PART TWO.
"So what are you doing now?" "Well the school of course." "You mean you re still there?" "Well of course. I will always be there as long as there are students." (Jacques Lecoq, in a letter to alumni, 1998).
79 CHAPTER FOUR
INTRODUCTION TO PART TWO. The preceding chapters have been principally concerned with detailing the research matrix which has served as a means of mapping the influence of the Lecoq school on Australian theatre. I have attempted to situate the research process in a particular theoretical context, adopting Alun Munslow's concept of `deconstructionise history as a model. The terms `diaspora' and 'leavening' have been deployed as metaphorical frameworks for engaging with the operations of the word 'influence' as it relates specifically to the present study. An interpretive framework has been constructed using four key elements or features of the Lecoq pedagogy which have functioned as reference points in terms of data collection, analysis and interpretation. These are: creation of original performance material; use of improvisation; a movement-based approach to performance; use of a repertoire of performance styles. These elements or `mapping co-ordinates' have been used as focal points during the interviewing process and have served as reference points for analysis of the interview material and organisation of the narrative presentation.
The remainder of the thesis constitutes the narrative interpretation of the primary and secondary source material. This chapter aims to provide a general overview of, and introduction to the research findings. I will firstly outline a demographic profile of Lecoq alumni in Australia. Secondly I will situate the work of alumni, and the influence of their work on Australian theatre within a broader socio-cultural, historical context. Here I will be discuss how the work of alumni might be positioned within this context and offer some possible reasons for the initial and continuing interest in the Lecoq school. The chapter will conclude with an outline of the remainder of the thesis.
Demographic Profile of Lecoq Alumni: As far as I have been able to ascertain, between 1965 and 2000 fifty-two Lecoq alumni have lived and worked in Australia as theatre practitioners (please see Appendix B for a list of alumni). Marc Furneaux is possibly the first Australian to attend the school in 1956, although this is unconfirmed, and Stephanie Kehoe is the last, graduating in 2000. Marc Furneaux is apparently the only alumni to have attended the Lecoq school in the 1950s. Four alumni attended the school in the 1960s, seventeen in the 1970s, fourteen in the 1980s and twelve in the 1990s. With the exception of Stephanie Kehoe, all the alumni I have interviewed learned about the existence of the Lecoq school through contact with Lecoq alumni working in Australia. The majority of alumni are Australian-born. The remainder have come from England (3), America (2), Canada (1), New Zealand (1), Italy (1) and Holland (1). A small number of alumni have resided in Australia for only short periods and returned overseas, or else have lived overseas for many years and have only recently arrived in or returned to Australia. Other alumni who have lived and worked in Australia for some time now reside overseas. These
81 include Isabelle Anderson, Francis Batten and Heather Robb. Alumni predominantly live and work in Australia's capital cities, with the majority working in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. One alumnus currently lives in Darwin, two in Adelaide and one in Western Australia. The work of alumni in Australia has been varied, although notably few alumni have worked consistently in mainstream theatre, television and feature film. Those who have, such as Geoffrey Rush, George Ogilvie and Russell Dykstra, have been highly successful. Most alumni have worked as actors, directors, playwrights, theatre consultants and teachers, in fringe theatre, street and festival theatre, corporate theatre, community theatre and documentary film work. A small number of alumni have moved away from theatre work. One alumnus is working in arts administration, another in museum work and a third has recently completed his second novel.
Socio-cultural, Historical Context: In the previous chapter I outlined Alun Munslow's concept of `deconstructionise history and indicated that this concept would be adopted as a model for the study. In line with this model, I am attempting here to situate the influence of the Lecoq school on Australian theatre within its socio-cultural, historical and ideological contexts. As Munslow notes, historical events are time and place specific and are interwoven with and generated within the wider political, ideological, social, cultural and economic structures which are operative within any given historical epoch. In the introduction to this thesis, I indicated that the Lecoq school has had a significant influence on theatre training and practice, not only in Australia, but also in many parts of the world. I also indicated that this influence is contextualised within a major shift in Western mainstream theatre that is characterised by significant challenges to the dominance of text-based realism and its concomitant approaches and processes. This shift has seen the burgeoning of a variety of non-text-based, non-realist forms such as physical theatre, dance theatre, new circus and revivals of a number of traditional popular theatre forms, such as commedia dell'arte, vaudeville and cabaret. This challenge to dominant theatrical modes has been mounted by theatre practitioners in many countries throughout the world and the work of international Lecoq alumni has contributed significantly to this movement. While the influence of the Lecoq school on Australian theatre thus operates within the broader context of this major shift in Western theatre, it has also been particularised within the Australian socio-cultural context.
The Lecoq presence in Australia currently spans some thirty-five years. This presence operates within a critical period of Australia's theatre history. As in many other parts of the world, this period is characterised by a major shift in the dominance of text-based realism. In Australia, however, this shift was particularised within the context of British
82 and American domination of theatrical modes, and is consequently characterised by consolidated attempts to displace these modes. In many ways, the dominance of Australian mainstream theatre by British and American approaches is synonymous with the dominance of text-based realism, so that to overthrow one was to overthrow the other. Until the 1960s British, and to a lesser degree American theatrical practices and products had dominated the Australian stage, manifesting across a broad spectrum of the theatrical field. Prior to the mid-1960s, directors and, indeed, productions, had been largely imported from Britain and America (Clark 1995:192). The first professional repertory companies to emerge in the 1950s and 1960s were established principally by English immigrants and were based on English models. Much of the repertoire consisted of English and American fare (Mitchell 1995:208). NIDA, Australia s first professional theatre training school, was established in 1958 by Hugh Hunt and Robert Quentin, both English, and was modelled on English theatre schools (Lavery 1995:393). Notably, the dominant acting styles had been naturalism and psychological realism and were, once again, imported from England and America (Brisbane Enright 1995:20). Journalistic criticism of Australian theatrical productions typically featured unfavourable comparisons with those of the London stage (Webby 1995:169).
The 1960s saw a shift in this longstanding pattern of English and American domination, and consequently in the domination of text-based realism. According to John Clark the next twenty years was a period of rapid expansion, national self-confidence and artistic self-reliance (Clark 1995:192-193). It was a period characterised by a preoccupation with the development of indigenous theatrical formations, underwritten by a central narrative of national identity in the quest for a distinctive Australian theatre (Kelly 1998:8). This central narrative was operative within the broader socio-cultural complex that saw the establishment of the Australia Council for the Arts in 1968 - in response to growing nationalism - and the emergence of Australia s first national daily newspaper in 1964, introducing a national rather than a local slant on issues of culture, identity and politics (Brisbane McCallum 1995:175). This major theatrical shift manifested in diverse but cognate ways and has come to be known as the new wave in Australian theatre history. Two of the most urgent preoccupations of this period were the search for Australian plays and an Australian acting style (Brisbane Enright 1995:21). The quest for Australian theatrical form and content was undertaken most forcibly in pockets of the Melbourne and Sydney theatre scenes.
In Melbourne, new wave advocates rejected both the hierarchical structures and theatrical processes of the English theatre models with the authority of the director overthrown in favour of more democratic, participatory processes. The privileging of the written script and the process of analysis and interpretation were shafted in favour of
83 ensemble exploration of ideas that relied more on improvisational than analytical processes (Brisbane Enright 1995:21-22). The Australian Performing Group worked particularly forcefully in a number of these directions, creating group-devised shows on political themes and performing predominantly Australian plays (Radic 1995:75). Reacting against the refined, elocutionary and highly artificial style favoured by visiting English actors , the APG developed their own local performance style that drew on popular variety forms, creating a style that was raw, vital, strongly physical and mostly comic, with realism exaggerated for effect through a mixing of surface naturalism and larger-than-life characters (Radic 1995:74-75).
While the new wave washed over Melbourne, the quest for Australian form and content was taken up in Sydney by members of the Nimrod. Like the APG, the Nimrod was committed to performing new Australian plays, but was also interested in finding new approaches to classic texts. It worked from its own ideological agenda of `decolonising Australian theatre , seeking to develop indigenous forms and processes, and creating its own version of the new wave acting style (McCallum 1995:407). In terms of directing, the new wave was led by people like John Bell, Max Cullen, Gloria Dawn, John Gaden, Chris Haywood, Gillian Jones, Maggie Kirkpatrick and Max Phipps, among others. Rejecting the tenets of psychological realism and seeking a more physically-oriented acting style, these directors concerned themselves in diverse ways with actor s energy, danger, economy and an intimate relationship between actor and audience (Brisbane Enright 1995:21). In addition to these more marginal undertakings, the establishment of state run professional theatre companies meant the high profile mounting of Australian plays by indigenous directors. John Clark claims that these companies created favourable conditions for the emergence of a distinctive Australian theatre (Clark 1995:192-193). The establishment of the MTC and the STCSA both contributed significantly in this direction.
The new wave also fuelled the emergence of the community theatre movement in Australia. Peter Oyston, determined to develop a course directed to the creation of leaders for a new Australian theatre, not one based upon European or American models, founded the Victorian College of the Arts drama school in 1976 based on community theatre lines (Murphet 1995:625). Early graduates of the college went on to establish companies such as West, Murray River and Theatre Works. In Queensland, Street Arts Community Theatre Company evolved out of the Popular Theatre Troupe. In line with the urgencies of the new wave , all of these community theatres were variously involved in producing group-created, self-generated theatrical material related to local issues, employing popular theatre styles that foregrounded the physical and the visual (Watt 1995:155). Their political agendas were linked by a common desire to
84 give voice to disenfranchised communities, in an attempt to address issues of concern to multi-cultural, Aboriginal, youth, women and regional communities.
The incursion of new wave forms, processes and products on the dominant modes of text-based realism afforded a measure of relief from the stranglehold these modes had come to have on Australian theatre. British and American theatres gave way to the narrative of national identity which manifested as un-self-conscious indigenous writing, forms and approaches:
The aspirations of a previous generation towards a kind of Englishness [...] have been replaced by a sense of national identity that, for example, makes it acceptable to perform classical texts with Australian accents and even in Australian contexts. The generation reared in and for the theatre rather than radio and trained in tertiary institutions works with more physical attack and resourcefulness than its elders, often manifesting other performing skills in accord with the demands of new writing and new ideas. The actor in a subsidised company is also now more likely to participate in some measure in writing and production, chiefly in the development - sometimes the devising - of new works. Actors are increasingly reflecting the diversity of their skills and experience in creating employment (Brisbane Enright 1995:23).
From the relative solidarity and optimism of the new wave , the economic and political drawstring of the 1980s tightened theatre subsidy around state theatre companies, effectively cutting access for larger alternative theatre companies, fringe and community-based groups. To a certain extent, this situation re-inforced the dominance of text-based realism on mainstream stages, although the content varied with mixed repertoires that now included plays by indigenous writers. Despite this small measure of diversity, the tense economic and political circumstances prompted safe productions from state companies anxious to shore-up their own positions in the subsidy stakes. This resulted in,
the development of costly and very similar-looking State companies , occupying rather splendid capital-devouring theatre complexes, in each of the five mainland capitals, drawing a disproportionately large share of subsidy to the maintenance of one kind of theatre (Fitzpatrick 1986:167).
In the face of these funding inequities, however, the diversity of form and content being produced by less financially endowed operations belied this homogenisation of Australian theatre:
85 The energies of community theatre, as indeed of women s theatre and black theatre, and of many of those groups experimenting radically with new (or at least unfamiliar) forms of theatre and styles of playing seem to me now to offer strong grounds for pronouncing the patient vigorously well [...] there is no doubt that the development of the areas mentioned, and of a great diversity of practice in general, has, despite some diminution in the sources and amount of subsidy, been a feature of the last nine years (Fitzpatrick 1986:166).
Many of these new forms and styles have contributed significantly to the growth of street and festival theatres over the last fifteen to twenty years.
Probably the most exciting stylistic development of the 1980s was the emergence of theatrical forms that mixed physical skills with theatre elements. These were pioneered by groups such as Circus Oz, the Flying Fruit Flies, Legs on the Wall, Rock n Roll Circus and a host of other physical/circus/image theatre companies and individuals that began to emerge in the late 1980s and have continued to emerge and evolve well into the 1990s. These include Club Swing, Desoxy, the Sydney Front, NYID, Circus Monoxide, Stalker and Gravity Feed. While many exponents of these genres have begun to receive international acclaim, Veronica Kelly has noted that mainstream producers continue to pander to expectations of tightly-focused psychological realism (Kelly 1998:5). As Kelly further observes:
Dissident observers periodically charge Australian established theatre with thematic safeness and stylistic unadventurousness, particularly compared with the innovation and brilliance of Australian hybrid arts, image and physical theatre and dance companies (1998:6).
