detailed account of the 1960 court case in Bari that questioned the reach of Elizabeth Reynolds’ copyright claims on Stanislavsky’s books;
  • Stefan Aquilina’s exposition of how the System was processed in the amateur theatre context of Malta;
  • Ina Pukelytė’s discussion on a heavily institutionalised reading of Stanislavsky in Lithuania;
  • Maria Gaitanidi’s elaboration of Stanislavsky’s impact on both modern theatre and contemporary actor training in Greece;
  • Siyuan Liu’s analysis of Stanislavsky’s impact on a Chinese School of Performance and Directing;
  • Raúl Serrano’s teacher-perspective on current Stanislavskian teaching at the Escuela de Teatro de Buenos Aires inArgentina;
  • Kene Igweonu’s exposition on Stanislavsky’s interaction with the Nigerian cultural environment as a series of convergences and counterpoints;
  • Hilary Halba’s account on the System experienced through the Maori World in New Zealand;
  • Syed Jamil Ahmed’s articulation of the System as postcolonial appropriation and assimilation in Bangladesh.

The book’s official launch will be held as follows:

Date:                5th June 2017

Time:               17:00

Venue:             Alec Clegg Studio, stage@leeds building, University of Leeds

For more information please contact us on [email protected] or [email protected]

 

Labours of Creative Love

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I would like to address the issue of care and self-care in relation to motherhood. There is a clear schism between different competing needs and demands: the demands of creativity and work life, and the demands of home and care.

The poignant question and problem raised for me in Marie’s post is whether creativity – creative work – can work in tandem with motherhood. How does this work? Can this work?  It is evident that the demands of a child outweigh everything. Yet to excel in the world of creative work is to have to deny the world of home, children, a love life, and health – and cut ‘private’ and ‘domestic’ life adrift – ignore it; make it silent – for it is a barrier, an interruption, a weakness. The problem is addressed by making the centre of motherhood – the child – the focus of the creative process. The product itself.  The labours of love – autonomous creative work and caring for one’s child – are brought together to overcome a painful artificially imposed and inescapable schism.

And yet we are left staring at the child and the mother’s gaze and wondering if this is indeed a concrete possibility. Is this the mother’s realization that in order to put the child at the centre of creativity then the child’s needs at that point need to become irrelevant – the child as a demanding subject now serving as the object of study and reflection. Or we wonder possibly if the child’s demands have ‘won’ and are now being totally met. Is it an acknowledgement that the child and her demands cannot be ignored; the child rightly will not play fiddle to the mother’s autonomy. She will not shift from the centre of the gaze. Of course the work is about exploring how we can address all of these conflictual questions and demands as they pertain to love and autonomy.

Speaking recently at a conference ‘Speak, Body: Art, the Reproduction of Capital and the Reproduction of Life’ at The University of Leeds, Falvia Carnevale, argued that what was needed was a human strike that insists on a radically different version of love. Carnevale is part of an art activist collective made up of two artists known as Claire Fontaine which is based in Paris. What she stressed was necessary was the need for a double yes – ‘yes’ to the private work of care and ‘yes’ to professional work. Our private life of love and care does not operate outside of public professional work. The messiness of being human – emotions, pain, love, joy, trauma, corporeal demands, illness, old age – cannot be extricated from public responsibility. To enforce a schism is destructive and a denial of a range of human needs which span the life cycle. Similarly, we are not outside of the environment; everything should not be at the mercy of capital and therefore cast out into the private sphere as worthless and unproductive.

Rather than saying ‘reproduction’, Carnevale argues what we should be saying is ‘creating life’ – for hidden inside the word ‘reproduction’ is the idea of being put to work. Motherhood is woman being put to work in the private sphere to help man, as the breadwinner, succeed in life. A human strike is needed as a refusal of the atomization of life into public and private, male and female, masculine and feminine, caring and not caring. Making care ‘private’ is to renege on public responsibility. As Nicola Lacey argues in her book entitled The Politics of Community (1993: 97): ‘The ideology of the public/private dichotomy allows governments to clean its hands of any responsibility for the state of the ‘private’ world and depoliticizes the disadvantages which inevitably spill over the alleged divide by affecting the position of the ‘privately’ disadvantaged in the ‘public’ world.’.

