Gaël le Cornec

Gaël is a Brazilian actress, writer and director based in London, UK.  She has her own theatre company, Footprint Project, that received last year's Young People’s Award for Innovation from IdeasTap and an Artistic Excellence Award at Brighton Festival.  She is currently working on a new play called The Boy Who Caught The Tide at CASA Latin American Theatre Festival which opens this Monday Oct 17 through Sun Oct 23^rd.

For tickets visit http://www.ovalhouse.com/whatson/detail/the-boy-who-caught-the-tide

For the rest of the CASA festival program that includes works from the Brazil, Chile, Venezuela and Argentina, please check out http://www.casafestival.org.uk/

More on Gaël:

www.gaellecornec.com

www.footprintproject.org

Gaël le Cornec

October 14, 2011

London, 9:30 am

What are you working on at the moment?

I am this year’s guest artist at CASA Latin American Theatre Festival, where I am directing a short play from Brazil, by an author called Ruy Jobim Neto.  It’s the first time the play is being shown outside of Brazil.  I’m working with Latin American actors and a Portuguese actress, and yeah, i’m having fun!   We don’t have that many days of rehearsal, so I still don’t know what’s going to happen, when the audience walks in and experiences the play.  But its exciting to be directing, because you might have an idea for something in the beginning  but then when you work with creative people, the idea gets transformed and it becomes something else, it becomes a collective.  There’s another transformation when the audience walks in, because they might perceive it in a different way then you did.  I love that process, not to know what’s going to happen.  I am also touring with a play, with a Cambridge based theatre company, as an actress - The CV of  Aurora Ortiz, a play adapted from a Spanish novel by Almudena Solana.

What is your directing style?

That’s a question for my actors to answer!  When I am working with text, I always look for elements that I can take out of the text and put in the world of the play, outside.  For example in the text, they are mentioning a party, St. Antonio, which in Brazil, is the name of a saint for marriage.   We had the idea to make a St. Antonio party when the audience walks in.  I guess this comes from my devising experience in theatre.  I am always interested in what the other creative people involved bring to the project, that is very important to me.  I also like audience participation and immersive theatre.  It’s important to take the audience, to the world of the play, to the imaginary.  What I tend to do with actors, is to open them up emotionally, so I do a series of exercises that make them connect to each other.  Connection is the key when you are on stage with another actor.  So many times I go to the theatre and I see actors just saying their lines without connecting.  I also work with quite a lot of physical elements with my actors.

Who or what inspires you?

I am very inspired by spaces, the environment around me.  To be open and have the sensitivity to observe the space and to observe people and see what they have to offer\, is what really inspires me.  I’m quite open to be inspired by an incredible artist, someone I talked to or an old lady I crossed on the street on my way to rehearsal.  And I’ll say wow, the way she walks, thats it!  That’s what I need to add to the character in my play! It’ s important to be open, to be inspired. 

From your experiences what have been the differences of working in the Brazilian theatre vs the British theatre?

I have more experience with British theatre.  British theatre is very text based and Brazilian theatre is very much about devising and very open to any possibility.   Multi media, multi languages, when I talk about languages, I mean different theatrical forms.  It’s quite common in Brazil to have audience participation and site-specific work.  And I guess I add that to my work as well.  This has been happening in England quite recently, I think.   A very big difference is how the audience reacts.  In Brazil, the audience always gets involved, it can be positive but negative as well.  Sometimes people take audience participation very seriously, sometimes too much!  And here, they will participate out of respect for the work, they will always clap at the end.  In Brazil, if it was bad they wont. 

What are your biggest theatrical challenges?

It’s always a challenge when you get a text, as an actor, as a director, to make something worth watching out of it.  I respect audiences highly.  Theatre does not exist without an audience.  But I’m not interested in pleasing the audience either.  I always want to give an experience, whichever experience that is.  When you get any sort of text, either complicated or simple, never underestimate the product you have in your hands, because you might get some surprises.  If you think something is easy, it might be more difficult than you think or vice versa if it’s a very complicated play, then just make it simple and then it works.   I always think it’s a challenge, because it’s new work, new people working with you, and it will go to different paths.

Dream projects?

Dream project would be to make a really massive theatrical experience…that would take days!  The audience would come and spend days in the space, it would be site specific, and somewhere isolated.  The idea of traveling to the event, and when they arrive everything is different from what they’ve seen, and magical, and take them into this journey, where audiences and actors blend.  With 100’s of actors.   A big, big thing.   I am also really interested in opera.  I want to direct opera in the future, in a big theatre.

Final question.  Is the director dead?

I just mentioned that to a friend a few months ago, you know, I’m proclaiming the death of the director! I said to him… I think he laughed… being a director himself.  I think sometimes it depends on the project.  But the less you see the director, the less you see what they have done, the better it is.  I hate going to see a play and see the blocking of the actors, I can see the actors doing that because the director told them to do it.  The director, the profession, is quite recent.  Maybe 100 years ago, people who would do theatre, would do everything.  They would be actors, writers, directors, and nowadays we kind of separate the roles.  So yeah, the director could be dead.  I wouldn’t mind. 

Thanks Gaël for sharing your thoughts!

“I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be human.” Oscar Wilde

Pameli Benham

Pameli Benham is an actress, writer and director. She has directed all ages and numbers, from single actors to casts of 50, in straight plays, cabaret, opera and revue.  Her latest production, The Darkroom is running now until October 15^th at the Alma Tavern in Bristol.