With the recent millennial and Olympic celebrations showcasing the work of many of Australia s high profile physical/circus/image/dance theatre specialists to the world, what has become identified as Australian theatre is not its subject matter, but its form. As Nigel Jamieson observes:
I think [physical, non-text-based theatre] has always been Australia s strength and I just wish it would wake up and realise it a bit more in terms of where it puts its funding and resources. When I went to the last International Showcase, where various countries showcase their work to the world, the Australian companies there were just extraordinary. It was just wall to wall physical theatre companies. I had Wake Baby on there and Legs on the Wall doing Clearance and Acrobats
86 were on, who are a circus physical company, and Desoxy were on. There was one day where there were eight performances and they were all physical theatre. I mean there wasn t a single text-based thing in the whole program. So I think it s what Australia does spectacularly well. It s what Australia has become famous for really. I mean it might put all its money into Opera Australia or the STCSA but the kind of international profile those companies have are not very high, whereas Circus Oz and the Fruit Flies absolutely started a world movement [...]. So I think this pathetic aping of English systems has failed to say, Right. This is something that can be uniquely Australian. It s about Australian humour, it s about Australian physicality, it s about Australian sense of egalitarian traditions. All those things that Australia s identity is wrapped up with is what Circus Oz was doing. And yet here you still struggle away with two week rehearsal periods (Jamieson 1998:328-329, interview).
Jamieson s lamenting of Australia s continued adherence to English theatre models might indicate that little has actually changed since the vigorous affront by new wave advocates began to tear at the walls of the established theatrical power structures. But although the destination sites of the Arts funding dollar are still cause for concern, much of Australian theatre over the last forty years has significantly undermined the dominance of English and American imports. This period has seen a move away from text-based realism as the privileged and legitimated form to an embracing of diverse and notably popular forms that re-instate the body as integral to performance. The rise of non-text-based forms has been accompanied by non-text-based approaches to theatre- making, with many theatre workers creating original theatrical material through participatory and visceral processes. The last forty years has thus seen the development of an Australian theatre that is influenced by, but no longer dependent on foreign ideologies (Clark 1995:193).
It is within these particular socio-cultural, historical, theatrical contexts, that the Lecoq influence on Australian theatre has operated. The Lecoq pedagogy is one of a number of the foreign ideologies that have contributed to this major shift in Australian theatre, acting to disrupt the central and hallowed position of text-based realism and its concomitant hierarchical and analytical processes. Alumni have brought to this country approaches to performance which foreground the physical and the visual, skill and experience in creating original material through improvisatory and participatory processes and a repertoire of new and traditional popular theatre forms, some not seen in this country before. Over the past thirty-five years, when Australian theatre has been particularly focused in all of these directions, the intersections between the work of Lecoq alumni and Australian theatre have been propitious. Many Lecoq alumni have
87 played key roles over this time as creators and disseminators of new possibilities and new potentials for Australian theatre training and practice.
In 1965, with the shift in Australian theatre beginning to gain momentum, George Ogilvie returned to Australia after training at the Lecoq school. As director of the Melbourne Repertory Theatre, he introduced approaches that gave equal emphasis to physical and textual elements, conducting Lecoq-based workshops with the actors alongside production:
When I returned to Australia in 1965, of course no-one had yet heard of Lecoq, but gradually through the Melbourne Theatre Company and workshops with the APG [Lecoq s] practice for the actor began to take hold (Ogilvie, interviewed by Martin Portus 1999).
During 1965 to 1970, Melbourne got a taste of almost everything that I d learned and I took up classes with the actors and I became very interested in clown classes and I think you ll find that Lindy Davies for example - she was part of the APG during those days - well I took the APG people and began to introduce them to mask and mime and she says to this day that s how their thing began, that s how their ideas truly took off (Ogilvie 1998:443, interview).
Later, as director of the STCSA, Ogilvie continued teaching Lecoq-based work, undertaking seven months of training with the actors prior to any public performances at the new purpose-built Playhouse. Katharine Brisbane considered Ogilvie s extended focus on actor training as a crucial step towards the development of an Australian theatre :
If our new plays and writers are to have their full effect, a new acting style has to be found to match the words. This is the challenge of the social workshop in South Australia. The first production of Jugglers Three [at the STCSA] which took advantage of the work already done at the Melbourne Theatre Company, was the only production of a work by one of the new writers done with the depth, confidence and finish necessary before our work can be properly taken to the theatre centres of the world. In time - and please let us not be in a hurry this time - Ogilvie may just possibly come up with a method (Brisbane, in Ward 1992:52).
And, as Peter Ward has noted, Brisbane was duly impressed with the results of Ogilvie s actor training:
88 Katharine Brisbane reported [...] that the success of George Ogilvie s training scheme was "without question: actors like Les Dayman, George Szewcow, Patrick Frost and Julie Hamilton, who have been with the group continuously are new performers entirely" (Ward 1992:68).
At the Pram Factory, Lecoq graduate Roslyn de Winter had also been giving workshops based on her training, and in 1976 joined forces with APG member Sue Ingleton and others to form the all-female group Stasis. The group produced both text-based and self-devised work which, like the APG before it, had a strong physical basis:
[The Pram Factory] was always physically-based right from the beginning, you know, Marvellous Melbourne and those early days. It was always knock-about vaudeville, based in the Joan Littlewood tradition and that is very close to what Lecoq was into - an earthy physical comedy (de Winter 1997:176, interview).
In Sydney, Lecoq graduate Heather Robb began teaching Lecoq-based work to student actors at the Ensemble in 1975 and later at NIDA, where her students included Judy Davis, John Howard and Mel Gibson. At Newcastle, Robb gave weekend workshops to acting students who later formed the Castanet Club with Lecoq graduate Russell Cheek. Isabelle Anderson took up Robb s position at NIDA in 1980, teaching clown to students who would appear some years later in Strictly Ballroom. At the QTC in 1978, Geoffrey Rush performed as the Fool in King Lear, his first role after returning from training at the Lecoq school. As Amruta Slee has noted,
Rush was one of a handful of people who in the 1970s began steering Australian theatre away from its "pseudo-Anglo" pretensions. James Waites, chief theatre critic for the Sydney Morning Herald, saw him onstage for the first time in a South Australian Theatre Company production of Twelfth Night and was struck by his distinctive style: "Basically acting back then was standing around speaking in a good English voice", says Waites. "Geoffrey didn t do that" (1998:48).
Later in 1978, Rush directed, devised and performed in the much acclaimed Clowneroonies at QTC, introducing Lecoq s clown style to mainstream audiences. As Rush observes:
I think that [Clowneroonies] had quite an impact, because it was long before any kind of red nose clowning had really been done here in a full-scale way I would have thought. And it was also consciously not following say the Pram Factory traditions which tended to always have some sort of agit-prop element so that the
89 technique seemed to be a kind of chosen medium to pitch up some kind of social or political idea. [Clowneroonies] was very much discovering what the pulse of performers were in a kind of comedy context (1998:527, interview).
In the 1980s, the troupe Double Take presented their slick clown shows at the Sydney and Adelaide Festivals, the Nimrod, Newcastle and at the Last Laugh in Melbourne. Lecoq graduates John Bolton and Claire Teisen joined West Community Theatre in Melbourne, performing as part of the Essendon Policewomen s Marching Band and working with communities, training and assisting them to create their own theatre. At Street Arts, Therese Collie was and continues to be a key player, contributing to the development of Rock n Roll Circus as well as devising, directing and performing for and with communities. Between 1983 and 1990, the Castanet Club took its character- based humour to national and international audiences. Lecoq graduate Russell Cheek was a key member. Between 1983 and 1989, the troupe Red Weather created and performed in Sydney, Melbourne and Newcastle, introducing Lecoq s bouffon style to Australian audiences. In 1986 Nigel Jamieson created Red Square for the Adelaide Festival, the first of his large-scale outdoor extravaganzas. In 1987, Jamieson created Kelly s Republic as the central commission for the Sydney Festival. Also in 1987, Geoffrey Rush s Popular Mechanicals became the smash hit of the season and was re- mounted with its sequel Popular Mechanicals II in 1992. Ken Healey saw the productions as a mark of Australian theatre s independence from Mother England :
See these shows to wonder at the virtuosic artistry of half a dozen of our local stage yokels. Sydney IS the bush when it is compared here to the sophistication of the Elizabethan court. We should and do revel in it, giving an improper colonial salute to the old imperial centre (1992:72).
In 1989, Rush delivered his acclaimed performance in The Diary of a Madman. This production also seemed to embody an Australian theatre that no longer relied on external legitimation:
If there is a benchmark of a nation s cultural maturity, that "coming of age" which still seems under debate in Australia, it is the ability to create this sort of art which is made by Australians but has nothing to do with nationalistic navel gazing. So, we are grown up. What next? (Croggan 1990:12).
Throughout the 1990s, Lecoq alumni have been creating street, festival and cabaret theatre, performing as clown, masked, bouffon and contemporary commedia characters. In 1991 Claire Teisen performed as Mistress of ceremonies for Circus Oz. In 1994,
90 Legs on the Wall won the Sidney Myer Performing Arts Award for All of Me, directed by Nigel Jamieson. Between 1990 and 1997, John Bolton was teaching Lecoq-based training at his school in Melbourne. In 1993 Russell Cheek performed as Monsieur Jourdain in The Gentleman s New Clothes at Belvoir Street and in Barrie Kosky s Tartuffe in 1997. The same year, Geoffrey Rush won an Oscar for Best Actor in the movie Shine. In 1998, Russell Dykstra was clowning director on Zen Zen Zo s production of The Marriage of Figaro and in 1999 Dykstra won the AFI award for his performance in the film Soft Fruit. Also in 1999, Nigel Jamieson directed Legs on the Wall for Sydney s millennial celebrations and in 2000, directed the Tin Symphony as part of the opening ceremony for the Sydney Olympics.
These are a few key examples of the work that Lecoq alumni have been undertaking in Australia over the last thirty-five years. These theatre practitioners have contributed significantly to Australian theatre training and practice, working across a broad spectrum of the theatrical field in mainstream and fringe theatres, street and festival theatre, community theatres, television, documentary and feature film. At a critical period of Australia s theatrical history, their contributions have served to undermine the privileged position of text-based realism and the longstanding pattern of English and American domination, helping to shape a vibrant and vital Australian theatre.
The reasons for the initial and continuing interest in Lecoq s training are multiple and complex, but the context in which this phenomenon arose gives some indication that the Lecoq school accommodated the needs of theatre and theatre practitioners during this time. It is perhaps not surprising in the context of the last forty years that Australians should actively seek out theatre training that offered alternatives to the text-based, realist paradigm. What is surprising is that they should travel half way around the world to study with a little-known French theatre teacher in an old boxing studio in Paris.
George Ogilvie felt that the Lecoq approach suited his physical nature and considers that Australia s initial and continuing interest in the Lecoq school has to do with a cultural pre-disposition:
I think Australians are very physical people [...]. When I came back to Australia I found that the physical nature of Lecoq s work suited Australians down to the ground and of course there s been a flood of people go to Lecoq since. So it has developed, of course it has developed. It s developed because of Lecoq and because of our own physical nature if you like (Ogilvie 1998:448, interview).
91 While Ogilvie s comments might be seen as somewhat reductive, what can be said is that Australians have an international reputation as being very physical people . As Martin Portus commented on the Arts Today radio program: certainly the signature we seem to have overseas is of being very physical (1999). In the wake of international acclaim for Australian circus and physical theatre performers, Gavin Robins queried this phenomenon:
Does this apparently superior physical vernacular stem from a relatively isolated geography where people are strongly connected to the land and the physical demands this places upon them, or from an outdoor culture of sun, surf and sport, or from initiatives such as the Flying Fruit Fly Circus and Circus Oz? (1999:44).
Certainly Australia s landscapes are inscribed in all of us in multiple and diverse ways and perhaps our particular geographical make-up has rendered us more physically oriented than some other cultures. But while theatre critics have often focused on the physical orientation of Australia s recent theatrical forms, stamping them with the ubiquitous physical theatre label, many have perhaps failed to appreciate the extent to which Australia s isolated geography has shaped our choice of theatrical forms and the types of training we choose to undertake to create those forms. Certainly all Australians are not very physical people , but we are all geographically isolated. As Neil Armfield and Geoffrey Rush have commented during the 2000 Rex Cramphorn Memorial Lecture:
[Australia] is a curious country in that we are so isolated [...] that experience of isolation has meant that there is a kind of separation from great [theatre] traditions (Armfield 2000:7).