Indeed, this was the problem for the keynote speaker, the artist Martha Rosler, who spoke at the same conference. Asked about the idea of care and creativity she responded by saying that there was still a need for feminist rage and she was not yet at the point of being able to move beyond this. Creative considerations of care are still couched within systemic exploitation and imbalance. Care and the home is still ‘naturalized’ as woman’s work. This is therefore undervalued as ‘private’ and ‘feminine’ with woman being infantilized as dependent and reliant on a male breadwinner. These constructed roles and the role of the family is therefore there to service capitalism and patriarchy with this gendered imbalance and exploitation permeating into the representational economy.

The recent incarnation of a sex doll – Harmony – is possibly the pornographic end game of that gendered split between the private sphere of care, love and intimacy and the public sphere of work. This is a robot who is programmed to satisfy sexual, emotional and intellectual needs on tap – with no complications, no comeback, no complaints, no human messiness. She is made with customized detachable washable labia and nipples and will even orgasm during sex. This is a gendered perpetuation and reinforcement of hierarchical division and exploitation – a pornographic one-way street where human care is objectified Sexual satisfaction and touch is extricated from human feeling to subserviently address the messiness of man’s needs…so that he can function better in the public sphere.

Creativity and care is not unique to home nor should it be separated and alienated from work. One should feed reciprocally into the other- it should it be predicated on gendered hierarchical roles. A human strike is therefore a potent idea which rallies against an enforced division; a division which is unhealthy, destructive and dehumanizing both on an individual and a global level. What is needed is a new vision of love which is not atomized into a destructive notion of a work-love divide nor indeed into the notion of separate self-contained family units who care only for themselves. Care should not exist only at home; and work does not exist only in the public sphere.

How would this be put into practice? A philosophy which is not built on concrete material solutions in relation to economic realities is though redundant. One must never forget that that ‘work’ exists because of, not in spite of, ‘home’ and ‘love’. Itemization and alienation is destructive and alienates love from human interaction and productivity. We all have to care and refuse dehumanization at every level. Activism which erodes the system from the inside will allow us to be proactive rather than waking up and realizing that life goes on and nothing changes.

Jacki Willson a University Academic Fellow in Performance and Culture at University of Leeds. She is writing her third monograph on motherhood, performance and the politics of care and self-care.

Developing a Risky Practice: Teaching and Facilitating – Reflections of a Creative English Trainer

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‘This notion that the leader needs to be ‘in charge’ and ‘know all the answers’ is both dated and destructive… Fear leads to risk aversion. Risk aversion kills innovation.’  Peter Sheahan in Brené Brown’s Daring Greatly.

In my first few weeks as a teacher in a private English language school in Italy, the Assistant Director of Studies ushered the first-timers into an empty classroom, and gave us some advice.

‘Never, ever respond to a question from your students with the words ‘I don’t know.’ Never tell them you don’t know something, and never tell them that you’re new to this. I know. It’s not fair. Everyone has to start somewhere right? But if they doubt their teacher, then they doubt the school. In their eyes at least, you must know everything.’

At the time, I took this as sound advice from a far more senior and experienced colleague who wanted the best for both us and the school. I mean…it makes sense, right? No student wants their teacher standing in front of them lamely doing a goldfish impression when there’s an important exam looming. What I see now, though, is that this ‘advice’ potentially killed a lot of the creativity and spontaneity I may have started to cultivate in my early teaching career, and instead cultivated an aversion to risk in my teaching practice that would prove very difficult to shake off. I quickly gained a reputation for my results-focused meticulousness and for always having a ready explanation. Continue reading →

Reflections of a First Year Acting Student – Part I:

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Royal Conservatoire of Scotland – BA Acting

 By Harri Pitches

This is the first installment in a serialized account of a First Year BA Acting student at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.  It is a first-hand account of the experience of embarking on the rigorous and holistic training offered at that institution and intends to provoke responses from students who undergo such training, or those who teach them.

