BUCHAREST, 2015 … the Alternative Actors Workshops … with Kurt Murray and Iulia Benze
“Seeing this makes me want to burn down the Romanian system and start again.”
– Costache, PODUL Director
Organic Cabaret Creation Rehearsals
The idea behind this was aimed at a showing of work to the general public by the end of the ten days; as well through a two page programme, synopsis and bios of participants and facilitators. This would be not a direct aim but reveal itself through the standard workshops and then be pieced together when the time was right, and it happened just like that. All the work was generated by the participants from the exercises presented. The core of the work came from Poems, movements and objects crafted into monologues and duologues to created short episodes linked with other creations of the previous week to bring about the piece. It was rehearsed over four days and presented on the evening of the fourth day. The focus of the full push of the work was the emotional and physical commitment of the actors to that which that they created. The facilitators acted as directors working in unison and individually pushing the limits of comfort for the work as a whole, the participants rising to the challenge. The work did not come without challenges, as the creations brought people close to personal emotional traumas and truths within themselves for some it was a hard experience. One participant stated her poem brought back an unspoken trauma from her life, to adapt to this we instructed she cut up her poem and rearrange it as to give the trauma new meaning whilst disguising its origin enough to make it bearable to perform. Another participant refused outright to perform her poem at all stating to the director of the Podul that the facilitators where arrogant and manipulative. To accommodate this we made it open to the group that performing their poems was not compulsory and the participant in question after creating a scene with her movements and the poem and movements of another, created a scene she loved so much that she jumped at the opportunity to put her poem back in when it was offered as an option. Each of the participants came across struggles and walls within their creations and where treated like committed professionals with strong discipline throughout by the facilitator come directors.
Performance
The evening’s performance was exceptional; to be there it was hard to believe that it had all come to light in just ten days. The work and commitment of the participants presented a work much more powerful than something so quickly devised could have ever been expected. The work was powerful and emotional, it linked together with fluid commitment and for at least three of the participants was their very first stage experience. Over 60 spectators viewed the work and were engaged throughout which showed through the pin drop silences that where created during the show. It was a post-modern representation of the dreams, traumas, triumphs, loves lost, joys and tragedies of the cast expressed with full intent of emotion. Some spectators flinched in their seats at the expressions of their family members in the cast expressing things directly related to them by name or story others laughed, some still cried. It was a powerful evening of emotion and commitment at a new level to self-truth and performance. The story was connected to actors returning time and again to various cleaning objects with which they repeatedly tidied the space or transformed into weapons, tribal dance objects, people and times of ancients past returning again and again to inform the audience that they are just mops, brooms, bags of rubbish etc… The personal objects were entered into the space with each new poem ending with the Director of Podul Costache standing on log surrounding by his performers screaming at him repeatedly ‘I look in the mirror and there I am not’ to crescendo before the Director dropped his object the box and solo repeated the line one last time leading into blackout.
Response to event/Future Possibilities
After a curtain call of applause by the audience, Iulia announced a question and answer session to the show. The audience praised the work coming from varying backgrounds and education in theatre. One woman, a psychoanalyst, broke down the show in its detail with praise, another member stated how he was not educated well in these things but wanted to say how much he connected with the powerful emotions presented before him stirring the audience to another applause. One audience member praised Costache for his poem personally asking how he managed to create an English Shakespearian soliloquy with such accuracy, then he went on to rant about foot fetish references (the actors did not wear shoes during the performance) and after five minutes it became quite clear his education and eccentricities where becoming foot pornography and he was shut down by numerous audience members and facilitators. The cast discussed their experiences in the ten day period with positive appreciation before we called an end to the discussion.
Costache the Director of Podul stated that he wanted ‘burn down the theatre of the old Romanian system of theatre just to start again’ to George at one point based on what he was seeing in our workshops. Costache also said to Kurt and Iulia at one stage that he was amazed at how much we were pushing the students to improve effectively and that he would have some deep soul searching to do in the way that he would approach things differently. Costache video recorded every moment of the workshops and all of us encouraged him to take whatever he wants from our teaching practice and move forward with it. The group of Podul is the most tight it has been in years, since the previous professor died and was replaced by Costache who up until this moment had not fully accepted the mantel. The connection and knowledge of these participants has come from our workshops and their natural ability to bring a group together and recent Facebook photos show this group is still hanging out together. On that last evening each of us received different words of praise from students about their experience in the past ten days, their appreciation and their desire for us to return, my statement was often the same ‘There is three of us and twenty of you, if you get together to make it happen then we will come and it will happen all the faster’. George stated a desire to come back to Podul for a full month working consistently to the point we got to in ten days and taking it further using forum theatre audience interaction as a platform for incremental development of a continuing work, Iulia and Kurt agree. For the three of us as facilitators this series even more so than Cluj formed a marked development in our roles. As individuals we all tried new things and even more exciting was the co-directing of a production witch can so easily go awry in theatre but between the three of us worked with ebb and flow to the full creation of the work. I am excited about what any future workshop series will occur as from this time in Romania a powerful evolutionary step has occurred in the way we three work not just individuals but as a group.