[O]bviously the traditions that we re talking about are great European or international traditions that go back much deeper in theatre history for different cultures that we haven t been part of (Rush 2000:7).
What Rush was apparently drawn to in Europe and specifically the Lecoq school, was not physical theatre training, but theatrical traditions that were far removed from Australia s British theatrical heritage and the hegemony of text-based realism. Rush has often pointed to his childhood theatre experiences as a formative influence on his performance work and he has spoken of those experiences as being somehow connected to those great European traditions from which he has felt culturally estranged. As a child, Rush delighted in the antics of Chaplin and Keaton, and he holds fond memories of the swan song of Australian vaudeville: childhood pantomimes featuring George
92 Wallis and the magic and spectacle of Sorlie s travelling tent shows. Sorlie s followed the agricultural show circuit, touring to country towns in NSW and Queensland where it played children s pantomime by day and variety show by night. In many ways Sorlie s epitomises the sense of isolation and desire for connection with theatrical traditions that Rush and Armfield have spoken of. For many, Sorlie s was the high point of the year. It has been said that in country areas, where travelling shows provided virtually all of the live entertainment, women bought two dresses a year: one for the agricultural show and one for Sorlie s (Chance, 1995:534). Rush s choice of theatre training was, in many ways, impacted by his childhood experiences of popular theatre forms. In Sorlie s, he glimpsed a sense of European popular theatre traditions that were largely absent from Australian mainstream theatre training and practice:
I tend to feel the tradition that I plug back into [...] was the galvanising moment of being enthralled by theatre in a travelling tent back in the late 1950s when I was seven, and seeing what might have been pretty crappy rural pantomime. I don t know, it was pretty mesmerising for me (Rush 2000:8).
I ve always had an affection for that strand [of theatre] because I suppose that was the performers strand in this country that didn t have anything to do with plays or texts or whatever but it was like coming from that semi-populist tradition that probably found some kind of link in my head with those European traditions at [the Lecoq] school (Rush 1998:527, interview).
The desire to make contact with these popular theatre traditions has apparently prompted a number of Australians to train at the Lecoq school. George Ogilvie, for example, initially travelled to Europe to study the commedia dell arte in Milan but was urged to go to the Lecoq school by friend and colleague Roslyn de Winter, who was attending the school at the time. Russell Cheek travelled to Paris in search of Italian clown traditions:
We used to talk a lot about going to Europe to study. We used to do clown stuff then and we got inspired by the musical clown - that Italian tradition, that kind of romantic Italian clown - and I really loved that stuff and I wanted to find out more about it (Cheek 1998:96, interview).
Whether alumni have chosen Lecoq s training because of its physical orientation or because it offered exploration of popular theatre forms, or, indeed, for both these reasons, since popular theatre forms are so often physically and visually-based, their choice of training indicates that what they wanted was not available in Australia. The
93 hegemony of text-based realism has permeated not only our performance practices, but our training regimes, and to choose the Lecoq school was a direct rejection of these modes. As Christine Grace and Therese Collie indicate:
I don t particularly like Australian plays, like David Williamson. I mean I don t like that kind of theatre. I don t like everyday things on stage, it doesn t do anything for me. They are held up as a real reflection of Australian culture and Australian theatre and I think it s a really small part of it. It s much richer than that and much more interesting (Grace 1997:265, interview).
I think you need something different and vibrant, physical and musical from your theatre. I mean I ve never been really attracted to a lot of people walking around talking (Collie 1998:135, interview).
For Lecoq alumni, what they wanted from performance training lay outside the scope of the training programs available at the time. Their choice of training was considerably alternative and represented a significant break from the expectations and assumptions of Australian theatre s text-based, realist paradigm. As Geoffrey Rush comments:
I wasn t drawn to travel south and go to NIDA or try and go to RADA or something like that because I knew that I was an eccentric performer, that I didn t fit into a kind of heroically-voiced mould that seemed to be what I was getting from contacts with people from NIDA. I thought, "Well I m not really getting a buzz out of that" and I was looking at a lot of Fellini films and I thought, "Well these are more my people" (Rush 1998:531).
While Rush s post-Lecoq career has been a particularly smooth one, many alumni have met with a certain amount of resistance towards a training which has been, and in some cases continues to be little understood, misunderstood or dismissed as illegitimate and without value. In a country that prides itself on its tolerance, it is disappointing to realise the opposition that Lecoq s training has sometimes met with. As Steven Gration reported in Lowdown in 1991:
There have been incidents of prejudice against Australian graduates from Lecoq s school. Isabelle Anderson could not gain employment in theatre, film or TV upon her return from Jacques Lecoq s school in Paris in the 1960s. She was told she needed qualifications from NIDA before she could be employed because her Lecoq training was not recognised. Ironically, whilst waiting for employment Isabelle was asked to teach at NIDA. She couldn t get employment but was
94 training students who did! Similarly, Russell Fewster was told recently that he had little chance of getting a director s development grant through the Australia Council because Lecoq s work was not recognised or valued in Australia. Fewster was told he would have a better chance if he did a year of drama at Adelaide University (1991:23).
Both Heather Robb and Celia Moon have had similar experiences:
When I got back to Australia in 1975 I wanted to get acting work. I didn t really know anyone or any procedures here so I tried to go through some usual channels and met with great incredulity. People just didn t know about this school and it was very difficult to explain to them what had been going on because it didn t seem to correspond to anything they were familiar with [...] I waitressed for a long time, for what felt like an eternity, and then I actually went to see Hayes Gordon at the Ensemble to see if he had any acting work and while I was in his study he got a phone call from his mime teacher to say that she was leaving. So he leaned across his desk and asked me if I d ever thought of teaching (Robb 1998:515, interview).
When I first came back to Sydney [...] some of the theatres were very anti-Lecoq - that style of thing [...]. They were just not interested and they d say: "Oh you ve trained at Lecoq? Forget it!" (Moon 1998:392, interview).
While ignorance of the Lecoq school and its pedagogy is perhaps not as widespread as it once was, some alumni have still experienced difficulty breaking into the industry and this is indicative of the strong hold the text-based, realist paradigm has had on our expectations and assumptions about performance as well as training. As Richard Fotheringham observes, there are ideological reasons for maintaining the privileged situation of particular types of training, and there are structures in place to ensure these positions are not undermined. Fotheringham has pointed out that NIDA is funded at more than $20,000 per student, while the other five major training institutions are funded at between $7,000 and $9,000 per student:
These five organisations each have financial reasons therefore to claim parity with NIDA, which has a vested interest in denying their existence and preventing their growth. Further, during the twenty years it was the only training school, NIDA developed close links with the subsidised state companies, and established a nexus which operated to privilege its own graduates and to exclude directors and actors who came from other backgrounds and training experiences. This worked to
95 institutionalise a certain kind of performance style (realism) within an overall aesthetic (plays from the British tradition) and economic structure (the English provincial repertory theatre). Conversely, however, since these other training schools do exist, NIDA has a contrary interest in maintaining control over what acting is and what the profession is (1998:27).
Lecoq graduate Dominique Sweeney has come face-to-face with the ideological power structures that operate in this country to privilege some and exclude others from the theatre industry:
[Lecoq training] is not an opening to getting into theatre here, that s what I ve found. I don t understand really. I thought it would have been very helpful to get into lots of things but I haven t found that so far. Maybe I haven t met the right people [...]. The whole thing with mainstream in Australia is you need to know a couple of directors and the word goes from there. You get a break from going either to NIDA or VCA to meet those people when they come in to have a look at the graduating students. You know, they usually try to get a couple of good directors while you re a student, particularly in your third year and then if they like you things can move from there (Sweeney 1998:536, interview).
Sweeney s disillusionment with the system has been compounded by the lack of media response he received for a devised piece created by himself and others called Strangers in Paradise in 1997:
We are most annoyed that no newspaper reviewer attended our performance. We have no press reviews. The media - print, radio, TV - were given all the information, contacted numerous times and invited to the mayoral performance or any other they wished to attend. We had an enormous amount of trouble getting `the establishment to attend. This was not because they did not know it was on. I do not know why they stayed away (pers.com. 2 Feb. 1999).
It is perhaps not surprising that two of the most successful Lecoq graduates in Australia have been Geoffrey Rush and George Ogilvie, both of whom were well established in mainstream theatre before they attended the Lecoq school. On the whole, Lecoq alumni have worked at the margins of Australian theatre, working on the street, at the festival, in nightclubs, with communities. In some cases, this has been a conscious choice rather than a necessity. Lecoq alumni tend to prefer to work in situations where they are at liberty to create their own original theatrical material, to design, to perform, to direct their own theatrical courses. Their Lecoq training has
96 provided them with the skills and experience to create and attend to all aspects of the production process. Lecoq s pedagogy offers a particular approach to theatre and performance that does not necessarily sit well with the institutionalised phenomenon we call the theatre industry . But the work of Lecoq alumni in Australia and the influence of that work on Australian theatre should not be underestimated on these counts. Their work has played a key role in effecting a major shift in Australian theatre. As George Ogilvie has commented:
What s been wonderful is being able to watch so many people go over there and bring him back. They bring Lecoq back with them and I think that every company I ve seen perform in Australia ever since is gradually influenced by this extraordinary man and his work through his students [...]. It pervades everything (Ogilvie, interviewed by Martin Portus 1999).
Through their work as actors, directors, teachers and writers, Lecoq alumni have contributed to a refashioning of Australian theatre, disrupting the forces invested in the maintenance of one kind of theatre so that the integrated body, improvisation, creativity and diversity of form might be active elements in the development of multiple, vital and dynamic Australian theatres.
CONCLUSION
In this chapter I have attempted to situate the influence of the Lecoq school within a socio-cultural, historical context. I have indicated that the work of Lecoq alumni in Australia is positioned within a major shift in Australian theatre that is characterised by the undermining of imported theatrical formations that relied on and privileged text- based realism. I have discussed some of the possible reasons for the initial and continuing interest in the Lecoq school within this context and have indicated where there has been resistance to the pedagogy and the work of alumni.
The remaining chapters in this thesis will detail the work of alumni and their influence on Australian theatre. The chapters are organised according to the categories of `acting , directing , teaching , community theatre and a case study of Geoffrey Rush. Each category is dealt with in a separate chapter. Within each chapter the narrative has been organised in terms of the four key elements or features of the Lecoq pedagogy: creation of original performance material; use of improvisation; a movement-based
97 approach to performance; the use of a repertoire of performance styles. With the exception of the community theatre chapter, each element is considered separately. In the community theatre chapter the narrative has been organised in terms of different types of community theatre.
98 CHAPTER FIVE
ACTING. INTRODUCTION
This chapter focuses on the acting work of Lecoq alumni in Australia. It will discuss how the work of these alumni has been influenced by their Lecoq training and the influence their work has had on Australian theatre. The chapter is divided into four sections focusing on a discussion of alumni's work within the framework of the four key elements of the Lecoq pedagogy: creation of original material; use of improvisation; a movement- based approach to performance; use of a repertoire of performance styles.
Overview of the Research Findings: Virtually all the alumni I have interviewed have worked as actors at some stage in their post-Lecoq careers. The types of acting work undertaken by these alumni have been diverse and their contributions to theatre cut across multiple aspects of the theatrical field. However, with the exception of Russell Dykstra, Russell Cheek and Isabelle Anderson, alumni have worked predominantly in fringe and alternative rather than mainstream theatre contexts. Within these contexts, alumni have frequently chosen to create original material rather than working with pre-scripted texts. This material has been devised and sometimes performed using improvisatory techniques. Alumni have employed movement- based approaches to their work and have utilised many of the theatrical styles taught as part of the Lecoq course.
Alumni have made a particular contribution to what Richard Harris has called the `revolution' in Australian comedy over the last thirty years (1994:15). While this `revolution' can be seen as part of the broader 'new wave' movement in theatre, it is also particularised within the context of the advent of television in Australia:
Australian comedy had been developing steadily until the mid-1950s when the introduction of television inadvertently opened the doors to a huge and overwhelming influx of British and American comedy. Within a decade this subtle form of cultural imperialism had caused the virtual disappearance of live comedy in Australia and was even threatening the existence of its national sense of humour. It wasn't until Melbourne's alternative cabaret scene took off during the late 1970s that our comedy culture resumed its development and finally came of age. During the following decade the output of home-grown comedy was so huge that it took on almost revolutionary proportions producing a comedy culture that was both rich in talent and unmistakably Australian (1994:ix-x).