The First Lesson – 26/09/2016

My introduction to the RCS in the first ‘official’ week of my training has given me a fantastic idea of the kind of actors this institution hopes we will grow to be.  I have already had the pleasure of the revered ‘freshers-week’ meeting and greeting the wonderful people with who I will share the next three years of my life. Continue reading →

I dont want to dance: Motherhood In/As Training

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Introduction for the viewer/reader

‘I don’t want to dance’ is my first of three blog posts under the title Motherhood In/As Training. Each of the three blog entries is composed of a short film (at the end of the post) and accompanying text. I’m a freelance dance artist and a mother and this series of posts is about being both at once.

I completed an MA in Creative Practice at Laban Conservatoire in London in September 2016 which required me to work in dance training while becoming a mother (my daughter Lisa was born in 2014- my first year as a part time student) at the same time. In this way, the experience of becoming a mother and being in creative development happened simultaneously and that experience is the foundation for this project.

I have experienced a tension between my dance training and training in motherhood. A dance practice traditionally requires time in the studio and a physical body-mind dedicated solely to the creative work. Being a mother affects these aspects: time and space as well as my body-mind are not exclusively at my own disposal. Motherhood pushes me out of traditional working methods in my dance practice and challenges my assumptions of what I believe training to be.

To challenge these assumptions my project asks: What is considered to be ‘training’ and to what degree does training begin or end when I step into or out of the studio? Who trains who in a mother/child relationship? What and how does the artist in me see from the point of view of what I call the ‘motherside’?

Motherhood is not linear and consistent. I respond to my daughter’s needs in the moment they occur, as unexpected and inconvenient as they might be – interrupting me in a train of thought or a meal half cooked. In a similar way, the blog texts and short films aim to give the viewer a sense of fragmentation, of spontaneity, of being stuck in repetition and again and again being interrupted, stopped, confused.

Feminist-academic-artist-mother

In her manifesto Mothernism Lise Haller Baggesen outlines the tension between the various aspects of her identity. ‘As I tried to figure out the relationship between the different aspects of my life (…) defining myself as a feminist-academic-artistic-mother increasingly felt like playing a complicated game of rock-paper-scissors-boob. (…) I felt increasingly provoked at this demand “to check my motherhood at the door.” So much so that instead of “covering” that part of my life , I opted to “come out” as a mother, artistically and academically.’[1]

Following Baggesen, I want to challenge my own assumption of the artist being someone on a lonely individual journey and that the nurturing nature of the mother is in opposition to the romantic ideal of an artist as a singular genius. I want to let go of the idea that in order to lose myself in an artistic process I have to give up motherhood.

Paradoxically, motherhood is precisely a lonely journey where I lose myself as I venture into the unknown. A lonely journey that for me started in the intimate experience of pregnancy where I felt removed from the sense of self that I knew, as my slender agile body was replaced by a grotesque version of me. Giving birth was lonely and unpredictable and although the shared responsibility with Lisa’s dad when she was born was a relief, I was always the last point of call when he was no longer capable of offering her comfort, because only my breast would do.

As I begin to acknowledge the common points of reference between the roles of mother and artist, this polarisation dissolves. If there is no polar opposition between the mother and artist and I can be both equally at once, what creative process and outcome will I have?

What does motherhood see?

Inspired by the documentary Cameraperson (2016), directed by American filmmaker Kirsten Johnson, my thoughts on how to make this investigation happen started to come together. Johnson’s documentary shows footage from her 25 years as a cinematographer, telling a story about her, the cameraperson, almost without showing her in the film. I was fascinated by the idea of using artistic tools of filming without purposely putting the person in question directly in the frame. Cameraperson shows what Johnson sees through the lens but only on a few occasions do we actually see her. It tells a story about the person who is seeing. Could my film show motherhood without the mother in the frame? I was not interested in depicting my experience of being a mother, I wanted the film itself to ‘be a mother’. My project shows motherhood in/as training by letting motherhood look through the camera. What does motherhood see? How does motherhood see?

