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Laurance Rudic (born 10 September 1952) is a theatre actor and explorer of creative process. He is best known for his long association as a leading member of Giles Havergal's Glasgow Citizens Theatre repertory company where he worked from 1972-1996. In 2000, he moved to Egypt where he began creating workshops, exploring a process-based approach to acting as pure embodied awareness.He lived and taught in Cairo for over twenty years and now lives in Berlin.

Beginnings

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Rudic began acting in amateur dramatics at an early age and by the time he reached his teens was entirely stage-struck. His early experience as a schoolboy working as a dresser at a professional variety theatre in Glasgow - Jimmy Logan's Metropole Theatre left him with a deep and enduring fascination for the potential of theatre as a space of presence, immediacy and impermanence. Intent on becoming a dramatic actor, he left school at the age of 15 and worked as an office boy at the BBC. While acting in an amateur staff play, he was chosen to play the name role in The Boy Who Wanted Peace (1969), part of the BBC's Wednesday Play series. Despite the attention, he was unimpressed with the experience of filming, referring to it as "technically top-heavy and a deeply fragmenting experience".

Acting School and Lindsay Kemp

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At the age of seventeen, he began formal actor training at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in Glasgow (1969–1972) and within a very short time found himself dying a death until he met and began working with his life-long inspiration: the celebrated dancer, choreographer and mime, Lindsay Kemp (1938 - 2018) Kemp, was muse to many artists including singer David Bowie (1947-2016) and Rudic began living a double life between Kemp's genuinely creative and liberating world of Total theatre: a mix of dance, burlesque, corporeal mime artists from Paris, method actors, drag queens and strip-tease artists; and the deadly world of acting school: fragmented, mechanistic, academic, plastered-on and disembodied. Through his work with Kemp, he succeeded in the beginnings of a psycho-physical self-liberation, but was left with the problem of finding an organic discipline which would allow him to live with awareness on stage each night. There was no switching on and off - it was a full-time, raw and all-or-nothing approach, intimately tied in with his subjective emotional life. His work with Kemp in Flowers based on the novel Our Lady of the Flowers by Jean Genet and Woyzeck by George Buchner at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh, led to his being accepted as a member of the newly-established Citizens Theatre Company. At that time (1972) he was one of only three Scots actors to be accepted into the young company who were predominantly English.

Giles Havergal's Glasgow Citizens Repertory Theatre Company

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For 34 years, (1969–2004) 'The Citz' was Britain's foremost repertory theatre, internationally-renowned for it's creatively-innovative treatment of rare Jacobean plays and classical European works. The company was run by a trio of creative directors: Giles Havergal (artistic director, actor) Philip Prowse (director, designer) and Robert David MacDonald (director, dramaturg, translator, playwright, composer). MacDonald, who had worked in Berlin with revolutionary theatre director, Erwin Piscator, regularly wrote new works for the company such as Camille, Chinchilla, A Waste of Time and Webster. He also translated plays by Goethe, Schiller, Gogol, Mikhail Lermontov, Goldoni, Sartre, Karl Kraus, Alfred de Musset, Rolf Hochhuth, de Sade and Bertolt Brecht. For many years, the Citz was 'finishing school' and creative home to many now-famous actors including Tim Curry, Pierce Brosnan, Gary Oldman, Rupert Everett, Sean Bean, Tim Roth, Celia Imrie, Ciarán Hinds and Mark Rylance.

Travels in the East

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Throughout his years at the Citz, Rudic travelled frequently to cultures beyond Europe in order to understand more about holistic process in the oral performance tradition. In 1975, on his first visit to the Dalai Lama's refugee headquarters-in-exile in the Himalayas, he was invited by the Dalai Lama's private office to teach acting to the young refugee performers of the Tibetan Institute of Performing Arts (T.I.P.A.) who were preparing for the first Tibetan cultural tour of Europe and the Americas. IN 1978, he also experienced life as a Kathakali acting student at the leading school for Kathakali actors in Kerala, South India - the Kerala Kalamandalum. These travels and others in cultures with strong oral traditions in music, dance and storytelling (Iran, Egypt, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Morocco),contributed greatly to an understanding of his own intuitive process.

In 2000, intent on developing himself as a ‘stand-up’ theatre artist, he was awarded a Ford Foundation Grant to travel to Egypt and observe the dying tradition of epic storytelling. As part of his research, he based himself with El Warsha Theatre Company, a group of young Egyptian actors, dancers and singers, working in downtown Cairo. Through the company he came to know the old generation of traditional performance artists such as Sayed El Dawy the improvising epic storyteller from Upper Egypt, and Hassan Khanufa, a traditional street performer and Aragoz puppeteer from Cairo, who died in 2005 at the age of 74.

Recent projects

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In 2006, working with Scottish theatre practitioner Andrew McKinnon, he returned from Cairo to Glasgow to perform a solo improvising "Stand-Up Theatre" piece - And God Created - at his old theatre, 'The Citz'. The entertainment, improvised around a theme of autobiographical stories about acting and travel, deals with universal themes such as Time, the search for identity beyond society and culture, and the role of thought and memory in consciousness.

In October 2008, he returned once again to Glasgow, this time to direct and feature in The Parade, an early work by the American playwright, Tennessee Williams. The actors were encouraged to work within the action through an ongoing use of sensory awareness. There was no fixing of character and throughout the twelve performances, the life between the text was always in a state of flux, which meant that each night was considerably different from the other. This was the European and UK premiere of the work which was played at the Glasgow Citizens Theatre in the Circle Studio.

During his years in Egypt, he has continued to refine and expand his Somatic approach to consciousness in theatre in which the actor works out of a dual extemporising reality as both storyteller and story.

Theatre

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Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama

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Giles Havergal's Glasgow Citizens Theatre Company

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1971
1972–1973
1973–1974
1974–1975
1975–1976
1981–1982
1982–1983
1983–1984
1986
1987
1988
1989
1990
1991
1992
1996

WORKS AS GUEST ARTIST AT CITIZENS THEATRE:

2006
  • Laurance Rudic And God Created... solo work created by Laurance Rudic. Creative Advisor Andrew McKinnon
2008

Tennessee Williams The Parade Laurance Rudic Don European and UK premiere

Other theatre

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Film and TV

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BBC
STV
FILM

References

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Category:Scottish male stage actors Category:Living people Category:1952 births Category:Scottish male film actors Category:Scottish male television actors

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