100 Following the re-emergence of Australian comedy in Melbourne, the next thirty years saw the rise of stand-up, cabaret and circus-based comedy at venues such as The Last Laugh in Melbourne, The Comedy Store in Sydney and elsewhere. In the 1980s, female performers were for the first time being accepted as comics on their own terms and becoming a force to be reckoned with in Australian comedy. These included Wendy Harmer, Sue Ingleton, Rachel Burger and Maryanne Fahey (Harris 1994:67). The 1980s were also a formative time for groups such as Circus Oz and individuals such as Stephen Abbott, Mikey Robbins, and a host of others, many of whom have found their way into television comedy shows such as The Big Gig , Comedy Company , Australia - You re Standing In It , `Full Frontal , the `D-Generation and Good News Week .
A number of Lecoq alumni have been contributors to the re-emergence of Australian comedy during the past thirty years. In the 1970s, for example, Lecoq graduate Heather Robb and her working partner Jan Hamilton performed as a clowning duo. The novelty of women performing as clowns in Australia is epitomised in the following comments by reviewer Errol Bray:
Heather Robb and Jan Hamilton are female clowns and Australians. A rare species for these two reasons alone and even rarer when you see their work (Bray 1978:16- 17).
Thus, not only did Robb and Hamilton introduce Lecoq s clown to Australian audiences, they also directly challenged what had traditionally been a male domain and paved the way for other female clowns. Robb believes that their work encouraged other women to work as clowns:
I think we influenced people to the extent that we were two women and up till then clown had been a very male-dominated area since most clowns had been men. So this was a new thing and I think that helped other women give it a try too. I know other women formed duos and did clowning having gained confidence after seeing us, after realising that it was possible and perfectly acceptable for women to do clowning (Robb 1998:517).
Other Lecoq alumni such as Christine Grace and Therese Collie have also performed as female clowns, opening up a comic performance style that had previously operated as `taboo for women.
In the 1980s, Australia s first bouffon troupe introduced a particular brand of comedy that one reviewer called an `interworking of the comic and the monstrous (Long 1987). The
101 troupe was Red Weather and was founded by Lecoq alumni Andrew Lindsay, Nicoletta Boris and Nique Murch. It performed self-devised bouffon productions in many of Australia s major cities between 1984 and 1989. Red Weather introduced the bouffon style to Australian audiences, using it as a vehicle for humorous social comment by satirising aspects of contemporary Australian culture.
The troupe Double Take has also contributed to the rise of Australian comedy. Using Lecoq s approach to clowning and comedy, Double Take created shows that relied heavily on visual humour and employed such techniques as mime, movement and shadow play. The troupe, variously made up of three and four members, consisted of Russell Cheek, Claire Teisen, Ted Keijser and Iaon Gunn. Cheek considers the group s appearances at Newcastle, Melbourne, the Sydney and Adelaide Festivals in 1982 had a seminal impact on the growth and development of Australian comedy:
We did make a real impact because we worked in a style together that people really hadn t seen companies do before. It was very clean. Even though it was a knock- about show, it was a very clean style and we all knew exactly what each other was doing and the focus was very clearly delineated and we knew how to build gags, sight gags and physical gags. We used a lot of different styles and we were all totally conversant with those styles (Cheek 1998:101, interview).
What we started in a kernel with Double Take coming here and being a big influence - we blew them out at the Adelaide Festival. We were the sleeper of the 1982 Adelaide Festival and the Sydney Festival. We made a mark there that people haven t forgotten (Cheek 1998:107, interview).
While it is difficult to substantiate the extent to which Double Take s work impacted on the rise of Australian comedy during the 1980s, certain key links and interactions were made between Lecoq alumni and practitioners who have subsequently become prominent in this field of Australian theatre. After Double Take, Russell Cheek joined the Castanet Club which became prominent both nationally and internationally between 1983 and 1991:
At the start of 1984, few people outside Newcastle, New South Wales, had heard of the Castanet Club. By early 1985, some 150 shows, 40,000 miles and 30,000 audience members later, a lot more had, thanks to successes at Edinburgh, Adelaide and Perth Festivals, as well as seasons in Sydney and Melbourne. This success was only the tip of the working iceberg (Cheek Abbot 1987:144).
102 Russell Cheek claims that Double s Take s work had a seminal impact on members of the Castanet Club, and that the Castanet Club in turn impacted on the development of Australian comedy:
The thing is, once Stephen [Abbott], Angela [Moore] and Glenn [Butcher] saw the work we did with Double Take, they got really knocked out by it. So I suppose that s a seminal kind of influence really and I suppose all those little theatrical offshoots that we did with the Castanet Club did find their way back into the band itself as well [...]. One of the biggest shows we did was called A-Ned-U-Kelly, which was the story of Ned Kelly in feudal Japan. We did it in white pantomime, in Japanese shintaro style in white pantomime. So Ned Kelly was a samurai character and the rest of us played the Ninja characters. We did stuff like shadow work, because that s what I d done with Double Take and that was an idea I d had at Lecoq to do shadow work. So that was a direct influence. We did total physical stuff and we did it at the Enmore theatre in front of 2,500 people. It was bizarre but it was fabulous [...]. I mean the Castanet Club did have a lot of influence on the Australian scene, hopefully when people look back on our film in a few years they ll see where a lot of the spirit of Australian comedy came from (Cheek 1998:104, interview).
Even prior to these shows, Stephen Abbott, Glenn Butcher and Angela Moore had worked with Russell Cheek directing a devised theatre-in-education show for Freewheels. As Cheek recalls:
It s quite a story really, because this ended up being the core of the Castanet Club. I d seen these two guys performing, they d had a little band going, in fact it was the very first version of the Castanet Club. Three out of the four people in this company Freewheels had started this little company and they were just starting when I came up to do this show and they said: "You should come and have a look at what we do". And so I went down and saw what they did and Steve and Glenn on stage had a really fantastic rapport and I just thought, "Well what s the rhythm, what s the key to their characters?" and I just thought, "Oh, it s kind of like the hare and the tortoise. So I decided to base this show we were doing with Freewheels on The Hare and the Tortoise (Cheek 1999b:125, interview).
So I devised this show based around the concept of these characters and I got Steve to play the tortoise and we built this fibreglass shell and he used to wear this school girl straw hat, it was hilarious. But I kind of stripped him right back. I mean this was a genuine influence from working with Philippe [Gaulier] and how I got my
103 clown through Philippe. I did the same process with Steve and he suddenly found his deadpan which he uses - it's 90% of his Sandman character [...] by playing the tortoise he learned to do nothing, to be deadpan and still be funny (Cheek 1998:104, interview).
All of these Lecoq alumni performed their particular brands of comedy at a time which, as Johnson and Smiedt note, 'many view as one of the most important periods in the development of Australian comedy' (1999:268). As with many of the comedians working at this time, their work relied strongly on broad physical characterisations and visual gags. At a time when Australian comedy was itself undergoing a process of fermentation, it is possible that the work of these alumni was part of this fermentation process, mixing the pedagogical leaven in and through Australian theatre.
CREATION OF ORIGINAL MATERIAL
An overwhelming majority of alumni in the acting category have chosen to devise, direct and perform their own original theatrical material. While the methods alumni have used to devise material are multiple and varied, they are notably influenced by Lecoq's pedagogical use of 'constraint' as the primary departure point in the creative process. In other words, alumni employ approaches which impose strict boundaries, limitations, rules and parameters on their material. Further, alumni work from the premise that creation operates most effectively within an environment of constraint, that imposed constraints facilitate the creation of dramatic material. As Will Hodgson explains:
If you say to actors: "I want you to create a piece where you can say a poem and you can sing a song. I want a change of levels and you're only allowed to do it in a space of three foot by three foot". You'd be amazed at what they come up with. But if you say to a group of people: "Well, look I just want you to create something about life on the streets of Melbourne" or even simpler than that, just a theme about water or the natural elements or whatever, then people are lost because they don't have any parameters. They think: "I've got freedom - I can do whatever I want" but we need those parameters to create the freedom and to go and do the work. If you set up parameters, strict parameters, you actually have a tremendous amount of freedom to devise theatrical material. It creates freedom. And it's the same thing with style. It's just so easy to devise when you're using a style. Style really gives you a structure to work in. If all the actors know what style they're working in then
104 the piece can be created. Whether it s clown, whether it s the bouffon, whether it s commedia, or the Greek chorus form, or even if you use the conteur mimeur, these are all parameters. You re setting up parameters and then you can create from there. (Hodgson 1998:307-308, interview).
Using this approach of constraint, alumni have created original dramatic material on many and diverse themes. The company Double Take, for example, based their first comic piece called The Last Laugh on Raymond Chandler s detective novels. Their second piece, No Flies on Biggles, was based on the tales of the British war-time hero. Claire Teisen created a solo piece called The Beautiful Necklace from an African folk tale. Red Weather created one of their bouffon pieces based on the Christian creation myth and another on environmental issues. Steven Bishop has often used objects as the creative impulse for his clown work, developing skills into clowning routines using items such as an umbrella or a cane and incorporating these into dramatic situations:
I tend to use objects and skills a lot. Say if you have an appearing cane, for instance, it s then a matter of what you do with it. Whether you can spin it around your finger, over your shoulder, catch it behind your back, that kind of thing. So you might firstly develop skills with objects or routines with an umbrella or something like that. Then you can use it in a dramatic situation, you use it to give something an elan or an accent (Bishop 1998:29, interview).
Alumni have also been influenced by Lecoq s exercises for creating dramatic material from personal experience and observation of the environment. Isabelle Anderson, for example, used this aspect of her Lecoq training to create a solo-mask piece called New Sky. Here Anderson used observation of the environment, her own and other s personal experiences as the raw material for the piece:
Lecoq would ask us: "What are you going to perform about? What s your theme?" And he would have us go out into the streets and watch the world and come back and perform something from the environment we saw [...]. When I did my one-woman show, I came back home and looked afresh at Australia - as you do when you ve been away - and what I saw was immigrants. I d just been a foreigner for five years in another country, so I came back to Australia and everywhere I looked there were foreigners. So it came out of what I saw around me, this sense of: "Well what is home anyway? Everyone has come from somewhere else. Home is somewhere that you feel inside". And that set off the whole piece. So Lecoq affected me very much in that respect, in terms of: "What are you going to perform about? What s your theme?" (Anderson 1999:5, interview).
105 For Dominique Sweeney and Will Hodgson, their observation and personal experience of life on Australia s Gold Coast was the impetus in their creation of two pieces called Strangers in Paradise and Breaker Street:
I guess there s something particular about being on the Gold Coast. It s such an artistic, cultural desert. There s very little there. I think as artists we found that living in that environment was always a struggle for us and so that struggle influenced what we ended up creating our theatre about. And certainly that was the case with Breaker Street. I mean it was really about two musicians struggle to make their living, trying to do their art in this Gold Coast, in this kind of plastic neon-light world. You know, what do you do? (Hodgson 1998:291, interview).
A number of other alumni have also used observation for creating thematic and narrative elements in devised pieces. Steven Bishop created a bouffon stilt-walking family from observing visitors to Brisbane s Southbank. Russell Dykstra based his characters in Children of the Devil on observation of life, from people that I knew or types of people that I knew or certain people that I knew (Dykstra 1999b:230, interview). Russell Cheek created a conspiracy story about right wing forces in Australia called Faces, Fakes and Falsehoods:
It was about this character who woke up exiled. He d been sent in this huge envelope into this strange kind of science-fiction sector somewhere in the outback and he had no idea where he was and he had to re-trace his story to find out why he d been exiled and who he was off-side with. So the show opened with me inside this huge envelope and then I came out of there. The show was in two halves. The first half was, I suppose, a literal interpretation of what had happened to him. He had been a political activist and had discovered some information that people didn t want him to have. It s like the disappeared . It was supposed to allude to that, to the disappeared in South America. And the second half was like a mythical interpretation of it where it was the same guy, this hero person, but treated in a mythical way and then the two stories came together at the end (Cheek 1999b:122, interview).
In creating characters for their devised pieces, many alumni have been influenced by the techniques of Personnage taught at the Lecoq school. This aspect of the Lecoq pedagogy asks students to create a number of different characters which are then explored and developed through improvisation. In addition, students learn how to transform instantly from one character to another and in one particular auto-cours exercise, are required to
106 devise a solo piece where they have to perform as two different characters. In another exercise, students form a company of five actors and, between them, must play ten different characters.