 Seeing through a viewfinder

The filming is not planned in advance; nothing within the frame is directed. I don’t seek out to film dance but to allow the dance to come through in the juxtaposition of shots, camera movement and pace. For this reason I don’t use complex equipment: being able to improvise my filming means to simply point and shoot.

I review my footage and observe that Lisa is often in the (centre of) the frame. I try and see beyond Lisa and beyond the loving gaze of a mother looking at her child as my film is not intending to be about Lisa, I’m not interested in portraying her. But in reality she is in the viewfinder when I film. She becomes the obstruction for the project: always there, pushing her way into my film, into my consciousness even as I try to see past her, in a way, illustrating how her presence fills my time, my space and my being. I wonder how the process of training is taking place and to what degree Lisa’s presence in my film is an element of her training me to be a mother and /or an artist?

The making of the film becomes about seeing movement and choreography, contrast and colour in the footage I have gathered and not just seeing my child. I allow the choreographer in me to shine through in an interest in framing what I see in the viewfinder in a particular light, in shadows or against a contrasting background. 

Seeing beyond Lisa 

In the film ‘I don’t want to dance’ I try to let the motherside of my daily life merge with the artist. Lisa is dressing up and role playing, using ‘performance’ as a way of training for ‘being in the world’. At the same time she is refusing to be trained as the voice track reveals.

As a consequence of embracing motherhood in the creative process I find the centre of the film becomes about the actual manifestation of motherhood, my daughter. Here lies the tension of the project for this first blog entry: can I make a film that has Lisa in the frame without it being about her? What can my intention to see beyond her show me about how motherhood sees?

[1] Lise Haller Baggesen, Mothernism, p. 12 http://www.spdbooks.org/Content/Site106/FilesSamples/9780988418554.pdf

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edward Braun Obituary

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Remembering Edward Braun

(1936-2017)

Terence Mann

Whilst at Drama School in 1994, during rehearsals for Nikolai Erdman’s The Suicide, I read Meyerhold on Theatre. At that point in time I had never heard of Vsevelod Meyerhold or Theatrical Biomechanics but that book was to be the start of a fascination with Russian Theatre, Meyerhold and in particular his actor training system Biomechanics, which has continued to this day. Little did I know back then, that some 20 years later I would be delivering a workshop and a paper on Meyerhold’s Biomechanics at Hull University in the presence of the book’s author Edward Braun.

I was a little nervous when I heard that Edward Braun would be there. After the presentation I was introduced to Edward (Ted) and much to my relief, he had some very kind things to say about the workshop. He talked about the time he spent in Russia in the 1960’s and how he had met Meyerhold’s daughter. Some weeks later we were hosting a series of workshops at the University of Central Lancashire with the world’s leading exponent in Theatrical Biomechanics, Gennady Bogdanov. I asked Ted if he would like to meet Gennady and he accepted the invitation.

Ted sat for several hours totally absorbed in the work. As he watched, I was acutely aware it was highly likely that he had seen Meyerhold’s daughter perform the same exercises some forty years earlier. We spent the evening in an Italian restaurant talking about Russia, Communism, Meyerhold, Biomechanics and….life. So, for a brief moment in our lives serendipity had brought us together; Gennady my teacher, his interpreter Svetlana, Edward Braun and I. I felt very privileged and quite humbled just being there. As the evening drew to a close and we walked Ted back to his hotel, I was struck by the fact that, had it not been for him, the four of us would never have met and I for one would certainly not be doing what I do today.

On hearing the sad news that Ted had died, I recalled the time I had spent in his company in 2015. He was extremely generous, courteous, erudite, enthusiastic, warm, and witty.

Listening to Jonathan Pitches last interview with Ted, as he talked about Biomechanics, I was quite surprised and rather moved to hear Ted talk about “being in Preston with Terence and Gennady.” It was as if he had known us for years and in a way, via Mr. Meyerhold……. I suppose he had. Although I only met Ted briefly; I will always remember him. RIP Ted.

 

Terence Mann (Chapman) is Senior Lecturer and Course Leader for BA Acting at UCLAN.  He has worked with some of the most innovative theatre companies and directors in Europe and is regarded as one of the country’s leading practitioners in Meyerhold’s Theatrical Biomechanics.