For more info and tickets to The Darkroom please visit the Alma Tavern Theatre website.

Pameli Benham

Alma Tavern, Clifton, Bristol

Sat. October 8^th, 2011, 6:30pm

What are you working on at the moment?

I am in the middle of The Darkroom, a play by Steve Lambert.  It is the start of the Theatre West season for new writing, and is the first of 5 plays chosen for full production.  It uses quite a lot of props and bits and pieces, which on the whole, I’d love to do without, but are integral to the play.  Therefore I come in each evening with things like milk and knitting and so on!  I was asked today to play a part for next spring that I am considering and I am also writing something.  So those are things going at the moment.

Can you tell us a bit about The Darkroom?

Its set in 1949, in England, which was still in the grip of, what was called at the time, austerity.  There were terrific shortages of food and fuel, of almost everything.  People were working tremendously hard.  There are 3 characters in this play, and they are all intimately involved and all have secrets from each other.  The time of the play’s setting is a time of terrific political hope in some ways.  There was a pioneering government elected soonish after the war, with the aim of making society much more equal, how shall we say… more welcoming to people that didn’t have a lot of money or privilege. The Communist Party had attracted a great number of supporters in the 20s and 30s, also hoping for a fairer world.  But then people saw how communist Russia was actually run, especially when Stalin sided with Hitler, people left the party, some people stayed in covertly.  There all these strands in the plays, of whether people are actually right or left wing, whether they’re disguising what they’re doing.  Throughout the course of the play, along with getting a goodish deal of political background, which I hope isn’t too heavy, you are getting lots of what makes the characters tick and what they are hiding from themselves, as things are gradually revealed.

What is your earliest theatrical memory?

I started going to the theatre very early indeed. I was 3 ½ or 4 and I was taken to see Arthur Askey, who was a very famous British comedian, very warm-hearted.  I was sitting with my parents and he asked would any little girl or boy like to come up on stage.  I was out of my seat like greased lighting and on the stage before anyone could stop me!   I remember very much wanting to perform, to show off.  Another thing was, my grandfather used to take me to the Yiddish theatre in Mile End Road in London’s East End.  That was very big and very powerful, and even if I didn’t understand every word, it made a tremendously powerful impression on me.

Who or what inspires you?

I’ve been very, very lucky.  I’ve been able to go to theatre, to the opera since I was a small child.  And have seen so many actors’ and directors’ work, I really loved. I can remember one of the RSC seasons, in the 70’s in London and the whole season they had a white box.  They stripped everything down.  There was a tremendous concentration on the beauty and power of the language, in an empty setting.  That’s been a huge influence.  The whole idea that you can get something to move fast and really depend on the actors, and don’t need to do an elaborate scene change and could do everything ideally, with just good lighting.  If your actors are good enough and your direction is clear enough, then that’s really, really powerful theatre.

Can you tell us about the your company Boil and Bubble and why you started it?

The aim was particularly to give work or offer a space to older actors, writers, directors.  It wasn’t to be a sort of geriatric ghetto, so for instance the Witching Hour, had two older women, and a much, much younger one.  As you get older, acting work can dry up, there are just fewer parts. I did something with the Theatre West season with older writers who never had anything professionally performed before and got some very good plays out of that.

I read that one of your inspirations for starting Boil and Bubble was because you were, as an actress repeatedly being offered roles to play mad old women?

Oh yes! Almost everything I play is dazed and confused.  There are comparatively few parts for older women that show them as feisty or intelligent or dynamic. There’s a smallish amount of television work and films and that tends to be batty, old… whatever!

In what direction do you feel theatre is heading?

Ooh gosh.  I think that some of it… well I don’t know if should say this in your blog!  But someone like, Rupert Goold, who is enormously inventive and I loved Six Characters In Search of An Author, last thing I saw of his which was at Stratford, the Merchant of Venice.  It was very inventive, very fascinating.  But I am not sure if directors should dominate as much as some of them do.  I am not sure how keen I am on someone who says, well this has been done a 100 times before so I am going to wrench it in another direction!  On the other hand, today I’ve spent the day watching Show of Strength in Knowle.  Wonderful 15 minutes pieces, beautifully acted and performed in a shopping centre with no or hardly any props.  In shops and out on the road, so I can see two directions really.

Dream projects?

As an actor, I have played the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet, I’m too old to do it, but I’d love another crack at it.  Or the Countess of Rousillon in All’s Well That Ends Well.  To direct, I would like to do some more Caryl Churchill.  I’ve done several of her plays and really, really enjoy them.  I’d love to have a crack at directing more Shakespeare.  I haven’t directed any with a professional cast.  Oh and opera.  I love to do opera.

Final question.  Is the director dead?

No.  I don’t think so.  I did once end up, because I lost an actor, in a play I was directing.  And I just hated it.  What I really didn’t like was the get in and the tech, acting and saying things like can we do such and such with the lights, that didn’t suit me at all.  I admire people like Kenneth Branagh that can do it, but that’s not my cup of tea at all.  In a play, I don’t seem to have that combination that can see outside myself and direct things.

Thanks Pameli for sharing your thoughts!

“Don’t want to be too clever.” Gregory Doran