The ability to create multiple characters is a notable feature of much of the work done by Lecoq alumni. Russell Dykstra, for example, played four different characters in his solo piece Children of the Devil. For The Last Laugh the troupe Double Take also created and performed multiple characters, as one reviewer reported:
Each member of Double Take plays many parts - the lone-wolf private eye, the moronic underworld goon who threatens him, the inspector at headquarters who resents his interference, the voluptuous wife of a senile millionaire whose stately mansion has an idiot butler, the stripper in whose black silk stockings a pearl- handled revolver is concealed (Lloyd 1982a:9).
Performed at Newcastle and the Sydney and Adelaide Festivals, critics were particularly taken with the actors transformational abilities, with one reviewer commenting:
The Last Laugh manages to walk the tightrope between playing a Raymond Chandler-style private eye story straight and gently sending it up. More remarkable, perhaps, is the fact that the 90-minute long story, full of shifty dames, bullet-riddles corpses, hardboiled cops and dumb hoods, is played by only three actors (Longworth 1981:4).
Claire Teisen s skills in character creation and transformation also came to the fore in a solo piece called The Beautiful Necklace, directed by fellow Lecoq graduate John Bolton. The piece tells the story of a young girl who receives a necklace from a river goddess for her good deeds, while others are met with horrible fates because of their greed and selfishness. Here Teisen transforms from the character of a young girl, to an old hag who dwells at the bottom of the river and ultimately into a ferocious monster, all without any costume changes. As with Double Take, the critics were once again impressed with Teisen s character transformations, the Melbourne Herald commenting: `Teisen s transformation from child to river goddess is one of the highlights of the year (UPC).3
3 Please note: many alumni have provided me with copies of newspaper reviews of their productions from their personal records. However, some of these items lacked enough information for me to be able to locate and reference their sources. These are identified in the thesis as 'UPC' - 'Unidentified Press Clipping'.
107 USE OF IMPROVISATION
Training in improvisation has impacted significantly on the work of alumni in the acting category. In broad terms their approaches to performance, though multiple and varied, are characterised by a preoccupation with spontaneous aspects of the production process. Their work foregrounds approaches which are non-analytical, visceral, extempore and involve working with unplanned, impromptu and unknown elements, constructing theatrical dynamics out of random occurrences. Alumni demonstrate a concern for and valuing of spontaneity, vitality and playfulness. Whether working with devised or scripted material, these preoccupations cut across multiple aspects of their performance work. The following comments by Russell Dykstra and Will Hodgson are indicative:
I think there s nothing better than saying: "Okay. We have no script, we have no ideas" - or we may have a few ideas - "What are we going to do? And then to come up with a product in four weeks down the track or even ten days down the track . It s a great feeling, especially when it works well. And I love bringing that kind of approach to scripted work as well, bringing play in, because I think the industry is such a difficult one anyway that it should be a pleasure to be a part of it (Dykstra 1998:213, interview).
It s scary devising from nothing, from an empty space when you ve got nothing apart from a few ideas or maybe a theme or a stimulus or whatever [...]. That initial time before you create is quite extraordinary because you ve got nothing and you go: "I don t know what we re going to do!". But something happens and it s exhilarating when it happens and it s astonishing how it does and three hours later, or even half an hour later - bang! - you ve got an idea and you re just flying with it [...]. It s a wonderful way to create. It can also be frustrating, because you do come up against blocks, but I guess even writers come up against blocks. It s part of the creative process. But you do learn to trust that it will work because you ve seen it work before. You know you ll have something at the end of it (Hodgson 1998:293, interview).
Alumni have used their improvisational skills in the creation of original performance material, as an approach to exploration and development of scripted roles and also as a performance medium.
108 In approaching the creation of original material, alumni follow no particular method or set of procedures, but rely on a strategy of play within the constraints of a given theme, character, performance style or other imaginative stimulus. Initial improvisations tend to be more exploratory and, working through a process of trial and error, material is developed and refined for performance. Steven Bishop, for example, uses this approach to develop comic routines for his clown character Harry:
[Creating clowning routines] is really about searching out physical comedy and developing it into a structure because at that kind of level it can t be improvised. You use a lot of improvisation to find it out, but you need to then really script all the movement and have it very precise but have it look like it is being improvised for the first time. It s got to have that freshness (Bishop 1999:37, interview).
For Children of the Devil, Russell Dykstra began the improvisation process by firstly creating his characters and developing a narrative by placing them in different contexts:
We used lots of impro and a video recorder where David Bell would say, "Okay. Let s put this character in this situation. Go!" and try and bring out the stories, try and get stories happening. So in the final product [the characters] all had a story and a journey and in those journeys or stories they would touch each other s stories or each other s lives in passing or they were somehow connected in some way (Dykstra 1999b:231, interview).
Heather Robb and Jan Hamilton began their creative process for Ready for Men with the theme of the socio-cultural stereotypes imposed on women and their clown characters:
We wanted to do a show about women. And it was clear from what we knew of our clowns already that Gladys could head in a militant feminist direction and Buttercup could enslave herself to the myths of femininity. So we knew there was potential dramatic conflict there from the start. And that s all we started with. The rest emerged from active experiment: improvisations, where we found things instinctively. After two weeks of experiencing amazing things under the noses [we decided] to concentrate on three main areas: the hair removal thing, which we hoped would represent a lot more than just that; the "niceness" thing and the sex thing (Hamilton, in Smythe 1979:10).
To create The Last Laugh, Double Take used the detective novels of Raymond Chandler as their starting point. Improvisations were structured around what Double Take member Claire Teisen calls propositions for jeu
109 I d written a scenario for The Last Laugh which was just propositions for jeu -propositions that fitted into a storyline - but basically every scene came out of improvisation. You don t write a whole text (Teisen 1997a:553, interview).
One that springs to mind is that there s a scene in one of Raymond Chandler s books of the detective going to the rich person s house and the maid coming to the door - answering the door - and he had to get past the maid. He had to find some way of getting past, you know, being clever to get into the house. So we thought, "Now there s a proposition for jeu: how does the detective get past these two characters and what are these two characters like?" So we just improvised off that and I just decided to play a really absent minded maid completely off with the fairies. So the detective would give the coat to me and I would come back and I would forget that he gave it to me and I d say: "Did you give me the coat?" - "Oh the coat!". You know, so the jeu is trying to get me to do this simple thing, and she s so absent minded and off the planet that she puts the detective s card in her pocket but her pocket is inside-out. So there s all these little mishaps and things. So there s all this business happening between us until finally the butler comes and he s got to get past the butler and he s trying to get past him in order to get to her, to the rich woman (Teisen 1997b:570-571, interview).
Another one was that we had an older couple come to see the detective in his office. They re looking for their lost son and the woman wants to pass information to the detective but she doesn t want her husband to know because Earl has got a bad heart you see. So this was another proposition for jeu: how can she give information to the detective without her husband hearing?". So she throws things across the room and says, "Oh! Earl, Mr Roberts just dropped his packet of cigarettes. Can you go and pick it up" and then she d whisper to the detective. So there was this play happening between them. We did know that we had some propositions like: "How do we get past that person?. How do we get the detective s card?" - eventually - "How do we get the detective s card into the vacuum cleaner?", you know, because it s going to pass on to the next person (Teisen 1997b:571, interview).
Alumni have also used improvisation as a performance medium. In approaching this work, the degree to which theatrical dynamics are improvised varies depending on the dramatic situation. Commonly, however, improvised moments or sequences occur within a well- rehearsed textual narrative structure and serve to extend and enliven the rehearsed narrative. Double Take, for example, frequently allowed for spontaneous and random occurrences in their devised pieces:
110 There were improvisations in performance always. No Flies on Biggles had heaps of improvisations. You d always leave the edge on some scenes. Like in The Last Laugh, the scene with the vacuum cleaner was totally dependent on timing. So you just worked playing with your timing and that had to be spot on. But other things would be left open. For example, there was a moment when a telephone had to ring and so the two characters waited for the telephone to ring. It was my responsibility to go "Brrm, bum", but I could leave the two people out the front in the shit for as long as I wanted. How they played that was up to them. So we tried to leave a few things open to play around with as well (Teisen 1997b:571, interview).
Alumni have also used improvisation more extensively as a performance medium, improvising in performance using only a basic narrative structure. Russell Dykstra s solo piece Children of the Devil, for example, relied heavily on improvisation, with Dykstra working within theatrical checkpoints to navigate his way through the narrative:
I knew that I had A and B that I had to get through, then I had B to C and so on and so forth. How I got from A to B was totally up to me. I knew there were certain points I had to hit, certain bits of information I had to get across, but how it would come out was entirely up to me. So it was very exciting. It was very edgy (Dykstra 1998:219, interview).
The more Dykstra has performed the piece, however, the less improvised and more scripted it has become. Notably, Dykstra bemoans the loss of spontaneity afforded by a reliance on impromptu elements and plans to re-mount the piece, retrieving the improvisational edge of the initial performances (Dykstra 1998:219, interview).
Alumni have also used improvisation as a performance medium in audience-driven situations such as street and festival theatre where the spontaneous and improvised interaction with the audience is the driving force of the theatrical event. Steven Bishop, for example, has created large stilt-walking masked and bouffon characters for events such as the Brisbane festival and outdoor public spaces such as Brisbane s Southbank. Christine Grace took her clown character of Jean-Francois into cafés and restaurants where she improvised with the customers. Michael Newbold has performed his stilt-walking clown character Longdrop in the street, at festivals, cafés and at the Adelaide Grand Prix. Longdrop s main activity is meeting people and de-lousing them. This clown spends much of his time rifling through his audience s hair and clothes, uncovering lice and gleefully destroying them with a variety of cleaning agents. While this clown has a pre- determined activity which he performs, how that activity occurs is dependent on the
111 improvisatory moments with his audience members (Newbold 1998:429, interview). Justin Case has also performed as a clown in venues such as clubs and race-courses. As with Michael Newbold s clown, Case s clown characters rely heavily on improvisation with the audience to create the theatrical dynamics. One of these clown performances, for example, was a night shift from 10.30pm to 2.30 am at the Sydney Casino taxi rank:
What happens is that these people come out of shows like Rocky Horror or Showboat and from the Advertising Awards night and from the casino and people queue for taxis and the queue is huge and there aren t any taxis. And it was pouring rain last night so everybody s pretty annoyed. So it s a mixture of clowning and organisation of taxis and being nice to people who are pissed out of their minds and angry and don t want to know and so you just go along and chat to them and make their queue shorter by just being funny, looking crazy (Case 1998:89, interview).
Case has also been employed by large corporations as a humour valet . Dressed immaculately in a valet coat with epaulettes and a pill-box hat, Case goes into lifts and masquerades as a lift attendant, improvising with the people in the lift:
Usually there are two lifts so we zip in and out and people come in and we say "Excuse me sir, just checking the length of your tie. (Getting out a tape measure) Just checking it s long enough. Ok, ok, ooh! - bit of dust and dandruff (remove with valet brush) Ooh! Don t mention that!". And you just do those sorts of things and if it s really hot you just bring out your little propeller to cool them down or spray them and talk to them about things, the newspaper or their day - right in the middle of everybody being quiet. The idea is that when they reach the top floor they re laughing which is a really good beginning to the day. So we usually start about 7.30 in the morning and finish about 10.00. And what happens is that everybody starts talking about the crazy people in the lifts. So it makes a very boring day fun. I mean some people just don t want to know, but the point is that they re the people who need the stress factor. So that s theatre, I suppose - it s theatre in the lift (Case 1998:90, interview).
For Steven Bishop, who also performs mainly as a clown, improvisation and play are key elements of his audience-driven performances:
I find it s something that I m very aware of every time I perform is how I connect with the audience. It s about getting your play just right so you don t start anything without them, that you include them in your game. So it s very important that it s honest because the moment that you re not right on the game they won t partake of
112 the performance. When you re performing you can either have fail-safe material and the material will work in any situation or you can go with something a little bit more nebulous like a game or a jeu and when that works with you and the audience then that s the best possible high you can get; that s the best feeling of an event for an audience. Whereas with the material that goes on regardless, the audience have a sense of having watched but not partaken. So that s always the balance - you ve got to have enough material so that you know that no matter how bad the audience or whatever that it s still going to work, but you still have to keep that edge of jeu so that it can go any different way (Bishop 1998:28, interview).
Christine Grace has used her improvisational skills as a member of a street theatre company called the Hunting Party. This troupe of five women wear big, gold shoes, exaggerated hips and tall head-dresses. Grace describes them as quite Baroque, Medieval - rich fabrics, strong music, strong percussion . Their street theatre performances consist of hunting people down and eating them:
We had spears with drums on the end that we d play and we d sing songs and we d tell hunting stories and we d go around hunting for food and we like eating men and women and little children. So there s this a whole play of us hunting and finding our juicy meal and singing them a song before we kill them. So we d chase after people. It s quite playfully aggressive (Grace 1997:262, interview).
The Hunting Party toured to Europe in 1995 and 1996, and at the Melbourne Festival, Hong Kong and China in 1997.
While the majority of alumni have used improvisational techniques in the creation and performance of their own devised material, some alumni such as Russell Dykstra and Isabelle Anderson have also employed improvisation as an approach to the development of character for text-based roles. Both have used improvisation with the elements, materials, animals or different styles as a departure point for exploring and developing character and textual dynamics. As Dykstra explains:
It s also a way of freeing up the text as well, so that it s not precious and you can say "I make this mine" [...]. Play the character as a cowboy, play the character as a gipsy, and play that in rehearsal and no it won t be the final product but there will be things that you ll find through having played with the character that will enhance the work. And it s more interesting for an audience to watch because you sense that kind of stuff. As an actor you re still in play mode. You can take bits of the
113 cowboy on stage with you. It may not be as 100% as you played it in rehearsal, but there may be 20% there that you're still playing with (Dykstra 1998:218-219, interview).
In addition to using these techniques to develop a role, Isabelle Anderson considers that training in improvisation also helps the Lecoq student to develop an ability to play as part of an ensemble and to perform with a strong sense of complicity between the actors:
I think that's been a huge effect of Lecoq's training is how to work with other actors on stage and in rehearsal and just how to be with others on stage for maximum effect. We learned to play together on stage. There was an enormous amount of that. You learned how to be on stage with other actors and feed the actors. From the improvisations you're seeing how the energy plays between people, and the pick up and the give, and the build and the pace and the rhythm, and the pausing. It's like you do it together, the whole scene happens together. It happens in the space between actors, it doesn't happen in the actors. It's like a ball gets suspended in the air and that's absolutely how it works. And when you understand that, you depend on your partner like a trapeze artist depends on the catcher. So you work with the partner all the time. See, coming back to Australia, that wasn't always the case. You know people have their role and they're doing their role and they'll look at you and point the words in your direction, but you don't really feel there's a real thing going on. So the ability to work towards that was a great gift Lecoq gave me (Anderson 1999:11, interview).
In this respect, Lecoq's training in improvisation operates, not only for use in improvisational theatre or as a means of creating theatrical material, but also develops particular qualities that are vital in any performance context.
A MOVEMENT-BASED APPROACH TO PERFORMANCE
Lecoq alumni position the movement of the integrated body in space as the actor's primary means of theatrical communication. As actors, they demonstrate a preoccupation with what and how the body communicates to an audience. Consequently, their approaches to acting are marked by a particular concern with clarity and precision of movement and with the overall readability of theatrical dynamics. While Lecoq's movement-based training manifests in the work of alumni as particular skills in acrobatics and gestural languages
114 such as pantomime, it manifests more generally as an acute physical awareness and control. The following comments by Russell Dykstra, Dominique Sweeney and Russell Cheek are indicative:
As an actor, I find myself much more aware of myself in the space and what my body is communicating and I feel more in control of my body than I did [...]. The neutral mask work is constantly pulling out what your flaws are physically. If you ve got any tics or habits that aren t neutral then it will highlight those. So as actors it s great to constantly be aware of that so you can find a neutral base to then build character on rather than going, "This is what I believe is neutral" and then finding out that actually I ve got my shoulder raised here and that s not neutral that is actually me! So it s going to say something else to the audience. (Dykstra 1998:214, interview).
[The neutral mask work] opens up the idea of the power of the body. It makes you aware that every movement that you make tells a story. So you have to be conscious of that from the start and then you can move on [...]. It s really just about being conscious of how much information is given across at every moment (Sweeney 1998:542, interview).
I suppose the whole thing for me with Lecoq is [...] that it s about integrating all the energies of your body [...]. I suppose the whole journey of the school really is to integrate those energies so that you become one whole entity on stage, there s no split between your mind, your thoughts, your body, you know, it s all one thing. And that s what gives you that presence: that you are there, you re right there (Cheek 1999b:131, interview).
Notably, Lecoq s pedagogy does not enact a separation of the body and mind, or, indeed, a separation of the body and the voice. Lecoq considers that a voice in space functions in the same manner as a gesture in space. Just as one may throw a ball at a target point, so too is the voice thrown by the actor in attempting to reach the target of the audience. As Lecoq has remarked:
[W]e don t use the diaphragm to place the voice. It is placed in the action of the movement. It is placed in the desire to speak to others (1998, video recording).
Further, Lecoq s mimodynamic technique approaches text by considering a word as a living organism and looking for the body of the word. Students are asked to look for a
115 `physical adherence to the text by focusing on the images, words and dynamics, always starting with movement.
In an enactment of Lecoq s pedagogical principles, alumni position movement as the primary departure point for exploration and development of the verbal text:
Lecoq gave me the understanding that all acting is about a physical body on stage and what it communicates [...]. The way that I find a role and perform a role is all to do with physicality - before the word. The word has to be supported by physicality (Anderson 1999:3, interview).
I think it s vital to physicalise the text so it actually becomes a physical part of the performance as well as of just your memory. For instance, if you ve said the text while you ve physicalised it and found a physicality for each word. So there is a physical connection with the text as well, even if you are only standing there saying it you ve actually physicalised it so it s part of your whole being (1998:3).
Lecoq s training aims to extend the student s range of movement capabilities and physical expression as far as possible, beyond their usual and habitual zones. Training in identification and theatrical transposition of the movement dynamics of multiple phenomena provides students with a vast gestural language which they can then reference throughout their artistic careers. Lecoq calls this language an analogical discourse and considers it to be rich and precise beyond any psychological approach (1998:98). Alumni are thus able to draw on a wide range of reference points and techniques from which to explore movement possibilities and construct movement dynamics. As Betty France notes:
The Lecoq school gives you a whole other dimension to work with, a whole load of possibilities to work with physically, and not just physically in terms of movement, but in teems of approach to characterisation and interpreting things through your body as opposed to just the voice (France 1998:239, interview).
Alumni are consequently able to develop movement-based characterisations so that they might, for example, develop the role of Richard III from the movement dynamics of a goanna. They might base the movement dynamics of a tragic chorus on the movement of a scrunched up piece of paper as it unfolds. They could use the movement dynamics of water to depict the character of Ophelia, or the changing dynamics of an egg as it fries in a pan to depict the transformation of a character who is calm to one who is burning with rage.
116 A number of alumni have used these techniques in developing characterisations both for scripted roles and also for devised characters. Betty France used the movement dynamics of a bird to construct the character of a soothsayer in The Agamemnon Factor, for example. Dominique Sweeney created two thug characters using the movement of otters for a devised piece called Accidente. Russell Dykstra gave the character of Dr Krahper for The Imaginary Invalid a reptilian quality (Dykstra 1999b:237, interview). Isabelle Anderson focuses on the movement dynamics of the elements to inform her characterisations for scripted roles. As Lady Macbeth, Anderson used the element of fire, and for her role in A Streetcar Named Desire, she used air:
I was playing Blanche Dubois and I would work very much on the air energy to help find her dynamic. Of course she changed throughout the play but essentially I found her to be an airy, flighty character. So that helps to find her physicality and her way of being. One of the images we used of air - you know, you do air and it looks like silk and Lecoq would say: "Is that air you re doing or silk?" - there s a similar quality - and one of the reviews I got was that I performed Blanche like finely woven silk. I thought that was so funny because that was exactly what I was trying to do [...]. It helps inform the early stages when you re trying to find a way to open up the text or an energy with which to open up the character then the elemental energy gets you in and then that becomes the general energy and then you find the specifics on top of that. And then you forget all about that and you just play the part. You don t go on stage thinking "fire" or anything because by that time that s served its purpose and you re now in the character, in the feeling and the psychology of the character (Anderson 1999:12, interview).
In addition to using the movement dynamics of various phenomena as a means of developing physically-based characterisations, alumni are also able to draw on their training in a repertoire of performance styles. Notably, all of the styles taught at the Lecoq school are physical and visual forms. Mask work, melodrama, tragedy, commedia dell arte, bouffon and clown, all rely strongly on physical characterisation and movement dynamics. Many alumni have used Lecoq s clown style in their devised productions and speak of the creation and performance of that form in physical terms, remarking upon the clown s use of physical comedy, slap-stick, sight gags and physical humour. The clown s walk, too, is developed by the student exaggerating the idiosyncrasies of their own individual way of walking so that, like Charlie Chaplin, each clown has their own particular walk. Other alumni have worked with the bouffon form where, once again, characterisation is determined through the movement of the body. In approaching the creation of a bouffon character, the physical mask of the bouffon form dictates the body s posture, gait,
117 movement and rhythms. Alumni use padding to make lumps, bumps and protrusions on their bodies, creating the effect of a physical deformity or exaggeration such as a humpback, huge breasts or enlarged genitals. Through exploring movement dynamics which accord with these physical alterations, the actor develops a physical characterisation. For Red Weather s first production, Nicoletta Boris and Andrew Lindsay created bouffon characters sporting gross and exaggerated physical deformities:
You have to begin with one part of your body and see how the body moves with the deformity. Each character comes from the form. (Boris, in Walls 1983:10).
I started with a leg that looked as if it was growing back into the ground, but I found that having a huge back and skinny little legs made me feel very strong (Lindsay, in Walls 1983:10).
Boris s bouffon character had knobby elbows and knees, a grossly enlarged backside, and a huge set of breasts. Andrew Lindsay s bouffon was bowed beneath an overpowering hump back, his head hooded, with enlarged genitals dangling above red tights.
In the solo bouffon piece Children of the Devil, Russell Dykstra depicted four different characters. Unlike Red Weather s bouffons, Dykstra used no padding or extensions for his bouffons, but wore rehearsal blacks throughout the performance. With no costume to differentiate the roles, Dykstra relied almost entirely on his physical resources to depict the different characters. For this, he drew on both the bouffon approach and also on the Personnage section of his Lecoq training, in which students create different characters and learn to transform instantly from one to another:
There s the born-again evangelical, a homophobe who believes in ethnic cleansing; there s the talent agent who shamelessly exploits her young charges; there s the suburban yobbo, a misogynist with more time for his car than his girlfriend; and there s an "arts wanker" who makes himself look good at others expense (Thomas 1998:15).
One takes the stage and is replaced by another. But always they return, sometimes only for seconds, at other times for longer (Payne 1998:7).
Dykstra s character creation process involved finding physical gestures and postures for each character and then discovering a vocalisation that would match the physicality. For Dykstra, the process was a matter of finding `physicalities that would not only make the characters easily identifiable for an audience, but that would also comment on and reveal
118 the personalities of the characters. As well as posture and movement, Dykstra also found gestural tics for the characters physicalisations. The character of Carmel the talent agent, for example, was constantly engaged in flicking back her hair and clicking her nails, while the character of Marc the arts wanker was constantly touching his head because, as Dykstra describes him, he was very into his head [...] very earnest (Dykstra 1998:217, interview). Dykstra made the suburban yobbo character very crotch oriented, and for Larry the evangelistic, Dykstra developed a physicality that was very open and deliberate, with a strong emphasis on arm and hand gestures.
Alumni have also created masked-characters for their devised work, using the movement skills and physical technique developed in their training to animate the masks and communicate with an audience. Steven Bishop, for example, has created large street/festival theatre masked characters on stilts called The Poppets. He developed the design from the full-face mask that he made during his first year at the Lecoq school:
With stilts obviously your legs are extended and I always wanted to extend all of the extremities of the body so with these characters the head is actually above your real head, the arms are beyond your real arms and they ve got a really skinny neck. But that was directly inspired from what I d done at Lecoq s and through working with other people it developed into a complete set of characters (Bishop 1998:30, interview).
As with the bouffon work, characterisation begins with the mask itself. Bishop s Poppet masks are somewhat Basel inspired, but are also reminiscent of Noddy, sporting pointy little noses, large eyes and Noddy-type costumes. Animating the masks focuses on finding the physicality and gestural attitudes appropriate to the characterisation suggested by the mask:
What we ve really been doing with the Poppets is focusing on finding the language of these characters which are larger than life in that they re obviously from a different world. So we ve been researching their physical language if you like, seeing how they communicate with each other and with an audience. It s all about trying to develop gestures into little scenarios. And because they re silent, that of course forces you to communicate with a physical language, otherwise there s nothing there (Bishop 1999:36, interview).
The Poppets were featured for the launch of the 1998 Brisbane Festival and have also appeared at The Rocks in Sydney and have toured to a festival in Bangkok.
119 For Lecoq alumni the role of the actor is not necessarily confined to the creation of character but can embrace the creation of all aspects of production. Many alumni working in Australia as actors have created, directed and performed their own performance material. Notably, their approaches to this work are movement-based, constructing narrative and mise en scene using the movement of the body in space as their primary departure point. Alumni consequently take a physically active role in creating the theatrical text, using approaches which attempt to by-pass the verbal, the intellectual and the cerebral. Focusing on movement, physical action and response, alumni actively experiment and explore theatrical possibilities, developing their texts on the floor rather than on paper:
The whole ethic of the school is that you do it, you don t talk about it too much, you just do it and you show it. So many people when they re devising sit and talk and they write then they talk and they don t put anything on the floor. And when they ve talked for three hours about their thing and they ve written their scenario, then they finally put it on the floor and they find out that the thing doesn t bloody work. So why did they work for three hours to get there? What was the point of wasting your efforts to do that? I mean there s nothing wrong with talking about stuff but really, it s just so important to put stuff on the floor. It s what happens on the floor. You start with an idea when you re devising and it might not necessarily be that same idea at the end but you can only see by putting it on the floor. You can only start from there. And that s the way we were always taught to work. It s obvious, you know, it s obvious. Anyone would probably go, "Oh yeah, that s obvious" but you d be surprised working with people when you re trying to devise stuff and they don t work in that way (Hodgson 1998:292, interview).
The alumni s key positioning of the physical and movement aspects of theatrical dynamics manifests in their work as a foregrounding of visual elements, where they use image, action and movement to construct the theatrical text. Where their devised material deploys a verbal text, their movement-based approaches situate the verbal in co-operative relation to movement and visual aspects of the overall text. Notably, however, their approaches frequently convey the narrative or aspects of the narrative solely through movement, mime and spatial dynamics.
Dominique Sweeney and Will Hodgson have used mimed sequences in two of their devised productions. In Breaker Street Sweeney composed a sequence that depicted a surf-board rider paddling, bobbing up and down on the waves and being taken by a shark, including a moment when the surfboard transforms into the shark. Strangers in Paradise was written with script, music, choreography and physical routines composed by Sweeney and Hodgson. The performers used a bare stage and, with minimal props, created different
120 worlds using music and movement:
[With mime] you can shift very quickly from one world to another; you can be on the moon one minute and the next you can be in the Sahara desert. You can be anywhere you want to be simply by the actors changing the scene. In [Breaker Street], we were in the South Pole and then we were playing Laurence of Arabia and in all these different places, and you can just shift and the image changes, just by simple mime you re in another world [...]. I think it s so wonderful when you see actors - just maybe two actors on a bare stage - that take the audience into a world that they create, they can be anywhere (Hodgson 1998:290, interview).
Double Take have also relied heavily on visual elements created through movement and mime to convey the narrative in their devised pieces. In No Flies on Biggles, Biggles, Rodney, Sonny Jim and Knut rendezvous and plan their secret mission to Australia. Their quest is to find Tasmania, which has been stolen and secreted to Queensland by an arch- fiend called Joe Belt-Your-Teeth-In. As a number of reviewers noted, the show was packed with visual gags and antics created primarily through the physical resources of the actors:
A well-developed appreciation for the art of mime allows the trio to bring alive the story with absurdity and clarity [...] with a sense of style and timing (Prouse 1982:22).
Their energy on stage is acute; their imitations of planes and bombs and Biggles at the controls are piercing. The show is full of eccentric movements, sight gags, a cacophony of craziness overlaid by silent movie-style comedy (Molloy 1982:8).
Claire Teisen, for example, is completely entertaining when she lands in a mud patch on the banks of the Themes and has to walk out. All she does is walk with "squelch, squoolch" noises, but they are absolutely vivid. (Lloyd 1982b:6).
No Flies on Biggles delightfully fulfils [Double Take s aim], stated in the program notes of sharing a style of theatre that is "alive...visual and, above all, accessible" [...]. The comedy ranges from the absurd - all four characters wedged inside a pillar box taking a phone call - to beautifully-observed human comedy (queuing for the train ticket). A highlight is the scene in the briefing room where all three of "the boys" give a lecture on their speciality. The characterisations here are delightful (O Brien 1982:14).
121 Double Take members mime dog-fights, beat off 20,000 emus, disguise themselves as lampshades and telephones, go underwater scuba-diving at the Barrier Reef and fly their plane from Britain to Australia:
We did a scene where we re taking off in an aeroplane and little Sonny Jim gets left behind because he s been writing a love letter to his sweetheart and he s been singing "My Dearest Dear" and he just gets so carried away that he misses the plane so he has to grab on to the tail. And so we did a whole thing in pantomime blanche where he grabs onto the plane and we take off. So we create the illusion of: we re in the plane, him hanging on and someone turning around to get him and going down as well and rolling the plane to get them back into the plane and someone falling off, then taking it into another dimension of performance where we re all singing something in the sky (Teisen 1997a:554, interview).
Double Take also employed mime, movement and shadow-play techniques in The Last Laugh. The Advertiser was particularly impressed with the trio s movement skills, writing:
The play is full of effects done almost without the help of props, but with well- disciplined imagination [...J. All three are tightly controlled, very stylish actors, who can take a piece of nonsense to the nth degree of well-timed humour (Lloyd 1982a:9).
Before coming to Australia, Double Take had performed The Last Laugh in non-English speaking countries in Europe and although the show was in English, Teisen notes that because it relied so much on movement and visual communication, even non-English speaking audiences were able to follow the narrative:
It was in English, everything was in English, but it was a visual show so people understood what was going on because you re playing, so the play is pretty evident. You re not reliant on dialogue. Dialogue is there to serve but there s something happening. Like we had a scene with a vacuum cleaner. The detective visits this place and he s talking to this woman who s a cleaner. We didn t literally have the vacuum cleaner, I mimed it and made the sounds for it and the whole play was between the detective and the cleaner trying to have a conversation over the noise of this vacuum cleaner. So she was pushing the button - turning it on and off and he was talking while the vacuum was on. So we had a rhythm and a whole play with the joke at the end (Teisen 1997a:551, interview).
122 All of these Lecoq alumni have re-invested their movement skills and approaches in their work as actors, not only creating physically-based characters, but creating productions that communicate primarily through movement and visual means.
A REPERTOIRE OF PERFORMANCE STYLES
The work of alumni in the acting category is underwritten by an awareness of the operations of form and style in the theatrical context, a positioning of form as a key aspect of theatrical endeavour, and an ability to utilise a wide range of reference points in relation to style and form. The following comments by Dominique Sweeney are indicative:
As an actor I think you really need to be clear about what style you're working with so that you can talk to the director in those terms. One of the huge problems I see here all the time is confusion of styles in performances - one actor is working in one style and another actor is working in another style or people don't even know what they're doing. It's really confusing. I mean if the play is naturalistic that's fine, but if you're not trying to do that then there are lots of different possibilities and so how do you do it? I think knowing clearly the different possibilities with style is really important. For example, there is a significant difference between bouffon and clown but a lot of people haven't even heard of bouffon let alone know what the difference is. The subtle difference between bouffon and clown is that a clown looks at the audience and says "Look at me - I'm stupid!", whereas a bouffon looks at the audience and says "Look at you - you're stupid! And you can laugh at me, but if you laugh at me you want to get serious about what it is you're laughing at". That doesn't mean that the stupidity of what you're doing or the comedy isn't similar. But it's understanding that kind of relationship with the audience and understanding the relationship between, for example, melodrama and tragedy. Melodrama is about the terrible things that happen between us but tragedy is about the terrible things that happen to us and that are somehow fated. And it's really clear the difference between commedia and clown on the one hand, but on the other you see elements of clown in commedia and commedia often influences clown. But knowing some of these things is helpful for performance and then, of course, you are able to mix them up. If you know these things, then you can break the rules but if you don't know, then you can't do anything, it's all guess work (Sweeney 1998:545, interview).
123 Alumni have created performance pieces using mask, clown, bouffon and commedia dell arte. In some cases, alumni have drawn directly on one of these performance styles, re-investing them in new performance contexts but maintaining a certain level of adherence to a style or styles learned during their Lecoq training. In other cases alumni have used their training as a departure point, mixing a number of different forms to create a stylistic melange or else mixing the pedagogical leaven with new ingredients and in new contexts, giving rise to innovative theatrical forms.
In the early 1980s, Isabelle Anderson created and performed a solo mask piece called New Sky. The narrative focused on immigrants in Australia and explored what home means. Anderson researched the material for the piece by interviewing female immigrants from Greece, Yugoslavia, Scotland and also an indigenous Australian. Anderson used large full- face white masks similar to the Basel mask, with each mask depicting the character of each immigrant:
The masks were all changed on stage with quick changes and each mask character had a story and they all interwove and kind of met each other. I was going to speak and then when I interviewed the real immigrants I just couldn t get over how beautiful their own words and their own accents and their own emotion was. So we did a collage, a montage of their taped voices inter-woven with the music and so it became very poetic and they spoke for themselves. So the mask moved in co- ordination with the words but it wasn t like it was a long fifty line monologue, it was just a line or two here and then the music and then a line or two there. They echoed each other. The only one who spoke non-stop was the Aboriginal woman because she had a great story and she was a storyteller and so she got on that microphone and started speaking and it was a monologue and I left it untouched and it was very beautiful (Anderson 1999:6, interview).
The piece was performed in 1980 at the QTC, toured the East coast and was performed at the Nimrod in 1981.
In contrast to Isabelle Anderson, Justin Case has used his training in mask as a departure point, creating masks from unusual materials such as shaving cream and photographs. In one particular sketch, Case takes photographs of himself in an imaginary photo-booth and then puts a box on his head which has a stack of prepared black and white photographs glued to the front of it. He then peels off the photographs one by one, adopting the physicality suggested by each photo:
So my body does the movements reacting to the style of whatever the photograph is.
124 So if it s someone frightened I d be dashing around frightened and I ll peel off that face and it would be a person in love and I d play that, but it d be instant change (Case 1998:91, interview).
Case has produced a short film of the shaving cream sketch and plans to make another one of the photo-booth sketch.
Heather Robb worked as part of a female clowning duo during the late 1970s. Robb s clown partner Jan Hamilton had encountered the Lecoq approach to clowning while training at the E15 school in London. Together they devised and performed a number of clown pieces, one of which was a playfully satirical exploration of the socio-cultural pressures on women to conform to female stereotypes called Ready for Men. Here Robb and Hamilton used the traditionally male clown duo to investigate this thematic territory. As with classic clowning partnerships, the women created clowns that operated via contrast, both visually and in terms of the clowns character straits. Robb s clown Buttercup was a slave to the myths of femininity and wore a lacy, frilly pink dress, poke-bonnet and high- heels. Hamilton s clown Gladys , was a militant feminist costumed in a karate suit and, wielding a sword, was always ready to fight the good fight. The duo performed a successful season at the Stables and at the Living Room theatres in Sydney. John Smythe, reviewing the show for Theatre Australia wrote about the piece in glowing terms:
Their clown performance work [...] has for me, rediscovered true comedy and pathos in a commercial, slickness-dominated world. Clowning, from Shakespeare s fools through Chaplin and Keaton to Norman Gunston, involves an emotionally honest, innocent, childlike, instinctive, creative process which is the vital essence of all `playmaking . That is why I feel what Jan and Heather have to offer is of fundamental importance to our theatrical community (1979:10).
Steven Bishop has created a character called Harry through mixing elements of both clown and bouffon. Harry wears a bright red suit in a 1970s cut with the cuffs rolled up, a little bit short around the ankle, white shirt and a bow tie, slicked back hair and fake buck teeth with a smattering of gold in the front tooth. In devising distinguishing characteristics for Harry, Bishop drew particularly on Lecoq s clown technique of the carte d identite :
One thing that Lecoq talked about was the carte d identite or identity card. So I guess over the years I ve developed a lot of identifying characteristics for Harry [...]. First of all there s all the tics and gestures that make up his language, which are little things like the way he slicks back his hair, the way he moves, he might have a very cool walk, or handshakes, the way he approaches the handshake. So all those kind
125 of things and then there s also things that he does. Like he s got pointed shoes so he might do a thing of sharpening them. He s got a carnation on an elastic that springs back to the lapel in his jacket. So I guess tics develop into movements and then from that you might develop a little sequence (Bishop 1999:38, interview).
Although Harry does not wear the traditional red nose of the clown, Bishop considers that the fake teeth operate in a similar way as the red nose, but also endow Harry with a touch of bouffon grotesqueness:
There s a bouffonesque edge to him. Yeah, there is a little bit that. It s interesting because we re taught bouffon and clown separately but the edges of them really can blend a little bit. You look at Harry and he is a little bit fringy, but because he is in that world of character and fringy, that enables him to get away with a lot. It gives that sense of him being a little bit of an outsider whereas you can t get away with nearly as much if you re a straight character. It s the sort of Dame Edna factor where you can get away with a lot more [...]. Like with Harry, the gag is that he s single, and he s always trying to pick up women. So he can do all these lines and all these moves and things but if a woman actually said: "Come on let s go!", he d completely back away. But the fact that because he looks like he hasn t got a chance means he s got a lot of license. So that s the kind of bouffony thing - you don t take them seriously because they re too far out of this world means that the comment can go quite deeply. So I guess the psychology is a little bit bouffonesque (Bishop 1999:39-40, interview).
Christine Grace has also departed from the red nose Lecoq style clown, incorporating mask in a cabaret solo clown piece called Le Cafe (1993). Grace devised the show for children and originally began performing it in primary schools but later performed the piece in cafés and restaurants. Le Café was centred around the character of a French waiter called Jean-Francois. Rather than the red nose, Grace wore a third mask - larger than a half-mask - with a big nose, a big moustache and a beret. The plot focuses on Jean- Francois and his cat who come to Australia on a boat where he establishes a café and employs a temperamental cook. During the performance, Jean-Francois invites three volunteers from the audience to come and have lunch in the café. The show then transforms into a cabaret with Jean-Francois becoming a South American singer called Coco Lotta (Grace 1997:255, interview).
Dominique Sweeney and Will Hodgson have mixed elements of clown and character in their creation of a piece called Breaker Street, presented at Brisbane s Metro Arts Centre for the 1998 Adelaide Fringe Festival. The piece was structured in terms of an interwoven
126 double narrative, with the first story relying on clown and the second on character. The first narrative focuses on the relationship between two clown musicians, Dom and Will, who are trying to hit the big time. With echoes of Didi and Gogo, Dom and Will operate in a curious artistic marriage, where they can t seem to live with each other but can t live without each other. The thrust of their relationship is the competition between the two clowns to become famous:
It s a play about rising against the odds and the planning schemes and dreams, (mostly lost ones) of two clowns trying to put together a show. But don t expect the red nose, expect the kind of clowns that bungle their way through tragedy, expect performance in the style of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin [...]. It s a mixture of material, some of it light, but there are also moments which should bring a tear to your eye in the tradition of the great clowns - like Jacques Tati, Marcel Marceau or Laurel and Hardy (Partridge 1998:11).
The second narrative thematically parallels the first in its tale of two characters trying to make it big. Here Peter Potts, a surfer in love with his bicycle, encounters Mervan Weaver, a salesman un-extraordinaire about to turn forty. Peter s best mate has just been eaten by a shark and Mervan is down on his luck when their paths cross on Breaker Street.
The first performances by a troupe called Red Weather in the 1980s mark the introduction of the bouffon style to Australian audiences. Red Weather s first bouffon performance was in 1983 at The Craft Council s Gallery at The Rocks in Sydney. In this production the company demonstrate a certain adherence to their Lecoq training in terms of character and theme. Called simply Red Weather, the show combined elements of parody and comic grotesquery in its macabre celebration of the Genesis story and the expulsion from paradise. Beginning with a series of drum rolls, the first half of the piece was a parody of the creation myth in which three bouffon figures with strange deformities emerge as form from the void. The second half depicted a grotesque human circus of life after the fall. Here human existence is held up and mocked: Motherhood and birth are depicted as the unravelling of a red cord from a grotesque belly; Love is parodied by displays of infatuated preoccupations with genitals and hairy orifices, an endless search for the meaning of life is enacted as a game of blind-man s-bluff where implicit violence degenerates into infantilism.
Reviewers were delighted with the piece, the Sydney Morning Herald describing it as a `perfection in grotesquery (Lewis 1983:14) and the Australian as:
127 Vulgar, lascivious, monstrously deformed, it is potentially horrifying and repulsive, yet exercises a curious attraction. Its ability to do the unmentionable, say the unsayable, and probe the borders of our prudery appears to have almost universal appeal (Walls 1983:10).
Red Weather s later pieces took the bouffon style into new territories where they worked towards developing their shows to focus on the Australian environment (UPC). Following the success of the first show, the troupe received a special project grant from the Theatre Board of the Australia Council to work with director Carol Woodrow. The resulting work, Keep the Dream Running, was presented at The Performance Space in January 1984. Andrew Lindsay notes that, in this piece, the bouffon body masks were much more subtle and considers that it was more like a contemporary Australian grotesque rather than Lecoq s strongly European bouffon form (Lindsay 2000:354, interview). The narrative centred around:
A group of people in a broken cage who d obviously been living there for years [...]. It was, in a sense, the desperate ramblings of this lost group of people who were grasping at relics of some sort of remembered culture that no longer really made sense. There was this sense that there d been some terrible catastrophe outside this bunker that they d been living in. And what they d evolved was this bizarre series of semi-coherent rituals based out of things like: Get a job, get a job, gotta get a job, gotta get a job, get a job , and the whole sort of crumbled melange of early 80s Australian cultural clichés (Lindsay 2000:354-355, interview).
In the second half of 1984, Red Weather members were invited to become artists in residence in the Theatre Workshop at the University of Sydney. Here they prepared a new bouffon work called Whistling in the Dark, again funded by the Australia Council and performed at the Seymour Centre. With this piece Red Weather began in earnest to combine the bouffon form with images of contemporary Australian culture. The piece explored the bouffon theme of liberation from conventional aspects of society in a carnivalesque celebration. Through the stories and music of the Grotesque Orchestra the troupe confronted the underbelly of our daily lives. Staged in two parts, the piece began in the light of the sculpture garden of the Seymour Centre which was,
transformed into a miniature festival of soft sculptures, installations and performances which reflect contemporary Australia. Inside the theatre, the Grotesque Orchestra take over with their ceremonies and rituals. Their world is a Gargantuan topsy-turvy place where the eccentric is the norm and all things are
128 possible. It s a world that resembles the forbidden side and the suppressed part of our own nature and through their carnival we learn how to overcome our primordial fear of darkness. We learn how to whistle in the dark (UPC).
Once again, the bouffon body masks were less stated than in the first Red Weather show. Lindsay describes their costumes as:
Broken down, stuffed up evening dress, but a little bit bizarre, a little bit not quite right and with much smaller, less discernible deformations [...]. I think my character had these sort of really funny high, sort of tense shoulders. But where they may have been massively deformed in the first show, this was a much more subtle degree of deformation. It was less medieval and a little bit more like the habitual deformations that you just accrue over the years or that you get if you have a particular occupation. So it was much more reduced (Lindsay 2000:356, interview).
In their next piece, Red Weather once again transposed the bouffon form into Australian idiom, adding their fascination with the grotesque in an Australian adaptation of The Threepenny Opera. Called The Fourpenny Opera, the piece used none of the original text or songs, but was set in the corrupt gambling world of a barely disguised King s Cross. The Sydney Morning Herald noted its topical references and contemporary relevance saying: It is also a reflection of here, now - Sydney 1987 (Simmonds 1987:3). Rather than performing as bouffons, the troupe adapted the bouffon style to a contemporary setting, portraying characters who displayed bouffonesque characteristics. With grotesque body shapes, the characters physicalities were a reflection of the grotesque and sleazy under-world of corruption they were depicting. Betty France, a Lecoq graduate who joined Red Weather for this production explains:
Mac the Knife had this huge penis and a shark s fin on his back and a great big hook nose. Jenny had these huge fake breasts and this gorgeous fur-lined, velvet- lined vulva with this big clitoris coming out of it. I was Polly and I had this huge jodhpur-like trousers because I was the spoiled little rich girl, and I had these totally enlarged shoulder-pad thing happening and this huge bottom. My father, Peachum, was played by a woman and he had a huge stomach and we had a very lecherous relationship with Polly using her sexuality to manipulate her father to get what she wanted. One of the other characters was Tiger Brown and he had this massive chest because he was the Chief of Police (France 1998:245, interview).
The Fourpenny Opera enjoyed a successful season at the Gap Theatre, Sydney Trade Union Club in 1987.
129 Like Red Weather, Steven Bishop has also used the bouffon principles of physical distortion but adapted them to an Australian socio-cultural context. Bishop created a group of bouffon-inspired characters called the Stilton Family which he designed specifically for street and festival theatre. Stilt-walking and larger-than-life, the characters were developed by exaggerating different parts of the body: Stan Stilton has a large pear shaped backside with a grotesque set of discoloured, uneven teeth; Mrs Stilton has enlarged breasts and outrageous hairdo; Baby Stilton (a grown man), is wheeled around in a huge baby pram. Notably, Bishop found he had to modify his approach to creating bouffon characters to operate successfully in Australia:
They re a bit like Les Patterson or Dolly Parton. So they were bouffonesque but if I d done a European bouffon they would have never worked, but because they re this family from Fargabundooly people could really relate to them. People with kids can relate to them very strongly (Bishop 1999:34-35, interview).
Russell Cheek has made the commedia half-masks his specialty and has often created his own characters. In a piece called Faces, Fakes and Falsehoods, Cheek devised and performed a one-man show using the masks in the context of an Australian conspiracy plot. While the central character who begins and narrative is un-masked, the remainder of the show is peopled by a variety of masked characters based on the commedia stock types. One is a yobbo cement worker based on Il Capitano; another is an Italian immigrant that uses the mask, physicality and rhythms of Arlecchino. A third character was based on Pantalone, a Government Minister who spends all his time on the toilet. Cheek used the Tartaglia mask to create a functionary, a stuttering and ineffectual official in the CES (Cheek 1999b:123, interview).
CONCLUSION
The acting work of Lecoq alumni has contributed significantly to a shift in the long- standing dominance of text-based realism in Australian theatre. The work of alumni has helped to displace the central position of this form, offering alternative approaches, processes and styles of theatre. The majority of these alumni have chosen to create original theatrical material rather than working with pre-scripted material, contributing to the writing of new Australian plays. Notably, much of the material created by alumni is positioned within an Australian socio-cultural context, offering reflections and critical
130 comment on aspects of Australian culture. In choosing to create original texts, their work references Lecoq s commitment to the actor as creator rather than the actor as interpreter. In this respect, alumni have significantly extended the actor s traditional purview, re- drawing the boundaries that commonly surround the role of the actor to embrace activities previously confined to the director, writer, costume, set and lighting designers. By engaging in multiple aspects of the production process, alumni have claimed considerable territory as their own, disrupting the specialised and segregated fields of mainstream theatre practice. In addition, alumni s frequent us of collaborative approaches to devising theatrical material has challenged the hierarchical and specialised roles designated by mainstream theatre practice, blurring still further the mainstream distinctions between the roles of actor , director and writer .
Alumni have created and performed their work using improvisatory and impromptu approaches, creating material through random occurrences. The alumni s use of improvisation and their foregrounding of spontaneous elements represents a significant movement away from interpretive/analytical processes and, in this respect, alumni demonstrate a commitment to the efficacy of an approach which is generally alien to mainstream theatrical practice. Alumni s deployment of improvisation effectively destabilises the privileged position of the written script and the processes of analysis and interpretation. Using improvisation, alumni construct theatrical dynamics and, indeed, theatrical texts at the sites of interaction between collaborative parties and, in some cases, at the very sites of interaction between actor and audience. In addition to creating innovative forms of theatre, alumni have introduced new popular performance styles to this country, such as Lecoq s clown, bouffon and commedia dell arte. Alumni s movement-based approaches to performance have helped to shift theatrical practice from its previous focus on psychological realism/naturalism, re-instating the integrated body in performances that strongly foreground the physical and the visual.
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